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.
UAB Magazine / Fall 2014 / Lying inside an fMRI machine that’s tracking her brain activity, a college student grasps a hot block in her hand. It’s just hot enough to cause her some pain—seven on a scale of one to ten, she tells a researcher. Above her, a picture flashes; it’s a snapshot of her …
WashU A&S Magazine / April 23, 2014 / More than two millennia ago, when a patient complained to Hippocrates – the ancient Greek physician – about a sore back or headache, he would suggest that they chew on strips of bark from a willow tree. But if the pain continued for months, Hippocrates didn’t have …
Stanford Medicine / Fall 2013 / If a pregnant woman rushes into a hospital with labor pains, one of the first questions she’s asked is how long she’s been pregnant. If the answer is much less than the usual nine months, then the normal course of action — wheeling the soon-to-be mother to a labor …
HHMI Bulletin / Fall 2013 / Inside the human gut, trillions of microbes are networking. They’re passing notes of collusion to friends, handing out business-card-like identifiers to the immune system, and signaling threats to competitors. Some messages are game-changers, causing bacteria to shift their behavior, produce a new compound, or abandon the gut altogether. Other …
Stanford Medicine Magazine / Spring 2013 / One day in 2011, an ambulance pulled up to the Stanford emergency room and paramedics unloaded a man in his 30s who had crashed his motorcycle. He was in critical condition: Tests showed dangerously low blood pressure, indicating that around 40 percent of his blood was lost. And …
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / February 6, 2013 / As recently as 2010, Forest Rohwer could be found immersed—literally—in the Pacific Ocean. Rohwer, a microbiologist at San Diego State University, has spent more than a decade researching the bacteria and viruses that inhabit coral reefs, developing ways to study the microbes, and …
HHMI Bulletin / Winter 2013 / For a cell, the past informs the present. We humans have search engines like Google and Yahoo to sift through the Internet’s gobs of historical information and learn from others’ mistakes and successes. In some cells of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, it turns out, a type of RNA, called Piwi-interacting …
HHMI Bulletin / Winter 2013 / To get from Boston to San Francisco, a person has a few choices: drive a car, hop on a bus, fly in an airplane, hitchhike from city to city, maybe even ride a bike. Circumstances will dictate which way works best. If the traveler is in a hurry, the …
New Scientist / November 14, 2012 / Every other week, biochemist Michelle Arkin sets up a videoconference before her lab’s group meeting. And when the lab meeting starts, she doesn’t only welcome her fellow scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. She also greets their remote collaborators: scientists from Pfizer or Janssen Research & …
HHMI Bulletin / Fall 2012 / A shiny, pinkish-brown triangle tucked under the right rib cage, a healthy liver is a marvel. Nutrient-rich blood from the intestines pulses into one side, and the liver goes to work removing toxins, converting digested food to energy, storing vitamins and minerals, and controlling how much fat and sugar …