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

    Picture this: Too many walruses

    A giant herd of walruses have hauled out onto a beach in Alaska. They don’t belong there, but with no ice nearby, they have taken to land.

  2. Scientists need help to pinpoint penguins

    We all love looking at penguins. Now, you can help scientists by hunting for them in photos.

  3. IgNobel prize honors scoop on the way dogs poop

    A study shows that dogs spontaneously align themselves north to south when they poop or pee. A new app helps you collect your dog’s bodily habits for science.

  4. Summer students dig into crab stomachs

    The eelgrass in a Maine bay has been dying off. Two teens caught and dissected green crabs to figure out if this invasive species might be responsible.

  5. Cookie Science 6: Baking it up

    It’s time cookie science hit the ovens. I baked up three different batches of cookies. But I ran into some trouble along the way.

  6. 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.

  7. High school students fill university lab with energy

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

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.