The world’s deepest zoo harbors clues to extraterrestrial life – my first piece for kids
I’m excited about the publication of my first piece for kids, about the World’s Deepest Zoo, written for Science News for Students. It covers the same topic as my Smithsonian piece from last year, i.e. life living deep beneath the Earth and the scientists who venture into underground mines in order to study them. Of […]
Ants, impostorism and a few more updates
It’s been a while since my last update, although this time I have a better reason than usual for being so busy-my wife and I were blessed with a lovely baby girl a few months ago! Between frantically trying to finish up assignments before she was born, and then being busy/sleep-deprived taking care of a […]
How the tiny parasite Toxoplasma alters its host’s behavior
It’s been a while since I received my PhD, but I finally got around to writing an article about the parasite I spent so many years studying in graduate school. That would be Toxoplasma gondii, a tiny intracellular parasite that infects just about any warm-blooded animal, including humans. My PhD thesis focused on how Toxo […]
How the gut “tastes” parasites, blood vessels “see,” and kidneys “smell” fatty acids and regulate blood pressure in response
In my latest feature for The Scientist Magazine, I wrote about how sensory receptors — the light, taste, and odor receptors that are primarily present in our eyes, tongues, and nose — are present all over the body, and have all kinds of functions. It turns out taste receptors in the gut and airway influence some of the earliest […]
How scientists can get credit for peer review: Science Careers article
Thanks to all the time I spent getting my PhD, I’ve maintained an interest in writing about careers in science, especially articles that might be helpful for graduate students and postdocs. I wrote this article for Science Careers about different platforms (such as Publons, Elsevier’s Reviewer Recognition Platform) that allow scientists to get credit for […]
Keeping busy, writing about molecular biology for BioTechniques
I’ve been meaning to update this website for a while, unfortunately I’ve been too busy writing articles to do so. Among other things, I’ve been writing regular articles for the journal BioTechniques. It’s been a nice way for me to keep in touch with the latest in molecular biology, a field that I haven’t extensively […]
When it rains, it pours: my article about the monsoons and floods in India
This article on flooding in India and Pakistan has been a long time coming. I did the bulk of the reporting last year right after the devastating September 2014 floods in Kashmir, only for the article to get delayed until now. Floods occur every year in South Asia, causing widespread damage and loss of life. […]
A foggy feature
Here’s a longer feature article that I wrote for The Verge, a science and technology site that I read fairly regularly. The article is about researchers who are developing more efficient methods to harvest water from fog. In particular I focused on a new fog collector based on the beaks of shorebirds, but I also […]
When it comes to echolocation, some bats just wing it
My latest piece for NationalGeographic.com is about scientists discovering that some bats can echolocate using sonar clicks from their wings. In every previously known example of echolocation, animals such as bats, dolphins, some birds and even some shrews use some sort of vocal organ (larynx, tongue, ‘sonar lips’ etc) to produce high-frequency sounds that they […]
Article about an insect-sized flying robot for Motherboard
I wrote my first piece for Motherboard, Vice magazine’s online science & technology site. I just happened to find a pitch that worked well for them, and it was fun to write a more technology-related article after a while. The article is about the first bee-sized robot that can fly using feedback only from an […]