Portfolio | Amanda Womac | Freelance Science Writer

Birth of the Animal Rights Movement

This year, American pet owners will spend close to $100 billion on their pets, but these exorbitant spending habits have not always been the norm. A little over a century ...Read More

Nature Illuminated

Deep in the woods on a warm summer evening, a species of beetle signals its mate with a flash pattern unique to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Synchronous fireflies ...Read More

Digitizing Lichens & Bryophytes

Across the planet’s terrestrial surface lives a layer of organisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Lichens and bryophytes are hosts to these cryptobiotic ...Read More

Singing in a Silent Spring

Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID-19 shutdown When the novel coronavirus swept across the country, forcing most businesses to close their ...Read More

Uncovering Microbial Mysteries

Karen Lloyd spends most of her waking hours thinking about mud. Specifically, the mud at the bottom of the ocean and trying to determine how deep into the earth she can dig ...Read More

The Neutron Star Frontier

Although he was interested in astrophysics at a young age, Andrew Steiner was never a big telescope person. Growing up, he preferred books by science giants, such as Carl ...Read More

Systems Deep Dive

Rachel Patton McCord’s interest in science is in her genes. She learned how to be curious about the natural world and how it works from her parents, who were both ...Read More

Mission: Outreach

UT geography students in the GIS Outreach and Community Engagement Lab are bridging the gap between the knowledge of geography and geospatial technology and the need for ...Read More

Lifetime of a Brain

The human brain weighs a little more than three pounds and makes up about two percent of a human’s body weight. It contains more than 80 billion nerve cells and billions of ...Read More

National History Day

History leaps off the pages of books and into the lives of middle and high school students during National History Day, a year-long education program for middle and high ...Read More