I’m at the Ecological Society of America meetings this week, so invited grad students Meghan Balk and Catalina Pimiento to write a guest post to coincide with Shark Week. Little did I know that this post would be so timely, with Discovery’s disastrous fake documentary on Megalodon! I hope you enjoy reading about these […]
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” – Palynology A colleague of mine (also a paleoecologist) recently recounted a story where, when learning about his research, a senior scientist remarked, “I thought pollen was dead?” This is never something someone wants to hear about one’s primary methodology, particularly at […]
When you study the climate of the deep past, time is relative. What one scientist may consider a long time — say, a decade — is only a short span of time to someone who routinely thinks in millions of years. Climate change is affected by processes operating at hours, […]
A month after last January’s State of the Union Address, in which President Obama called for an increase in STEM graduates, The Atlantic published this piece on the “Ph.D Bust,” lamenting the decline in academic job placement rates for scientists. The latter has been making the rounds again, coincident with […]
Training in academia is often trial-by-fire, and learning how to review manuscripts is no exception. Because you’re technically not allowed to share manuscripts you’re reviewing with others, it can be especially tricky to learn how to do them (I do know some PI’s who share manuscripts with their grad students […]
“As I did stand my watch upon the hill, I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought the wood began to move.” – Messenger, Shakespeare’s Macbeth The simple story of the last 2.5 million years of vegetation response to climate change could be summed up like this: temperature goes up and down, plants […]
Maybe you’ve always know you’ve wanted to be a research professor in wildlife ecology. Perhaps you’ve just taken a course on fungi and stumbled into a whole new world of career possibilities. Either way, getting past the first step– your undergraduate degree– and onto the academic path isn’t easy. Academic culture isn’t […]
Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and […]
You’re enjoying your morning tea, browsing through the daily digest of your main society’s list-serv. Let’s say you’re an ecologist, like me, and so that society is the Ecological Society of America*, and the list-serv is Ecolog-L. Let’s also say that, like me, you’re an early career scientist, a recent […]
I recently returned from ScienceOnline, a meeting for journalists, scientists, artists, teachers, and others who discuss (and do!) science on the internet. This was my second time at the conference and, like last year, I came home with a mind full of ideas about effective outreach, open science, and teaching […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 