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. Chemistry gets cheesy

    You might think of cheese as something produced far away. In fact, you can make it at home. It just takes a little bit of kitchen chemistry.

  2. High school students fill university lab with energy

    A Chicago scientist found high school students brought hard work and enthusiasm into his lab.

  3. Cookie Science 5: ‘Blinding’ your subjects

    When designing a cookie experiment, you need to make sure that your tasters can’t tell which cookies they taste.

  4. Free app for tree ID needs work

    Leafsnap is an app that identifies local trees. Unfortunately, the app is difficult to work with and has some technical problems.

  5. Cookie Science 4: Cookie ethics

    I may just be asking people to eat cookies, but if I’m doing science, I also need to make sure I am treating everyone fairly and that no one gets hurt.

  6. Cookie Science 3: The lab notebook

    Every good scientist keeps a lab notebook. It’s a careful record of every step of testing and every observation. A lab notebook means that you can review all details of your work long after its done — and other people can try to verify your findings with their own tests.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Cookie Science 2: Baking a testable hypothesis

    I would like to make a gluten-free cookie that my friend can eat. But to do that, I need to come up with a hypothesis to test.

  8. Students in lab learn not to fear failure

    Scientific papers often look like nothing but success. But two high school students learn that failure can be a step to success. You just have to learn from it.

  9. Welcome to Cookie Science!

    You don’t need a fancy laboratory or equipment to do science. Here, we show you how to conduct experiments at home — even in your kitchen.

  10. Find floating forests for science

    Kelp, a large type of seaweed, provides food and habitat for many ocean creatures. Now, scientists need your help to find out where kelp beds are and how they might be changing.

  11. Teen’s lab experience benefits her mentor, too

    Pairing a high school student with a graduate student helped the teen learn about science. But her ‘teacher’ may have learned just as much.

  12. Animals

    Octopus sets egg-nurturing record

    Animals will do extraordinary things to help their babies survive. Consider ‘Octomom:’ She sat on one clutch of eggs for nearly 4.5 years.