Freelance Science Writer
A small sampling of recent articles I’ve written. Not always updated regularly! Check my Facebook page for a more complete listing of recent pieces.
UCLA Engineering / September 4, 2019 / If you crack open any of the electronic devices you use on a daily basis— your phone, smartwatch, tablet, TV, instant pot or microwave— you’ll see a landscape reminiscent of a miniscule city map. Computer chips, each dotted with microscopic transistors, are arranged like buildings on the green …
GW Magazine / Fall 2019 / As 3D printing comes of age, researchers turn to 4D printing, and the possibility of building replacement organs from patients’ own stem cells.
National Science & Technology Medals Foundation / August 2019 It was more than three decades ago, but chemist Geraldine Richmond still remembers it clearly: the first time she felt like her research had really failed. As a young researcher fresh out of graduate school, Richmond was setting up her own laser lab. She had spent days on end …
National Science & Technology Medals Foundation / July 2019 In her lab at the University of Illinois, Berenbaum has spent the last four decades studying the evolutionary arms race between plants and insects. She’s probed how insects often manage to evade plants’ defenses, and her work has helped scientists learn about the effects of pesticides …
UCLA Engineering / April 2019 Today, most of the devices we use are, literally, stiff. Your e-reader likely can’t fold in half to slip into a pocket. Rock solid airplane wings don’t morph in shape mid-flight to adjust to gusts of wind. Your cell phone screen isn’t self-healing. And robots don’t give soft gentle hugs. …
National Parks Magazine / Winter 2017 It’s a windy May morning on the Texas coast, and dancing sand nips my ankles as I cross an expanse of beach. I’m at Padre Island National Seashore to learn about rare Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, and as I walk to the park headquarters, I can’t help but study …
Stanford Medicine / December 12, 2017 If there was a Mafia crime family of the virus world, it might be flaviviruses. Dengue, Zika, West Nile and yellow fever virus — to name the more notorious public health gangsters of this clan — are all mosquito-borne flaviviruses, and they’re notoriously hard to take out. Researchers struggle …
FUTURA / Dec 2017 Around a billion years ago, a cell captured a nearby bacterium, enveloping it completely. Once inside, the bacterium became a survival advantage, helping the cell to generate energy from oxygen. The cell divided, and within it the bacterium divided as well, and that happened again and again, and a whole host …
Salk Institute / November 9, 2017 Every day, websites you visit and smartphone apps that you use are crunching huge sets of data to find things that resemble each other: products that are similar to your past purchases; songs that are similar to tunes you’ve liked; faces that are similar to people you’ve identified in …
Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds FUTURA / Fall 2017 Recycling glass, paper, and plastic may be a purely human endeavour, but cells have perfected their own form of recycling, called autophagy. Once dubbed a “garbage pathway”, autophagy is now turning out to be far more complex – and have further-reaching impacts on health and disease – than …