Today, I’m very sad to say, the artist John Schoenherr passed away. Among his honors, Schoenherr earned a Caldecott Award for his paintings for the book Owl Moon. His dark, textured artwork did justice to all manner of life, from a Canada goose to a giant sandworm.

I met Jack when I was just ten years old, through his son Ian. He was not the typical father of your fifth-grade friends. He got up not long before noon, sat for a while at the kitchen table with some coffee, making a few  jokes, and then headed to his barn, where he would paint till midnight or later. His barn was filled with dismantled MG’s, Japanese swords, a complete collection of National Geographics, snapping tortoise shells, camera equipment, years’ worth of paintings, and an atmosphere suffused with good cheer. We kids were always welcome, whether we wanted to ask questions about the latest painting on his easel, or if we just wanted to wander along his rough bookshelves and be alone in his company. I learned some of my most important early lessons about nature from Jack, and I also learned from him what it’s like to love the act of creation, day in and day out.

The kids in the studio eventually grew up, but kept coming back. His son Ian became a fine artist and children’s book illustrator in his own right. I’m sure that much of my interest in natural history stems from my time in that barn, too. When I got older, I was proud to come back there, where Jack was still painting, his beard gray now, his shoulders stooped, and tell him about my own encounters with walking whales and enchanting flatworms. Everyone always joked that Jack was a great bear. It wasn’t just his ursine cast that earned him that name; it was also his  combination of grouchiness and loyalty. Bears are also strong, and over the past few years Jack showed amazing strength as well, as he struggled with his failing health. Now the Great Bear of Locktown has left us, but we will not forget him.

[Update: Here's a biography of Schoenherr]

[Update: The New York Times has a lovely tribute, with pictures.]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stephen Colbert is the twenty-first century Mister Wizard. He’s had guests on to talk about great experiments in physics and shock their fingers, addressed the thorny issue of species delimitation, reveled in microbes, and even screamed in horror at the sight of tongue-eating parasites. If you still doubt me, look at the list of videos at Colbert Nation tagged “science.”

What? You think science is a thing of the past on the show? Well, consider this: Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance will be on March 3, and Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will be on in the second week of March. Tune in.

I’ll be a judge again this year for the National Academies Communication Award, a $20,000 prize for excellence in reporting on science. The prize is awarded in four categories:

• Book
• Magazine/Newspaper
• Film/Radio/TV
• Online

The nominations are now open. More information can be found here.

The winners of this year’s AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award have just been announced. I’m honored to be the winner for large newspapers. (I submitted some of my articles over the past year in The New York Times.)

The whole enterprise of handing out awards for science journalism is fraught with gloomy undertones these days, of course. Last year’s newspaper winners actually lost their jobs by the time the awards were announced. But even as we struggle on, it’s reassuring that there are chances to get some recognition for striving to do our best, to make as much sense of the world as we can manage in plain English. And I’m particularly grateful that the folks at the New York Times indulges me in my curiosity about basic questions about the nature of life–like why fireflies flash.

Peter Wainwright and his colleagues at UC Davis study the weird ways in which fish eat. Two years ago I wrote about their creepy work on moray eels for the Times here. Now they’ve got a Youtube channel for their surreal films. Mick Jagger, meet the Red Bay Snook. And Mr. Mosquitofish, meet your doom. (h/t Jonathan Eisen)

I smell an anthology here: a collection of the all-time greatest take-downs, in which scientists expose lazy thinking. How about, The Best Pwnage of 2009?

My own latest nomination:

In the new book Superfreakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner make lots of provocative claims about global warming. For example, they say that solar panels would absorb so much heat they’d be useless for bringing the planet’s temperature down by cutting down carbon emissions.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, who, like Levitt, is a professor at the  University of Chicago, shows why that’s wrong–not with calculus or some other fancy-schmancy mathematics, but with some embarrassingly simple arithmetic.

Be sure to check out the map at the end. Ouch.

