Bethany Brookshire was a longtime staff writer at Science News Explores and is the author of the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. She has a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in philosophy from The College of William and Mary, and a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She was a 2019-2020 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, the winner of the Society for Neuroscience Next Generation Award and the Three Quarks Daily Science Writing Award, among others.
All Stories by Bethany Brookshire
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Genetics
DNA testing looks into dog breeds and cat history
Dog and cat breeds can look very different from one another. How does it happen? Combinations of tiny genetic tweaks.
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Animals
Scientists Say: Extinction
When the last member of a species dies, it’s gone forever. That species is extinct.
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Chemistry
Scientists Say: pH
pH is a scale used to measure the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. The scale ranges from zero to 14, with seven as the perfect neutral middle.
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Health & Medicine
Cool Jobs: Soaking in sweat
These three scientists are using sweat to hunt killers, detect illness and find out just how our species became such hairless, perspiring apes.
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Chemistry
Explainer: The bacteria behind your B.O.
Special glands in our armpits give us our signature stink. But it’s not our sweat that’s to blame. It’s the bacteria that gobble it up.
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Scientists Say: Mineral
Minerals are chemical elements or compounds that form repeating crystal structures. Quartz is a mineral. Table salt is, too.
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Health & Medicine
Scientists Say: Olfactory
Smell something? Thank your olfactory sense. Olfactory refers to anything having to do with smell.
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Animals
Scientists Say: Hertz
Frequency is how often something repeats over a period of time. Frequency is often measured in hertz, the number of times a cycle repeats each second.
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Physics
Scientists Say: Big Bang
The Big Bang is the current theory about how our universe came to be. It began with a vast explosion of matter — a very Big Bang.
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Life
Scientists Say: Mitosis
Mitosis is a type of cell division where one cell divides into two identical copies, called daughter cells.
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Animals
Scientists Say: Hagfish
Hagfish are eel-shaped fish with many traits that make them similar to long-vanished fossils. When threatened, they can pump out piles of slime.
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Health & Medicine
Scientists Say: Obesogens
The chemicals can change how the body stores fat or how often someone feels hungry — increasing the risk for obesity.