Dr. Amanda Foster

That gray rock by the garden bed, the speckled one near the fence, the smooth dark stone your kid keeps bringing inside. Most of us walk past these rocks every day without a second thought. But every backyard tells a geological story, and learning to read it is easier than you might expect. In this … Read more

I remember the first time I tried to identify an unknown rock from a hiking trip. I stared at my collection for an hour with no clue what I had picked up. That changed once I learned how to use the Mohs hardness scale with household items. The Mohs hardness scale is the simplest tool … Read more

If you have ever picked up an interesting rock on a hike and wondered whether you found something valuable, learning how to test a mineral’s specific gravity at home is the single most useful skill you can pick up. It requires no chemicals, no dangerous equipment, and only a few dollars of gear. I have … Read more

I still remember my first rock. It was a chunk of rose quartz I picked up on a family trip when I was nine, shoved into a sock in my backpack because I had no bag for it. Forty years later, that same beat-up crystal sits on my desk. It is scratched, chipped, and worth … Read more

You found a strange, heavy, dark rock in the desert or a freshly plowed field. It pulls a magnet. Your heart races. Could it be a genuine space rock? Most of the time, the answer is no. Geologists and meteorite collectors have a name for these lookalikes: meteor-wrongs. Out of every hundred rocks that get … Read more

I still remember the first time I cracked open a quartz vein in a creek bed and saw what looked like a small fortune staring back at me. The metallic glint was bright, the color was unmistakably yellow, and my heart nearly stopped. That “gold” turned out to be pyrite, and my disappointment taught me … Read more

Last Thanksgiving, my uncle leaned across the table and asked, “So what exactly are you studying?” I froze, then launched into a 90-second monologue about cell signaling pathways. By the end, his eyes had glazed over, and my aunt rescued him by asking about dessert. I have replayed that moment many times. If you want … Read more

I remember the moment a coworker forwarded me a headline claiming that chocolate cures cancer. The article looked legitimate. It cited researchers. It quoted statistics. Yet the entire study had been conducted on five mice, in a journal that accepted payment for publication, with no replication. That headline is one example of bad science in … Read more

When I first opened a peer-reviewed paper on sleep and memory, I froze at the methods section. The vocabulary felt like a foreign language, and the dense figures looked like works of art I had no training to interpret. If that sounds familiar, this guide on how to read a scientific paper as a non-scientist … Read more

Last week, a cousin forwarded me a Facebook post claiming a well-known herb cures inflammation in 48 hours. The post had 200k shares and a confident quote from someone called “Dr. M.” I almost believed it. Then I applied the same framework I use at our science outreach events, and within five minutes I could … Read more