Author: Mary

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...

The word muscle comes from the Latin musculus, which means little mouse. But why? It’s because the rippling movement of certain muscles under the skin was...

Sometimes I worry that I’ll describe the origin of a word incorrectly because I get my Greek and Latin roots confused. At this distance, it’s easy t...

This is the third and final post in a series on some of the most glorious plant families of the summer garden and orchard. Part 1 covered cucurbits, and part 2 ...

A surprising number of chemical elements are named for places. (Well, it surprised me, anyway.) Many of the elements that have been identified since the late 18...

Welcome to part 2 in a series of posts about the late summer garden harvest. (Part 1, on the cucurbits, is here; part 3, on the drupes, is here.) Today we’...

Given that the Mars rover Curiosity is in the news (it did not find methane in the planet’s atmosphere, contrary to earlier reports), this seems like a go...

My last post was about the link between the words melancholy and choler, which are based on the Greek word for bile. Melancholy and choler were associated with ...

You don’t see the string chol in too many words except for fairly specialized terms in biochemistry or medicine, so I had to wonder whether there’s ...