Who put the meteors in meteorology?
While we’re on the subject of meteors, what have meteors got to do with meteorology? It turns out that the link between meteors and meteorology is a Greek...
Author: Mary
The meteor family of words
Sometimes words that describe the natural world come in a rather confusing clump. I’m hoping to explore many of these groups of words describing interrela...
Who names things?
Most of the time, names arise mysteriously out of the collective creativity of language. Common names for plants and animals are a very rich source of informati...
Why do they call it that?
I edit scientific papers; although my background is in astronomy, geology papers may be my favorite. I love the lingo of geology—greywacke, gneiss, drumlin, pla...
About
Science Word Geek is where my interests in words and science converge. I have a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and a lot of experience editing scientif...
So what does make humans unique?
We're. not quite like any other animal on Earth. But why? Prof. Kim Hill of Arizona State University explained in a recent talk.
My brain, hallucinating
Oliver Sacks describes hallucinations as "an essential part of the human condition," and I describe some experiences with hypnopompic hallucinations, which occu...
The humanities, the sciences, and numbers
A few days ago I ran across a Scientific American blog post that struck me as interesting but somewhat disappointing: Humanities aren’t a science. Stop tr...
Was that me?
One of the things that fascinates me the most about the brain is the way it makes up coherent, mostly convincing stories with great confidence, even in the face...
The Darwinian unconscious
In E.O. Wilson’s talk at the Consilience Conference, he described ants as “angelic robots,” which we most definitely are not and would not want to b...