Barbara J King

"One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not....If I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or heroin, ...

"Come see!"

That's the vocal code in our house, when one of us wants to summon another to show off a small treasure: the flash of a red fox streaking our backyard; a pink-inflamed cloud as sunset approaches; a snake, sinuous and fine, curving black against the green of high-summer ...

In the realm of prehistoric art, there's a type of small figurine made of stone, bone or ivory that is famous. It features exaggeratedly large breasts, hips and buttocks.

Popularly called "Venus figures," these tiny statues were crafted by human ancestors living in locations across Europe and Asia starting around ...

On Monday, the animal advocacy organization PETA released material in support of its campaign to shut down a series of experiments on infant rhesus monkeys carried out at the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The material includes excerpts from more than 500 hours ...

Any of us connected with the school calendar — teachers and academic staff, students and their parents — are right now plunging into new beginnings.

September brings a fresh season, also, in the publishing world, in theater and dance and music, and in some sports.

Coupled with the excitement of ...

In Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant novel The Signature of All Things, Alma Whittaker, the central character who was born in Philadelphia in 1800, is destined for a highly unconventional life as a woman in science.

Consumed by a love of botany, specifically of mosses, Whittaker grapples with questions that preoccupied ...

Are trigger warnings a good idea when teachers ask students to consider material about emotionally wrenching topics? Anthropologist Barbara J. King says yes — in some cases.

Ukraine's army has been gaining ground against pro-Russian separatists. But details are difficult to pin down. They are now trading accusations over an alleged attack against a civilian convoy.

Canyonlands National Park in Utah is "a landscape of canyons, mesas and deep-river gorges" that invites its visitors to revel in nature. An hour's drive from Moab and part of the Colorado Plateau, Canyonlands sprawls across 337,000 desert acres.

Nearly a half-million people take in Canyonlands' gorgeous ...

The question of why the Ebola virus seems to so badly frighten so many people seems, at first, to have an obvious answer.

Ebola, after all, is an incurable hemorrhagic virus with a mortality rate that soars in some outbreaks to 90 percent of those infected. Symptoms in sufferers ...

For Philip Lymbery, head of the U.K.-based Compassion in World Farming and his co-author Isabel Oakeshott, a visit to California's Central Valley amounted to an encounter with suffering.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, Lymbery and Oakeshott write that the mega-dairies of the Central Valley ...

Here in southeastern Virginia, our biggest city, Norfolk, is saddled with an unwanted claim to fame. As The Washington Post has reported, Norfolk is the place "where normal tides have risen 1.5 feet over the past century and the sea is rising faster than anywhere else on the East ...

Clark Little photographs ocean waves.

Many of us do. We may be drawn to waves because they connect us with the moon and the tides, or with the magnificent marine creatures small and large who dwell in our seas, or just because it's fun to surf and swim and float ...

Scientists who carry out basic research sometimes find themselves unexpectedly caught up in a web of vitriolic public attacks by politicians pretending to expose foolish, dollar-wasting projects. Patricia Brennan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, found this out the hard way.

As she explained last ...

All of us who rescue animals in trouble, or care about animal welfare, may take inspiration from our successes and triumphs. Rejoicing in the good outcomes can fortify us for when the going gets tough.

At the same time, it's important to understand and talk about the complexities ...

Poppy, the world's oldest known cat, died earlier this month in England at the age of 24.

Near San Francisco, a homeless woman named Roza Katovitch and a cat named Miss Tuxedo met in a cemetery and bonded with each other, changing both of their lives for the ...

One year ago here at 13.7, I wrote about fat-shaming carried out by a college professor of evolutionary psychology.

Ever since, I've been more attuned than before to blatant discrimination based on weight and have spotted evidence of fat-shaming in multiple contexts. Recent examples range from the world ...

Inside Higher Ed reports this week on a California bill that would require college students to obtain "an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity."

The bill, already approved by California's Senate, is a response to escalating concerns about rape culture ...

One of the many enjoyable aspects of blogging weekly for NPR is that publishers send or offer me books, most often nonfiction volumes that in some way involve animals. When this happened with Marina Chapman's memoir, The Girl with No Name: The Incredible Story of a Child Raised by ...

If you're like me, when you're buying fruits and vegetables to cook or make a salad with, you seek the most aesthetically appealing examples: the unblemished apple, the bright-red tomato, the zesty looking leaves of spinach.

But I'm reforming my ways. This summer, I'll be looking for ugly produce instead.

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