Category: Science Word Geek

I love to collect possible titles for pieces I’ll probably never write. (It’s my version of “Hey, that would make a good name for a band.̶...

In my first post, I noted that the words granite and corn share the Latin root granum, granite for its granular texture and corn for its original meaning as the...

I was browsing through the dictionary the other day with a friend, as people do, and we learned about something that bears and humans have in common. I had just...

If you love science, history, and words, it’s not every day that you find a book that addresses all of those interests, and it’s even rarer to find ...

I knew about the hippocampus in the brain, but until I started reading The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World Through Evolutionary Eyes, by Christopher Wills ...

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...