Archive: 2020

Researchers recently determined that while potentially health-damaging aerosols are relatively evenly distributed throughout Switzerland and Liechtenstein, some potentially dangerous compounds in the aerosols tend to cluster near cities.

Zebrafish shed insight into how the brain responds to social isolation: their neuronal gene activity changes depending on how many others are around them.

Commercial harvesting of plants may have forced them to evolve to camouflage and evade humans.

Xiaomeng Han is a graduate student in the Harvard Ph.D. Program in Neuroscience. She uses electron microscopy to study neuronal connectivity. Cover image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay This biography is part of our “Picture a Scientist”…

by Xiaomeng Han Chien-Shiung Wu In the spring of 1912, a baby girl was born to a family in China. It was the family’s tradition that all the boys in the generation have the character “Chien” in their first names, followed by characters from the…

by Wei Lifigures by Rebecca Senft If you’ve ever taken an organic chemistry class, you may know that making chemical compounds can be a long and painful process. Bacteria, however, face no such struggles. After millions of years, these tiny microbes…

Science is part of our daily lives, it’s even in our kitchens! Here, we discuss the science of fermentation – from sour dough to sauerkraut. Listen in! Featuring: Delphine Tripp and Sharon Spivak

by Mary Mayfigures by Aparna Nathan People have been eating and drinking fermented foods since long before we understood how to cultivate the yeast and bacteria that make them. As anyone who’s cultivated a sourdough starter can attest, the…

The 2020 Nobel Chemistry Prize goes to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for CRISPR! We discuss the technology, its history, and the patent war over it. Featuring: Melis Tekant, Chad Stein, Wei Li, Delphine Tripp, Edward Chen, and Jordan…

Novel delivery system enables CRISPR-based genome editing therapy to kill cancer cells in mouse models.