Welcome to Our Sister Blog, Surprising Science

The staff here at Smithsonian seems to have developed a strange fascination with dead things. There's the Dinosaur Tracking blog, of course, which is concerned with a superorder that went extinct 65 million years ago. And at our new sister blog, Surprising Science, some of the first posts are about woolly mammoths (a mere 10,000 years dead) and the bones of astronomer Nicolaus "the earth is not the center of the universe" Copernicus (d. 1543).

Surprising Science is written by Sarah Zielinski, a biology-major-turned-journalist and an assistant editor at Smithsonian. She is interested in most types of science ("whatever is in front of me," she says) but will focus on the subjects we tend to cover in the magazine: geology, archaeology, astronomy, animals (living or dead) and stories that have art or history or travel tie-ins. But above all, stories that are weird or quirky or unexpected or amusing. We hope you'll enjoy it.

Laura Helmuth | | READ MORE

Laura Helmuth is the science and health editor at Slate. Previously, she was a senior science editor at Smithsonian magazine.