Welcome to Eureka! Lab

Hello and welcome to Eureka! Lab, a new science education blog for students, parents, educators — and anyone else who cares deeply about the process of discovery! My name is Bethany Brookshire and I’m incredibly happy to be able to share my love of science with you — and to show you some of the weird and wonderful ways an observant person can learn about this world.

Bethany Brookshire

As a scientist with a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology, I’ve spent much of my career studying how drugs work inside the brain. But along the way I also began blogging: For many years now, I’ve written a blog called Neurotic Physiology and I’ve also posted on Scientific American blogs about all that is good, bad, and weird in neuroscience and physiology.

Eureka!Lab will be blog central for Student Science, a brand new part of the Society for Science & the Public’s mission to advance science through education, and a sibling to the news website Science News for Students. As you might have noticed, Science News for Students (formerly Science News for Kids) has gotten a stylin’ new makeover, making it easier to read, more fun to use and a great place to connect the science news of the day with what students learn in the classroom. Here at Eureka! Lab, I’ll be talking to students, teachers, and parents about how science works, what scientists do, what goes into conducting first-class research and science projects and how you can get involved! From science fairs to science in your house, Eureka!Lab will be all about asking questions, big and small, about how the world works.

Why Eureka!Lab? These days the word “eureka,” widely attributed to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes, tends to be used to exclaim a big discovery, like E = mc2, a disease cure or a vein of gold on a mountainside. And, for sure, what motivates most scientists is to find something completely new — something that no one else in the world knows. But in fact, the word is based on the Greek verb “evresko” (ευρίσκω), which simply means “to find.” So every time you discover something new — even if it’s only new to you — you’re having a Eureka! moment!

This blog will celebrate, and help you find, those Eureka! moments. I’ll post on how science works in the day to day, how you can do your own science, and how you can use your research to create projects, enter competitions and share your Eureka! moments with the world. I’ll also be blogging for teachers, with ideas on how to lead more students down the path of scientific discovery. And this blog is for parents, too, so you can find new things for your young scientist to do and give them their best shot at making their Eureka! moments happen. And of course, there will be lots of new science, because with all the great work going on in the world, scientists have Eureka! moments going on every day.

So welcome to Eureka!Lab. Get ready to join me on a wild ride through science. And drop me a note if you have thoughts or suggestions for future blog items.

Power Words:
Physiology: the study of how living things function.
Pharmacology: the study of how drugs, from Tylenol to chemotherapy to drugs of abuse, work in the body.
Neuroscience: the study of the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and nerves, all of which control everything a body does, from how it moves to how it thinks.
Eureka: an Ancient Greek word that means “I have found it!”

Bethany Brookshire was a longtime staff writer at Science News Explores and is the author of the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. She has a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology and likes to write about neuroscience, biology, climate and more. She thinks Porgs are an invasive species.