Bethany Brookshire

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

  1. Animals

    Scientists Say: Venomous

    A poison-arrow frog is poisonous, but a rattlesnake is not. What’s the difference? It’s how their poisons are delivered.

  2. Environment

    Scientists Say: Poisonous

    A poison-arrow frog is poisonous, but a rattlesnake is not. What’s the difference? It’s how the poison is delivered.

  3. Brain

    Hormone affects how teens’ brains control emotions

    Using scans of brain activity, scientists show that surging hormones drive where emotions get processed in a teen’s brain.

  4. Teacher invites Twitter into the classroom

    Twitter can connect students with scientists in real time. But engaging tweens in an open social network also requires caution, one teacher warns.

  5. More classroom time increases reading skills

    Keeping kids in school for a few extra hours could mean better reading comprehension — no matter how the teachers use the time. But those extra hours come with extra cost.

  6. Environment

    Scientists Say: Plastisphere

    As plastic floats in the ocean, it can acquire its own colony of microbes and algae. We call this ecosystem the plastisphere.

  7. Teen makes sure bacteria stay hands-off

    Germs are everywhere. One teen has designed a way to keep them from sticking to a surgeon’s gloves.

  8. Chemistry

    Scientists Say: Toxin

    It is safe to refer to any poison as toxic. But while all toxins are poisonous, most poisons are not toxins.

  9. Chemistry

    Scientists Say: Cyanide

    Cyanides are poisonous. But they are more than that. This group of compounds is used in everything from mining to capturing fish.

  10. Ink leads way to terminating termites

    Inspired by a classroom experiment, a teen has built a way to lure troublesome termites to their death — using the power of ink.

  11. Environment

    Teens use science to worm through plastic waste

    Some beetle larvae can eat plastic, which might be good for our pollution problem. But which types eat the most can vary a lot, these young scientists find.

  12. Space

    Scientists Say: Wormhole

    Scientists have predicted the presence of tunnels in space that connect two points in space and time. They are named for the shape they resemble.