Kat Long

This is fascinating, thanks!

John Playfair taught my biography subject #WilliamScoresbyJr in his natural history course at the U of Edinburgh in 1806—the epicenter of the Neptunism vs. Vulcanism geological debate. Scoresby leaned Neptunist! His notebook from Playfair's lectures (yes he misspelled Edinburgh on the cover):

Image of a misty spooky scene with fallen log, a pond, and patches of moss and other dark green vegetation.

Do you love bogs and Halloween? If so, please follow and share this thread to explore the eerie, the dark and the supernatural side of bog ecosystems. BogBoo. 1/

You are terrifying
and strange and
beautiful,
something not
everyone knows how
to love.
-Warsan Shire

Just incredible that a cargo ship made TWO crossings of the Northwest Passage in a single season. 120 years ago it took Roald Amundsen three years to get through the ice that no longer exists

This whale lives for centuries: its secret could help extend human lifespan A cold-activated protein that mends damaged DNA could play a part in keeping the bowhead whale in tip-top shape.

#WilliamScoresbyJr, my biography subject, predicted that bowheads were extremely long-lived due to the length of their baleen back in the 1820s! Now we another clue as to why they’re the longest-lived mammals on Earth

'A real violation.' More than 1,000 artifacts stolen from California museum in brazen heist Items stolen from the Oakland Museum of California included Native American baskets, jewelry, laptops, historic photographs and intricately carved ivory tusks.

Stolen scrimshaw!

What a metaphor

Aw, thanks!

A large angular rock outcropping in the foreground with red and gold fall foliage in the background

A close up photo of a small maple tree branch with bright red leaves

An almost fluorescent yellow cluster of sassafras leaves against the forest floor

The view from the top of Sugarloaf Mountain with rocky outcroppings in the foreground, some small conifers a little farther back, and an expanse of farmland in the background

Senescence at Sugarloaf Mountain (near Comus, Md.)

You too Nick!

A gigantic thank you all of my story sources and especially to the Mental Floss team for making the past 9.5 years so freakin’ great. I should also mention here that I am AVAILABLE FOR FREELANCE ASSIGNMENTS on any science and/or history topic! More clips, bio, etc. here 17/fin
katlong.com

From Snakeroot to Salamanders, Life Thrives in Cemeteries These historic cemeteries are incongruously alive.

Finally, my last big feature for MF was a story again (!) pegged to Halloween season and looked at the ways old cemeteries are being managed as habitats for native wildlife. Probably my favorite part was finding the header image to go with it—love that little black-throated green warbler 16/n

The Reasons We Love Fall So Much, According to Science Wondering why you— or your friends—like fall so much? It turns out that there's science behind the answers.

Our newest staff writer CaLea Johnson pitched this science piece about the psychological underpinnings of our love of fall. She did an amazing job looking at different angles, calling up sources, and turning the facts into an entertaining article—the essence of a successful science story! 15/n

Lonely at the Top: Protecting Hyperion, the World's Tallest Tree Redwood National Park is home to Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. But you won't find it marked on any maps—and that's for its own good.

I loved editing this feature by @micheledebczak.bsky.social
about Hyperion, a superlative redwood whose location remains officially undisclosed to save it from curiosity-seekers. Such a great combination of science, history, and adventure in this one 13/n

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and the Great Dinosaur Utopia of Victorian England Hawkins was the Steven Spielberg of his time—an artist and visionary who created an immersive world where giants still walked the Earth.

I got to edit this dinosaur-sized feature by our incredible staff writer Jake Rossen about Victorian sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his attempts to create the first lifelike models of dinosaurs based on their fossils. Hawkins … didn’t quite get there 12/n

How 19th-Century Photographer Anna Atkins Changed the Way We Look at Science Her identity was a mystery for decades.

I love it when art, history, and science collide, like they do in this feature I wrote about Anna Atkins and her pioneering use of photography (specifically cyanotypes) to document botanical specimens in the 1840s. This story coincided with an exhibit at the New York Public Library in 2018 11/n

Ice Age Human Footprints in Canada Reveal a Walk on the Beach Taken 13,000 Years Ago New evidence that early North Americans cruised the Pacific coast.

