Author: Mary

In honor of the recent birth of my second grandchild, I thought I’d look at some words related to newborns. Here are a few with interesting stories. Fonta...

I recently finished an editing assignment that had to do with the bones and musculature of the hand. The bones of the fingers (and the toes, as it turns out) ar...

Woolly worm season is upon us. The other day I spotted one of these fuzzy caterpillars behind my car, and I moved it to avoid backing over it. Woolly worms were...

Sometimes it seems like everything is named for a resemblance to something else. This is a story of the similarity-based links among two flowers, three birds, a...

It’s easy to talk about science or its history in the abstract, especially when you’re thinking about long stretches of time, and to lose sight of w...

The wine harvest is nearing its end, so this seems like a good time to look at the different species of grapes that are used for wine. When I first began to tak...

I ran across the phrase renal calculus, another name for a kidney stone, and wondered whether it was related to the calculus you learn in a math class. It turns...

The other day I was poking around online reading about rocks and dinosaurs when I should have been working, and I discovered that what I knew as the Cretaceous–...

This is one of my very favorite times of year; on sunny days, the low-angle sunlight makes the colorful leaves on the trees glow. “Season of mists and mel...