From the archives: Bioengineering

I just found a scan for an ad I never posted here, part of this series that I both wrote and modeled for, one of the more interesting chapters in my professional career.

Anyway, click the ad to see this full-sized. And no, that's not me in the photo.

The Most Interesting Wombat in the World

Thanks to the shortened Thanksgiving week, I only had one article published last week, but it was an...interesting one. I interviewed the advertising icon "The Most Interesting Man in the World" about his efforts to save one of the world's rarest mammals from extinction.

Can the Most Interesting Man in the World Help Save This Critically Endangered Wombat? 

This was not only fun to write, it was a chance to write about a species I have hoped to cover for months now. And it's done some good. The auction mentioned in the article just closed after raising well over $1,000. That's impressive.

More next week!

From the archives: DNA

The archives are producing a treasure trove of projects I enjoyed working on over the years. Here's an ad I wrote for IEEE about five years ago. I still like it.

(Click on the image to see it in all of its glory.)

Spongetastic

Huh. You'd think that will all of the hours I put in last week I would have published more articles. But most of that work was interviews and research for upcoming features and other projects, so I don't feel bad. Not every article I write can come out within a day of my writing it!

Anyway, here are this week's links -- two new Extinction Countdown articles for Scientific American and two news items for Mother Nature Network.

Amazing Neptune's Cup Sponge Rediscovered in Singapore

Another Rhino Goes Extinct and Other Updates from the Brink

Family mourns pug's death on transatlantic flight

Co-founder of Facebook competitor Diaspora dies at 22

There probably won't be a huge amount coming your way this week -- it is almost Thanksgiving, after all -- but you never know, maybe I'll surprise you.

From the archives: Just Right

Digging into the marketing archives again, here are two of the four pages from a large-format brochure I wrote to launch a new IEEE informational product. (As memory serves, the product didn't last, but it set up the market for several more successful services that followed behind it.)

(You can click on this image to view it in more detail.)

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!

From the archives: Passion

Here's an advertisement from several years back: a full-page ad for a technical journal that we tried to make more lively. I still like it.

(Click to view in full size.)