Nell Greenfieldboyce has loved science since she was a kid growing up in New Jersey. She was fascinated by the stars, the planets and life on Earth.
“Mucking around in the woods and finding little creatures and plants, minerals and rocks. I was the kind of kid who was always interested in the natural history museum and always liked poking at things and fiddling with things. It was just natural to me. It was what I was drawn to.”

But as a biology major in college, she discovered a career in science was not what she wanted.
“I realized that what I really liked was reading about science and talking to the scientists – not so much doing the science, because when you do science you have to be very specialized and just focus on one thing, but I liked learning about everything.”
Fortunately, her university had a program in science writing. Nell signed up and didn’t look back. After graduation she wrote for magazines, and when NPR advertised for a science reporter she got the job. It’s work she loves so much that – in her spare time – she began writing essays about science, just for fun.
There was one about a spider who lived outside her kitchen window, another about black holes and a third about tornadoes – which terrified her kids.
“That essay is a lot about how we’ve come to learn about tornadoes, and what we know about tornadoes and what we still don’t know about tornadoes, but it’s also about how – as a parent – you help your children deal with the uncertainties in life and the possibility of things just appearing out of nowhere that could shatter things, which is a real possibility, so what are you going to tell the kids? This is never going to happen? I just couldn’t do that.”
She called one of the nation’s leading experts on tornadoes and picked his brain about how to deal with her children’s phobia. Then there’s the essay about fleas, inspired by something Hermann Melville wrote about his whale-centric novel, Moby Dick.
“He talks about why he picked whales as his theme, and he’s saying that to have a mighty book you must have a mighty theme, and he was saying that no great and enduring volume could ever be written about the flea,’ and I thought, ‘That’s not nice. C’mon. Fleas are interesting,’ and so I started researching fleas, and researching how scientists have learned about fleas and also how artists and poets and philosophers have used fleas as metaphors.”
She learned that fleas could jump more than 50 times their own body length, that a male flea has a sex organ twice his body’s length, and that one of the world’s great experts on fleas was Miriam Rothschild.
“Her family, which was famous for banking and being wealthy was also into the natural sciences, and her father collected flea specimens, and she became a flea researcher.”
Another essay explores meteors.
“Scientists didn’t used to believe that rocks could fall from the sky. How could it fall from the clouds? Thomas Jefferson was really skeptical. He thought they must have come from volcanoes, but certainly not clouds. He was like ‘How is that possible?’”
And it was that topic which inspired the title of her book – a collection of these essays called Transient and Strange. The phrase appears in a poem by Walt Whitman about shooting stars.
“'Look at these meteors. They’re so transient and strange.' And then he says, ‘But what am I but another transient and strange being.’ It just seemed like a nice phrase, and also we got to put meteorites on the cover, which made me very happy. I do like meteorites.”
NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce will speak at the New Dominion Bookshop on Charlottesville’s downtown mall, Saturday at 7.