I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Scientific Merit Award at the Imagine Science Film Festival, which just closed over the weekend. You may have seen the winner we picked, Magnetic Movie, which I’ve embedded below. There was a huge variety to choose from, some wonderfully beautiful, and some finding great emotional depth in just a few minutes. But Magnetic Movie, in the way it reveals the hidden weirdness that surrounds us, was tops.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. They won for their discovery of telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep them from degrading and ward off aging. The Nobel site has posted some useful information about why this was such a profound discovery.

Just a technical note, with shades of exasperation: After my web site got hacked earlier a couple months back, I changed ISP’s and spent a lot of time bringing it up to date. Now I’ve discovered that it’s not working again, because of some mysterious error. I’m getting help with it, but it may take a few days for everything to get back in place.

I’ve posted the first two stories from students in my science writing class over at Science on Shoals. (plus an explanatory introduction). One piece is about the mysteries of bird migrations, and the other’s on a new technology for seeing skeletons in motion in 3-D. And there’s plenty more to come. Check it out.

Now these are good office hours. I’m sitting in front of a big tide pool on a hot day at Appledore Island. My children are playing some Byzantine  game involving princesses on the raft in the middle of the pool. A student of mine has just walked passed me, snorkel and goggles in hand. “I’ve just sent you an outline for my project, and I’m going to take a break,” she says. As she floats off to gaze at the algae and the crabs, I use the awesome wireless on this island to check my email The outline is in my inbox. So by the time she’s done snorkeling, we can discuss it.

I’m doing my best to counter this tranquility by editing these students nearly to the point of tears. But my impersonation of John Houseman in the Paper Chase just can’t measure up on a day like this.

We’re three days into the science writing class here at Shoals Marine Laboratory, and the exhaustion and enlightenment are neck and neck.

Monday we arrived on Appledore Island and settled in among the squawking herring gulls, which grudgingly walk out of our way as we walk by, as if to say, it’s our island. Tuesday morning we marched out to the northern edge of the island to learn about the intertidal zone, the place where the ocean meets land in necklace of pools and rocks battered by waves and coated in slimy algae.

A wicked lightning storm promptly drove us back to safety, and we spent the morning learning the intricacies of parasites that reign supreme in the intertidal zone, infesting snails, crabs, fish, and those squawking gulls. In the evening we were able to return to the intertidal zone in peace, to inspect cages where hapless crabs must wait to be infected by their parasite overlords. We were disturbed only by mosquitoes, which seem to be able to hammer nails into the skin. It turns out that these parasites (flatworms called trematodes) don’t just affect their host species, but can even influence how much algae grows there, because infected snails eat less than healthy ones. And the sheer mass of the parasites is astounding, with most of the snails in the higher parts of the zone merely puppets for trematodes. Knowing that, I feel even more at home here.

Tuesday we pursued the White Whale of vertebrate evolution, the hagfish. It’s a hit-or-miss affair, and in our case it was a miss. We traveled for an hour from Appledore Island to reach a Shoals hagfish trap, hoping to bring up some live ones. En route we saw astonishing gatherings of tuna leaping out of the water, along with fin whales lifting their stately backs. When we reached the trap buoy, the students learned how to haul a tub 400 feet up from the bottom of the sea. (Note the rope in hand and the reporter’s notebook stashed in the back: true hands-on journalism.)

Sadly, only mud and bait fish were inside.

Back at the lab, the director of Shoals, Willy Bemis, cut open some hagfish he caught earlier this year to show why it’s worth going so far for a fish. Hagfish are not-quite-vertebrates. They have a brain and a braincase like us, along with a few other vertebrate-like traits, but they fall profoundly short. They have no skeleton but just a rope of cartilage they can tie into knots. And they have evolved weird traits of their own, like a sideways set of jaws and the ability to spew slime.

The students are now pounding out stories late into the night, and there’s more in store: the history of New England recorded in shells and bones, the migration of birds from equator to Arctic, and the three-dimensional X-ray animation of bodies in motion. By Sunday, they’ll have written up their final stories, which they will be publishing here. And then we can enjoy the view from the classroom in peace.