Jonathan Feakins

Freelance science and history writer with a love for our absurd, astonishing, and fabulous world.

My Latest Work

Eos •

Pay Dirt: How Colonialism Left Its Mark on the Soil of the American Southwest

Shortly after Frank Telles arrived at Northern Arizona University to start his Ph.D., researchers announced that they had just radiocarbon-dated a set of fossilized human footprints found within the gypsum dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. Sandwiched between two layers of ancient grass seeds, the fossils revealed that people were living in the region as long as 23,000 years ago.
Eos •

The Fiery Tornadoes That Could Mop Up Oil Spills

It’s been more than a decade since Michael Gollner and his colleagues first watched a viral YouTube video of a fire tornado fueled by Jim Beam bourbon.

A warehouse in Kentucky had just been struck by lightning, funneling almost a million gallons of the flammable spirit into a nearby retention pond. As the flames whipped across the surface of the water, however, something in the atmospheric stars aligned: The flames coalesced into a towering fire whirl, more commonly known as a fire tornado.
Offrange •

The Grain Pest Detectives

Back in 2015, a somber-faced beagle named Emeril, working as an agricultural K-9 at O’Hare International Airport, perked up his nose at a passenger’s unassuming baggage. Although the traveler had neglected to declare, further inspection of their belongings uncovered a smorgasbord of illicit food items, ranging from pickled mutton to rice to curry leaves.

The fermented sheep meat, as it turned out, did not actually warrant much concern. The invasive Khapra beetle in a bag of rice, on the other hand...
Core77 •

The Tactile Media Alliance: Rescuing Touch in a World of Screens

When Lindsay Yazzolino was young, she made an origami Christmas tree out of a one-dollar bill. Impressed with how sharp she'd made the topmost point, she urged her mother to examine it for herself. Although her mother assured her that she could see the paper, Yazzolino insisted. Upon touching the point, her mother yelped in pain.

"And I said: 'See, I told you!" Yazzolino recalls. "It's just a different experience."

Blind since birth, Yazzolino didn't expect to make her professional career in...
Trails •

Biology By Canoe: How a Scientific Paddling Trip Through the Arctic Wilderness Opened the Door to Connections with the Land, People, and Culture.

Danielle Nowosad cut her backcountry teeth on the edge of the Arctic. Hired in 2017 as a research technician at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre in the far north of her home province of Manitoba, Nowosad would conduct studies on nutrient dynamics one day, and serve as a bear guard for school groups and visiting researchers the next.
Arts Midwest •

The ‘Prosthetic Guy’ Who Crafts Artful Appendages to Empower Patients

In addition to his day-to-day work as a prosthetic technician, Harrier designs custom, free-of-charge “jackets”: bespoke pieces of art, slipped over a patient’s artificial limb, in whatever form they so desire—be it dragon skin, body horror, or the iconic aesthetics of H.R. Giger. On Instagram, Harrier documents his work as @prostheticguy.

“Every prosthetic place should have a prosthetic guy. It shouldn’t just be me and a few companies doing it,” Harrier says. “They need to up their game...
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