The ineffable Maria Popova: the Universe in verse
I find myself struggling to articulate the essence of Maria Popova’s writing – how it weaves together the delicate and the scientific, the thoughtful and ...
Tag: science
Pause for station identification
Yes, another station ID post. And, not that you’re keeping score, normally I have large gaps between them. Alas, we live in Strange Times and strange thin...
Pause for station identification
I’ve been posting these pauses for almost 17 years. They are meant to give folks a quick overview of where I am at, but when I look at them, they serve a ...
Pause for station identification
Wow. The world is such a different place since my last station identification. I’m writing this in the midst of the largest global disruption since perhap...
Pause for station identification
Yup. Another year and a half has gone by since my last station identification. So much has happened and so little has changed since then. MeWho am I? I’m ...
Is OpenTrons the Makerbot of biotech? In some ways.
When I was a molecular biologist, folks used to ask me what I did. I used to say, “Squirt things into tubes and wait.” OpenTrons takes that drudgery...
Ebola exposes chinks in our techno-optimistic armor
If you’re a bio-nerd like me, you’ve known about Ebola for a very long time. You knew it was trouble from the get-go and wondered how it would unfol...
Ego play: My Erdős–Bacon number is 7, sort of
Paul Erdős was the most prolific publisher of mathematics papers (more than Euler). Much like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, mathematicians have an number to conne...
Finally got around to reading Sterling’s “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”
“That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with t...
The Impact of a Consortium of Fermented Milk Strains on the Gut Microbiome of Gnotobiotic Mice and Monozygotic Twins
“The results also showed that (i) consumption of an FMP containing five bacterial strains was not associated with a statistically significant change in th...