Confession time: I have yet to find a satisfyingly regular and repeatable method for measuring neural canal diameters. A LOT of dinosaurian neural canals are not cylindrical but flare out on either end, like two trumpet bells set back-to-back.

Anita Cherry: Like Father Like Daughter  History was made in the winter of 1973 in the coal seams of Jenkins, Kentucky. Alongside Diana Baldwin, Anita Cherry became one of the first two women in the United States to work underground in a coal mine.

Appalachian Figures From Double Creek to Hindman James Still was born on July 16, 1906, in the Double Creek/Double Branch community near LaFayette, Alabama. After studies at Lincoln Memorial University (’29) and graduate work at Vanderbilt (M.A., 1930), he arrived at the Hindman Settlement School in the summer of 1931.

Appalachian Figures A voice from Knott County Verna Mae Slone was born in Knott County, Kentucky, on October 9, 1914, and died in Hindman on January 5, 2009. She and her husband, Willie Slone, raised five sons. In addition to writing, she became known across Eastern Kentucky for her quilts and cloth dolls.

Three weeks ago, I posted three colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” excavation at the Dry Mesa Quarry, provided by Tyler Holmes from an old dinosaur encyclopedia. Here’s the third one again: I wrote: This can’t be right.

On November 12, 2025, the 18th European Public Health Conference hosted a symposium organized by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). The session, “The heart of resilience: lessons from mental health support for children and young people affected by conflict in Ukraine,” explored the large-scale mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) initiative developed by the IFRC with support from the European

I recently gave a talk about analyzing vowel formant trajectories using the Discrete Cosine Transform, and people have been asking me about when they could/should use a DCT based model versus a gamm. So, I’ll work through that question here!

Appalachian Figures Charles McElroy White grew up in the logging and rail hamlet of Hutton on the outskirts of Oakland, Maryland. He went on to lead one of the nation’s largest steelmakers during the most turbulent decades of American industrial history. His path ran from a mountain schoolhouse to the University of Maryland, from mill floors to boardrooms, and into the hearing rooms of Congress.

✒️ Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Catharina Sänger . With a curious mind and a passport full of lab stamps, Catharina has explored science across the globe. She studied Biochemistry in Frankfurt, Germany, including research projects in Boston and Melbourne, before moving toward Molecular Biology for her PhD at ETH Zurich.

It is estimated that children make up one-third of the world’s population. Nevertheless, they constituted 40 percent (49 million) of the 122.6 million forcibly displaced individuals in 2024.

A much cited essay by Bret Victor, "Explorable Explanations", argues for supporting and encouraging active reading in communicating ideas. Explanatory text should thus be complemented by interactive visualizations and computational demonstrations, allowing the reader to actively engage with the ideas. If you haven't read Victor's essay yet, please do so now, and then come back here. It's not very long.