Archive: 2014

This is a painting of my favorite statue by Louis-Ernest Barrias in Musée d’Orsay, Paris. As the title suggests, the beauty of nature is the inspiration for both art and science. I painted it with a drawing pad (WACOM’s Bamboo) attached to my…

7 feet of information. Stored in the nucleus. For this sciku.   Fast forward along DNA until reaching the stop codon.   Synthetic DNA. The blueprint of life. What is natural? A Sciku is a scientific snack, a short piece of science-related poetry served…

This project originated at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when sociologist of science Gerhard Sonnert met the blind astronomer Wanda Diaz Merced, who studied the sonification of astronomic data as a tool for data analysis and signal…

We may know that the universe began with a Big Bang, but until yesterday, we had no direct evidence for the drastic expansion the universe is thought to have undergone in the moments after its birth. This “inflationary” model has grown from a speculation…

 Food allergies are a growing problem around the world []. These days, if you do not personally suffer from an allergy, you almost certainly know someone who does. Currently, around 3-7% of children have a food allergy—about a 50% increase since 1997 [1,…

One of my earliest memories is of the chaos caused by a kamikaze bee that flew through an open window in my family’s pickup truck during an otherwise pleasant country drive. It saddens me to imagine a future where children are deprived of the bee-related…

Photo by Annemarie Mountz, from http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bees-electrical-fields.html Flowers seduce bees with attractants such as color, shape, and scent. Scientists now think that flowers may have another surprising attractant in their repertoire:…

Should the discovery of an infectious virus in the permafrost worry us? Scientists have uncovered a so-called ‘giant virus’ in permafrost that has melted as a result of progressive climate change. The virus, Pithovirus sibericum, was isolated from melted…

  Hello new and former readers! My name is Tyler J. Ford. I’ve been an editor for this newsletter for almost four years and recently took over as Editor-in-Chief for Jamie Schafer who will be graduating very soon (Congrats to Jamie!). We’ll be…

Mitochondria provide the energy for cells, but unlike DNA, they are only inherited from our mothers through their eggs. Defective mitochondria cause diseases which are incurable in adulthood. However, they are treatable before conception with…