Bethany Brookshire

Staff Writer, Science News for Students, 2013–2021

Bethany Brookshire was the staff writer at Science News for Students from 2013 to 2021. 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 is also a host on the podcast Science for the People, and a 2019-2020 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow.

All Stories by Bethany Brookshire

  1. coyote walking up stairs in a park
    Animals

    5 reasons you might be seeing more wildlife during the COVID-19 pandemic

    From rats and coyotes in the streets to birds in the trees, people are noticing more animals than ever during the time of the coronavirus.

  2. bubble chamber
    Physics

    50 years ago, Fermilab turned to bubbles

    The National Accelerator Laboratory, now called Fermilab, used to have a bubble chamber to study particles. Today, most bubble chambers have gone flat.

  3. male mice in cages in a lab setting
    Neuroscience

    Female rats face sex bias too

    In neurobiological studies, male lab animals tend to outnumber females, which are considered too hormonal. Scientists say it’s time for that myth to go.

  4. women in medical school
    Science & Society

    Medical student evaluations appear riddled with racial and gender biases

    Women and minorities are more frequently described by personality in medical student evaluations, but men are described by their skills, a study says.

  5. statistics
    Science & Society

    Statisticians want to abandon science’s standard measure of ‘significance’

    For years, scientists have declared P values of less than 0.05 to be “statistically significant.” Now statisticians are saying the cutoff needs to go.

  6. working out
    Health & Medicine

    ‘Good to Go’ tackles the real science of sports recovery

    In ‘Good to Go,’ science writer Christie Aschwanden puts science — and herself — to the test for the sake of sports recovery.

  7. The End carved in sand on the beach

    This blog is dead. Long live the blog.

    Blogs are synonymous with the early internet. But what is a blog, and what has it become? A blog is a platform. And this one, Scicurious, is now gone.

  8. woman staring at cake
    Psychology

    Sometimes a failure to replicate a study isn’t a failure at all

    Ego depletion is one of the most well-known concepts in social psychology. A recent study can’t confirm an old one showing it exists. Who is right? Probably everyone.

  9. Nine-banded armadillo
    Animals

    50 years ago, armadillos hinted that DNA wasn’t destiny

    Nine-banded armadillos have identical quadruplets. But the youngsters aren’t identical enough, and scientists 50 years ago could not figure out why.

  10. sea otter
    Animals

    50 years ago, atomic testing created otter refugees

    Nuclear testing on the island of Amchitka caused hundreds of otters to be rehomed 50 years ago. Those hundreds have grown into thousands.

  11. heart transplant surgery
    Health & Medicine

    50 years ago, a pessimistic view for heart transplants

    Surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967. In 1968, he predicted that patients would survive five years at best. Fortunately, he was wrong.

  12. circle of people on personal electronic devices
    Science & Society

    For popularity on Twitter, partisanship pays

    Pundits claim that we’re all living in political echo chambers. A new study shows that, on Twitter at least, they’re right.