And this science story about the oldest human footprints ever found in North America. The find added more evidence to the theory that people began populating the continent via the Pacific coast during the last ice age—which affirms the traditional stories of coastal First Nations 10/n

It’s Easy Being Green: Most Amphibians Are Biofluorescent, Study Finds After being bathed in blue light, salamanders, frogs, and other amphibians glowed a brilliant green. There's more to these critters than meets the eye.

I wrote some actual science as MF’s science editor, really! I enjoyed writing up this short piece when scientists discovered that most amphibians glow under black light—so cool! 9/n

Lost Soles: When Concealed Shoes Kept Witches Away People in the Middle Ages concealed shoes in the walls of their homes to trap witches—a folk tradition that may continue today.

MF did a LOT of ghost content. One of my all-time fave stories came about when Laura Potts casually told me she had found a “witch shoe” embedded in her old house. I dove into the folk tradition of burying shoes in the walls of buildings to scare away witches, which turned into … 8/n

WIC Recovery From the Fire The WIC's starting goal is to raise $1 million to help rebuild what was lost and restore and add to the amazing collection that we had.

Sadly, that museum, the Whale Interpretive Centre on Vancouver Island, was destroyed in a fire late last year. It’s raising money to reopen 7/n

How Two Biologists Put A Killer Whale Back Together, Bone by Bone When an orca whale was found dead near Vancouver Island in British Columbia, it wasn't the end of its story. Two of the world's best skeleton articulators gave the killer whale a second life in a muse...

On the same trip I heard about a husband-and-wife team who articulates marine mammal skeletons. It turned out that they were assembling bones of a killer whale for a local museum. Since the whale had been monitored for years, I was able to piece together the story of its life—and its afterlife 7/n

The Canadian Village Where Sasquatches Are Said to Roam According to Klemtu's residents, the hairy, human-like creatures have always been there, in the dense forests and remote areas across the nation’s traditional territory.

Also spooky, in 2017 I went on a reporting trip to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia with @ijnr.bsky.social. While we met with several First Nations to discuss resource management issues, I also learned how sasquatches appear in their folklore—which I just HAD to know more about 6/n

The Charming English Fishing Village That Inspired <em>Dracula</em> How a seaside vacation in 1890 gave rise to Bram Stoker's terrifying tale.

It wasn’t ALL polar exploration tales, although even this one had a polar connection. I wrote this feature describing how Whitby, UK, inspired key scenes in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”—in which I got to praise Arctic explorer #WilliamScorebyJr’s hometown AND interview Stoker’s grand-nephew 5/n

Little Weesy Coppin, the Ghost That Foretold the Franklin Expedition’s Fate The British ships HMS 'Terror' and HMS 'Erebus' had vanished while searching for the Northwest Passage. A young Irish ghost purportedly knew where they were.

Another one of my proudest achievements at MF is flooding the site with #FranklinExpedition content. I cajoled our brilliant staff writer Ellen Gutoskey into writing a hard-hitting report on Little Weesy Coppin, a spectral child who allegedly revealed in 1849 where the missing expedition was 4/n

Mental Floss Presents: The Quest for the North Pole History Podcast · Series · Many wanted to claim its discovery—but only one could be the first. In The Quest for the North Pole, a new podcast from Mental Floss and iHeartRadio, we'll dive into the adv...

My absolute favorite project was The Quest for the North Pole, MF’s podcast with iHeartRadio, which I created, hosted, and wrote most of the episodes for, with excellent script-writing assists from all of the MF staff. I even went to Greenland with @glacierbytes.bsky.social for an episode! 3/n

... including the stories I wrote/produced (not all about science, some are definitely not science) and the amazing pieces by our genius staff writers that I was privileged to edit!! 2/n

Welp, after 9+ years, my time as Mental Floss’s science editor has come to an end. I could not have asked for a better bunch of weirdos to be my co-workers (and who also got laid off). You know what this means: a thread of greatest hits! 🧵1/n

Really looking forward to this!

The East Wing is gone, and Trump turns to damage control Demolition crews appeared to finish taking down the bulk of the White House wing Thursday, while President Donald Trump defended the project.

A great lede can be less than 10 words:

"The East Wing of the White House is gone."

Via @ddiamond.bsky.social @jonathanreports.bsky.social
@oliviacgeorge.bsky.social

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Good question. If this was in Manhattan the White House would be covered in sidewalk sheds