[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/The-Washboard-Effect.mp3[/podcast] Saskatchewan, as has oft been noted, has a lot of roads: more than 190,000 kilometres in all, in fact, giving it one of the most extensive road systems in Canada. Not all of those roads are paved, however. In fact, most aren’t. And as anyone who has had occasion to drive extensively on the …
Tag: science
I get a box full of disease detectives!
Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That’s the cover at left. Here’s the blurb from the back: Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how …
Stop that stretching!
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Stretching.mp3[/podcast] There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out. That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. …
Insight into the theory of mind
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Theory-of-Mind.mp3[/podcast] This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but in addition to writing nonfiction, I also write fiction—specifically, science fiction and fantasy. Now, the writing of fiction is a very odd thing, in that it involves the making up of characters: people who don’t really exist, but for whom the …
Talk to the right ear
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Talk-to-the-right-ear.mp3[/podcast] If someone approaches you from your left side and makes a request, are you more or less likely to grant that request than if he approaches you from your right side? If you’re thinking, “What kind of a stupid question is that?”, and you think it would be an equally stupid question no matter …
Are cognitive shortcuts making us fat?
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Cognitive-Shortcuts-to-Obesity.mp3[/podcast] When we think about how we make decisions, we tend to imagine that we consider the facts of a situation carefully and logically, in a straightforward, step-by-step manner. But that process is, indeed, imaginary. The truth is that our brains prefer to do as little actual thinking as possible. They like shortcuts—and sometimes those …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here’s one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children’s book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Jonathan Runstadler investigates bird flu in Alaska
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/jonathan-runstadler-and-bird-flu.mp3[/podcast] Here’s another column drawn from one of the chapters of my new book Disease-Hunting Scientist (Enslow Publishers): Every spring, an estimated six million birds arrive in Alaska to breed. Some spent the winter in Southeast Asia, home to a strain of avian influenza called H5N1. Although swine flu is getting all the attention right …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Dr. Laurie Richardson and black-band disease in coral
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/laurie-richardson-and-black-band-disease.mp3[/podcast] My newest book, Disease-Hunting Scientist (Enslow Publishers) has now been officially released, and so this week I’m giving you a column-sized version of another of the lengthy chapters devoted to individual scientists in the book. Dr. Laurie Richardson, Professor of Biology at Florida International University in Miami, is researching black-band disease in coral reefs—which …
My new book Disease-Hunting Scientist officially released!
My newest nonfiction children’s book for Enslow Publishers has now been officially released! (That’s the cover at left; at the moment, that’s the largest version of it I have.) You can order it now from Amazon.com or elsewhere. From the Enslow blog: Author Edward Willett tells the true stories of six real disease hunters in …
Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try …
R.I.P.: the girl who named Pluto
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/the-girl-who-named-pluto-rip.mp3[/podcast] Three years ago I wrote a column about someone I was astonished I’d never heard of until that week: Venetia Phair (née Burney), at the time an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher in Epsom, England. At the age of 11 Venetia suggested the name Pluto for what was then (and for many decades after) considered the …
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