For 10 years, Taina Litwak’s job was to draw almost nothing but mosquitoes. As a science illustrator in Washington, D.C., for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Litwak helped document disease-transmitting species that might endanger soldiers overseas. T. Litwak Today, Litwak’s work offers a bit more variety: She’s an “art department of one” in D.C. for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Systematic Entomology Laboratory. She helps scientists describe insects that threaten crops or forests, as well as bugs that could kill these pests. This means illustrating beetles, ... (p. 32)

When Stanley Culpepper was a kid, he spent hours pulling weeds on his family’s farm. “We pulled and pulled and pulled,” he says.  Culpepper loved working on the farm, but he didn’t like weeding. He became a scientist to figure out easier ways for farmers to control weeds. “I decided there’s got to be a better way than pulling weeds all your life,” says Culpepper, now a weed scientist at the University of Georgia in Tifton. He and other scientists found chemicals can tackle many weeds. But increasingly, this chemical weed control is coming at a price — a big pr...