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. Cookie Science 14: One experiment, 400 cookies

    Making delicious gluten-free cookies requires testing. And this means baking a lot of cookies with scientific precision.

  2. Teen helps plants fight off pests

    When plants are attacked by predatory worms, often they don’t fight back. A teen studied why and used those findings to help the plants defend themselves.

  3. Chemistry

    Scientists Say: Fulgurite

    When lightning strikes in the right place, it can fuse minerals together in a glassy structure.

  4. A plastic that heals itself

    A scratch on a car can be expensive to fix. A teen helped to create a new smart material that can heal its own gashes.

  5. Animals

    Finding out why birds are out of range

    Sometimes people see large numbers of birds outside of their normal range. A student examined how to predict these excursions.

  6. Brain

    Scientists Say: Cortical homunculus

    If you draw a representation of your body as seen by your brain, it’s called a homunculus. On it, parts sensitive to touch or used for fine movement are large, while others are small.

  7. Science & Society

    Teens win top awards, as told on Twitter

    Eureka! Lab live-tweeted the 2015 Intel Science Talent Search gala. Check out the finalists and winners.

  8. A teen and a trolley reveal society’s dark side

    If a trolley continues on its track, five people will die. But you can flip a switch so that it only kills one. A student showed that how we decide what to do in this situation can reveal our hidden biases.

  9. That’s when I knew I loved science

    Finalists at the Intel Science Talent Search competition tell Eureka! Lab when they realized they loved science, technology, engineering and math.

  10. Science foils fencing history

    Fencing is a sport where knowledge has been handed down for many generations. A high school student decided to add some science into the mix.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Scientists Say: Circadian

    We often feel the pull of sleep when the sun goes down. Light and our own biology put us into a regular, 24-hour rhythm that has its own word.

  12. Tech

    Museum app fleshes out old bones

    Museum app breathes life into skeletons. But it will need more funding to make it shine.