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. National festival calling all math lovers

    Math is important to everything from our computers to the magic in movies. Now there’s a national festival to show the fun side of numbers.

  2. Animals

    Scientists Say: Nematode

    Nematodes are a group of related small worms found all over the world. They can cause disease, but they also can be useful for scientists to study.

  3. The next MacGyver’s not a guy

    A famous TV show featured an engineering hero. Now, a contest plans to bring engineering back to the screen, and needs your ideas.

  4. Animals

    Mates or survival: Which explains a bird’s color?

    When male birds are brightly colored, we assume that’s because their plumage attracts the gals. But a new study with thousands of museum specimens shows that sometimes survival is just as important a factor behind bird color.

  5. Animals

    Scientists Say: Irruption

    Sometimes populations of animals can suddenly increase. The word for that is irruption.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Chemistry

    Scientists Say: Fulgurite

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

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.