writer, editor, inkfish
THE NEW YORK TIMES: A puppy with a tail on his face gained viral fame this week. “I would die for Narwhal,” a number of Twitter commenters pledged. The rescue mutt was named for a marine mammal with a single tusk that sticks out of its face. But instead of a tusk, Narwhal the puppy has…
Read more How Narwhal the ‘Unicorn’ Puppy May Have Grown a Tail on His Head
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
NEW YORK TIMES: I never intended to be one of those people who would whip out a boob for a toddler old enough to demand milk using full sentences. When I was pregnant, I hoped I’d be able to breastfeed at all. If things worked out, I thought, I’d continue for a normal amount of time…
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
ORION: When I find Warren Senders on the side of a Boston suburbs highway, he is ready to hand me a sign that reads, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IS SOCIAL JUSTICE. It’s only 7:30 on a late September morning, but the day is already steamy. This makes his own sign, which leans against a guardrail and proclaims, CLIMATE…
SCIENCE: Try, for a moment, to be a fish. As you swim through dim waters, you see shapes moving past and watch for threats. You hear other animals calling or producing rasps and crackles by scraping together rigid body parts. The water is a tapestry of smells that reveals predators and potential mates, food, and the…
Read more A growing sensory smog threatens the ability of fish to communicate, navigate, and survive
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
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…
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…
