writer, editor, inkfish
QUANTA: A little blue-and-black fish swims up to a mirror. It maneuvers its body vertically to reflect its belly, along with a brown mark that researchers have placed on its throat. The fish then pivots and dives to strike its throat against the sandy bottom of its tank with a glancing blow. Then it returns to…
Read more A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test
QUANTA: In a loudly bubbling laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, about 2,800 of the salamanders called axolotls drift in tanks and cups, filling floor-to-ceiling shelves. Up close, axolotls are just on the cute side of alien. They have fleshy pink bodies and guileless, wall-eyed faces. Unlike most salamanders, which metamorphose into land-dwellers as…
Read more Salamander’s Genome Guards Secrets of Limb Regrowth
THE CUT: I’ve taken countless videos of my daughter since she was born, but there’s one I can barely stand to watch. In it, she is 5 weeks old and screaming. Her face and tiny fists are tomato-red. Her gums are bared and her eyes are squeezed shut, and her head is twisting back and forth…
Read more My Baby Cried More Than Yours, and No One Knows Why
THE ATLANTIC: There are only around 500 North Atlantic right whales left in the world, making them one of the most endangered of all whale species. This month, nearly that many data scientists raced to complete a project that might help researchers keep this small population from disappearing altogether. Their goal: Develop an algorithm that could…
STAT: Those drugs in your cabinet? They’re designed to treat only half of you. The other half — the trillions of microbes throughout your body — haven’t historically interested drug makers. But as scientists learn more about the microbiome’s role in conditions ranging from allergies to anxiety to cancer, they’re increasingly interested in drugging its constituents.…
BIOGRAPHIC: “This one might be a little stinky,” says Tenaya Norris, a scientist at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California. Research assistant Barbie Halaska carries a limp, sodden carcass into the room and drapes it across a gleaming steel table. Even before the researchers slice into the tiny, brown California sea lion pup and remove…
STAT: When physicist Alex Zhavoronkov looked in the mirror one day and saw alarming swelling around his eyes, he guessed it was an allergic reaction to a drug he’d taken. But he couldn’t just ring up his doctor and ask — the drug was one his own company was developing, and he was its first guinea…
Read more Biotech Execs in Search of Human Guinea Pigs Find Eager Subjects: Themselves
SLATE: In the 1970s, a pair of Danish researchers ventured north of the Arctic Circle and into medical lore. Studying a scattered Inuit population, they concluded that eating plenty of fish and other marine animals protected this group from heart disease. The researchers would eventually suggest that everyone else’s hearts and arteries might also benefit…
NAUTILUS: Some animals, including your pets, may be partially colorblind, and yet certain aspects of their vision are superior to your own. Living creatures’ visual perception of the surrounding world depends on how their eyes process light. Humans are trichromats—meaning that our eyes have three types of the photoreceptors known as cone cells, which are sensitive…
HAKAI: Rule number one: lean the opposite way from your partner, unless you both want to take a swim in the tepid Mystic River. While one person reaches over the side of the canoe and swirls a batch of bright green leaves like spaghetti, the other keeps the boat balanced. Then the person leaning over the…
JEZEBEL: As someone who likes to bake and doesn’t own a car, I have schlepped a lot of cakes on a lot of trains. I’ve maneuvered pies over subway turnstiles and Tupperwares between strangers’ elbows. What was unusual about this one lemon cake was that I wasn’t carrying it—and that’s where this experiment was born.…
MOTHERBOARD: As a teenager in Vermont, Sarah Harmon used Java to create a computer program that wrote poetry. She named it OGDEN. Then she submitted one of its poems in 2008 to her high-school literary magazine under the pen name Dan Goshen, an anagram of Ogden Nash. “They accepted it,” Harmon laughs, “although they did say…
