Wellcome Image Awards 2012

The Wellcome Image Awards 2012 winners are here, stunning as always. I think my favorite is the  image of caffeine crystals shown above (by Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy). The Arabidopsis seedling, mothfly and bacterial biofilm look really cool as well, but they’re all worth checking out–here is the winners’ gallery. [Wellcome Image Awards 2012 | […]

Published a Wired article on slowing light

Was excited to publish my first article for Wired Science last week! The article, which appeared on Wired.com, was about a new tiny chip that could slow light down at room temperature, thanks to some quantum physical effects. The article was fairly challenging to write, but thankfully the UC Santa Cruz researcher responsible, Holger Schmidt, […]

A new website to share scientific images

As part of our social media class at UC Santa Cruz, a couple of classmates and I came up with the idea to create a site where scientists could easily share striking scientific images. (All of us used to work in lab and take pretty scientific photos that we didn’t know where to share.) The […]

Nature News published my story about a new underwater robot

Underwater robot can follow marine organisms over record distances: Nature News. Nature News published my story today! Follow the link above to read it. I’m obviously excited to publish a story in Nature, it’s been a dream of mine. And the fact that it was my first pitch to them makes it feel even more […]

Regulating genetic testing, understanding probabilities, and knowing the future

Should we regulate people’s access to their own genome data?. More on the issue of regulating personal genetic testing, by Ars Technica‘s John Timmer. The headline is a bit misleading, since the issue is more about whether the “Direct-to-Consumer” (DTC) genetic testing industry should be regulated like any other medical tests or not. Definitely worth […]

Virology institute working on curing cancer

More recent freelance work for the Institute of Human Virology (IHV). Interestingly, this time both articles were on cancer! What do viruses have to do with cancer? Well, as Dr. Robert Gallo, Head of the IHV mentioned, it wasn’t long ago that no one thought cancers had infectious causes, but now 20-25% of all cancers […]

Out of Elements

I worked on one of my favorite articles and infographics for the June 2010 issue of Popular Science, on the elements that we couldn’t do without. It brought back memories of high-school and college chemistry, and the infographic itself involves a periodic table. It was interesting to even think of the fact that we do […]

Movie/TV Science vs Real Science

A couple of nice cartoons that illustrate the differences between science as depicted in movies and TV – i.e. awesome, fast, and produced quick and definite results – vs real science, which is often slow, painstaking, and rarely produces the kind of conclusive results that can be stated with a whole bunch of qualifiers… Here’s […]