Traumatized chimps, gay penguins, icky diseases and a poem

Looking back on it, last week was pretty wild as far as my writing was concerned. My articles were all over the map, but in a good way. That's the fun thing about being a freelance writer: you never know what the next assignment or story is going to bring.

This week's two Extinction Countdown columns for Scientific American covered important topics, and they both generated a fair amount of discussion:

"Save the Chimps" Sanctuary Builds a Home for Traumatized Apes

Should Gay, Endangered Penguins be Forced to Mate?


I usually do one feature a month for IEEE-USA's Today's Engineer, but I did two for the November issue. Here they are:

New Jobs Council Report Addresses Entrepreneurship, Promises 10,000 New Engineers A Year

Career Focus: Systems Engineering


Mother Nature Network continues to let me report on a wide variety of stories. Here are this week's including one of the ickiest things I've had to write about in a long while:

Christo's $50 million 'Over the River' art project approved

Steven-Johnson syndrome: HIV drug can cause life-threatening skin reaction, says FDA

Is there evidence of extraterrestrial life? Nope, says Obama administration


And finally, on a completely unrelated note, I have I have a science fiction poem called "Manscaping" in the latest issue (#15) of Illumen magazine. I sold it back when "Manscaping" was still a commonly used word.

That's it for this week! More links in seven days!