Author: sarahlzielinski@aol.com

When I saw the first trailer for the movie San Andreas, I knew it wasn’t going to be realistic. And that really bugged me. There are real earthquake risks in California. What I didn’t realize was how scary those risks are and how unprepared the state still is for them. The real “Big One” will provide plenty of death and destruction, and it may last for years. What can we expect? Read my story for Smithsonian.com: What Will Really Happen When San Andreas Unleashed the Big One?...

A bit over 200 years ago, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in the greatest cataclysm in the last 10,000 years. It spewed so much ash and gook into the air, and it stayed there so long, there was essentially no summer the next winter. But the tendrils of that eruption lasted far longer than that. Read my anniversary story at Smithsonian: 200 Years After Tambora, Some Unusual Effects Linger....

In August, Toledo residents woke up to warnings that they shouldn’t drink the water coming out of their tap. A toxin was in the water, the result of an algal bloom in Lake Erie. In the days after the incident, I started talking with my editor at Science News for Students about how Toledo was just one in a series of incidents around the country that had left people without clean water. I ended up writing a feature, “Will water woes leave Americans thirsty?,” that tried to tally up some of those incidents, as well as longer-standing problems and...

Plenty of people have dreams of buying that second home right on the water. And a few recent home shows have capitalized on such dreams. But should you actually pursue that desire and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a property just steps from the ocean? No, I argue in Slate; climate change is raising sea levels, and what’s next to the water today may be in the sea not too far in the future. Read more in my story: “Do Not Buy Oceanfront Property.”...

That’s the question that I asked in my cover story for the July 26 issue of Science News (now online). And it was a question that became far more complicated that I thought it would. That’s because if a species is going to deal with climate change, it’s got several ways to do so. It can migrate to a new place, if it can find a path and has a spot where it can move to. It can genetically adapt, but to do so fast enough some members of its species must already carry the appropriate genes. Or it...

Last fall, I visited the Jurassic Coast in southeast England to go fossil hunting with a friend. After a week of scouring beaches in Lyme Regis and nearby towns, we left with piles of fossils. We found nothing that would be worthy of a museum, but they were special because we found them. Fossil hunting can be great fun, especially for kids. Inspired by my trip, I wrote a story for Science News for Students (the online publication for which I am an editor) about children who have found amazing fossils and adult paleontologists who were inspired by fossil...

This week I got to go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to visit forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley. Dr. Owsley and his colleagues had been called in by Congressional Cemetery to deal with the bones in a vault that was being restored. After more than 150 years and at least one bout of vandalism, the remains in the Causten Vault were a mess. But by the time I arrived in Owsley’s lab, though, he and his team had painstakingly sorted the bones, identified the remains (all but one individual–a baby in a metal coffin)...

Yesterday, I wrote a story for National Geographic‘s website about a new study regarding bullying. The researchers had looked at a biomarker for stress, C-reactive protein, and found that young adults who had been bullies when younger had lower levels of CRP than anyone else. So do bullies get health benefits from their malicious actions? Maybe not, scientists told me. While CRP can be a harbinger of bad things, such as metabolic disease, the differences in CRP levels may instead reflect something in the underlying biology of people who become bullies rather than better health. Maybe bullies really are...

Earlier this year, I took a trip to North Carolina with the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources to learn about various environmental issues. While in the Outer Banks, in the middle of a Nor’easter, with the winds blowing and the sea washing homes into the ocean right before our eyes, I considered how the current human population is–or isn’t–dealing with the problem of sea level rise. That made me think about how past populations may have dealt with the problem thousands of years ago, when the Ice Age was retreating and glaciers were melting, and led me to...