Unwind The Helix

SpaceX Falcon Heavy launching with 4 MerlinD1 Boosters For our final assignment in this Science writing class we have to write a feature story with a human element to draw readers in, I chose Elon Musk’s success in the privatization of space craft development and launch. Unfortunately this week I won’t be talking about that, apologies. I want to take a break from writing about current assignments because I am already tired of it and instead talk about what I wrote as a comment in another classmate’s blog. Book review round two, that’s right reader, today I will be talking about my favorite science fiction series, Ender’s game, and the trilogy that follows. For those that haven’t heard, the 2013 movie was actually adapted from a book of the same name from 1985, WOW. That book, written by Orson Scott Card, had genius boy Andrew Ender Wiggins thrust into a space militant training facility to develop the best minds into tactical war geniuses for the eventual return of the formics,...

This week’s post comes after a very stressful week for me; exams, papers, and scrambling to get ready for graduation. At the end of Thursday I ended up going home for Alec’s birthday (my little brother who just turned 14), the weekend, by contrast was very relaxing. Alec is much different than me or my older brother, probably because of the large age gap, he is obsessed with brand name clothes and shoes and the like. While having dinner on Saturday, we began to ridicule him for looking up and dreaming about $2000 Nikes, Supreme gear and Bathing Ape, so while looking for a topic for this blog, the latter brand took my interest, Above is a video about Japan’s famous “bathing apes”; the macaques. The video starts off describing the history of how a group of macaques started using naturally occurring hotsprings in the colder northern region of japan. The macaques began using these hotsprings in human establishments, so to keep both groups happy, locals built a site just for the macaque...

 A couple weeks ago I wrote a preliminary blog post talking about a book review on Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness . I skimmed through the book and wrote a rough draft last week. I was originally planning to write a simple summary of the first couple of chapters but the goal is for readers to read the actual book, not my interpretation. Therefore I’ll just use the first three chapters to highlight why you should read the first three chapters and hopefully more. Meeting Across the Tree of Life The first chapter of this book clarifies most importantly, that the author is foremost a philosopher by trade, while there is a level of depth to the explanations of evolution, neurology and the like it is not inaccessible. The way the author, Peter Godfrey-Smith writes is informative, interesting, and thought provoking. The chapter begins by sharing two fascinating accounts of curious interactions between cephalopods (subgroup of mollusks inclu...

This semester I am taking a Vertebrate Zoology class and the professor introduced us to a Facebook page, " Wildlife Issues " that has been a useful resource for keeping up with current events in conservation. For this week's blog post I was browsing the page and was surprised by a header on the timeline: " Florida's Solution to its Invasive Iguana Problem: Smash their Skulls in ". Despite it's gory implications, the disposal of these iguanas is definitely a necessity, as explained in the article by the Washington Post . The Iguanas were originally native to a broad area ranging from Mexico to South America to the Caribbean and were brought to Florida as pets around 1966. Since then they have spread from Miami to the Keys and as far as Palm Beach. To address the “smash their skulls in” portion, many biologists are going out with bolt guns to kill the iguanas, while the in-the-head portion is to reduce the suffering of the animals. The reason there is...