Barbara J King

It's right there on the dinner menu at Oyamel (a Washington, D.C., restaurant), listed under the "authentic Mexican tacos" section:

Chapulines

The legendary Oaxacan specialty of sauteed grasshoppers, shallots, tequila and guacamole.

$5.00

Whether it's sauteed grasshoppers at Oyamel or katydid grilled cheese sandwiches prepared for the ...

Over the weekend someone at an auction in the United States paid $350,000 for a permit to kill a black rhino in Namibia. Black rhinos are endangered: only about 5,000 are still alive in the entire world.

Ben Carter of the Dallas Safari Club, where the auction was organized ...

Catching up on my journal reading over Christmas break, I came across a study by an international team of anthropologists which points to a fascinating pattern in how humans move across the landscape. Whether foraging for food in Tanzania or walking from Space Mountain to the Pirates of the Caribbean ...

As a good portion of the country grapples with snow, here's a fresh way to think about those accumulating — and sometimes aggravating — inches of pure whiteness: as art canvas. That's how Simon Beck sees them.

High in the French Alps, this English artist walks on snowshoes for ...

Celebration: That's the theme I decided on for my final two Thursday posts of 2013. Last week I wrote about the spectrum of genders in the human world. It's only natural that this week I should return to my first love among blogging topics: animals and animal welfare.

It's ...

Some of the people who will read this blog post are female, some are male, some are both and some are neither. To all, greetings of the season!

Of the many things I want to celebrate during this annual round of holiday joy, the beauty of human diversity and the ...

In the movie Robot and Frank, made in 2012 and set in the near future, an elderly man named Frank (played by Frank Langella) is losing his memory. His adult son, concerned because his father lives alone, gifts him with a robot caretaker that is humanoid in appearance and ...

In Dave Eggers' terrific new novel, The Circle, set at a California computer company, a cult of connection is slowly taking over the United States and spreading around the globe. An evolving cultural preference for constant sharing by way of computer and camera is turning any citizen's wish for ...

On Halloween, we play around with what may scare us. Kids suit up in zombie and vampire costumes, of course, and there's also a lot of imagery connected directly with our own life trajectories: skeletons, skulls, gravestones, cemeteries.

Some of this is just pure fun. But death and burial make ...

It all started in 1968 at a pet shop called Fish 'N' Cheeps in New York's Greenwich Village. On the way to a Jimi Hendrix concert, Patricia Wright and her husband dashed into the shop to escape heavy rain. There, a two-pound ball of fur from the Amazon captured their ...

Earlier this month, plans for a new marine theme park were announced for the town of Taiji, Japan. Sometime within the next five years, if the plans come to fruition, tourists will be able to observe and swim with dolphins and small whales. Then, while still in the park, ...

With stunning imagery and cogent commentary, British naturalist and filmmaker Sir David Attenborough has brought science into millions of homes, including mine.

It's dismaying, then, to read Tuesday's newspaper reports about Attenborough's recent comments on human evolution. In a Radio Times interview, Attenborough said:

I think ...

About 1.75 million years ago, our human ancestors, the hominins (who you may remember as the hominids), achieved a technological breakthrough. They began to craft stone hand axes (called Acheulean tools) in ways that required more planning and precision than had been used in earlier tool-making processes. Around the ...

A children's adventure garden, a $62 million education center focused on earth and life sciences, is about to open in Texas at the Dallas Arboretum. Maria Conroy, the Arboretum's vice president and the driving force behind the garden, told The New York Times last week that, because Dallas ...

For the first time in 30 years, obesity rates in the United States have remained flat. Given the grim numbers, that finding hardly counts as uplifting news. I like the way this inelegant headline cuts to the heart of things: "U.S. adult obesity rates holding steady, but still bad."

Now that it's mid-August, thousands of families across the country are preparing for an emotional milestone: sending a child off to college for the first time.

So, this week's post is about the emotions parents of college-bound children feel, and what other primate parents may feel — or not — ...

Late last Friday afternoon, just about to relax into the weekend, I checked NPR.org to see what was new and ran smack into a story about a cruel tradition here in the American South: frog gigging.

"The Old Gig: Catching Frogs On Warm Summer Nights" by Blake Farmer ...

You may have heard about last week's announcement that scientists implanted false memories in laboratory mice. The paper, published by Nobel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa and co-authors in the journal Science, explains how mice were caused to "remember" a scary an environment that was actually neutral.

Here's the procedure in ...

There's a gift in cancer. It says so right on page 203 of Greg Anderson's book Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do (2013 edition; first published 1993). Anderson quotes the singer Olivia Newton-John as saying this about her "journey through breast cancer": "I see it [cancer] as a gift. I ...

Blackfish, a movie opening Friday in New York and Los Angeles, takes aim squarely at theme parks like SeaWorld where captive dolphins, including orcas or killer whales, perform in entertainment shows for the public.

"Nothing at [SeaWorld] is what it seems," Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has said, as reported ...