The Science Writer

Dec 5, 2024 | thesciencewriter.org | Celeste Hankins

A year before, I moved to the woods to recover from long COVID. Daylight hurt my eyes, so the low gray clouds of western Washington felt safe, like curling up with a down blanket and a warm cup of tea. The moss and earth smelled sweet. I bought a pair of red rain boots for puddle-splashing in the forest and hoped the dim, soggy weather would replenish my brain. Doctors weren’t sure how, but the coronavirus had mangled my neural pathways.

Jan 30, 2024 | thesciencewriter.org | Amy Moore

Another problem is heat. Cellulose is unlikely to withstand 225 degrees Fahrenheit or the high salinity of the Salton geothermal brines, McKibben explained. “We tried making beads out of cellulose, and the brine broke them down very quickly,” McKibben said. Cooling the brine might seem a viable solution. But geothermal plants can’t allow the brine to cool too much “because the more it cools, the more silica and iron precipitate out of it,” McKibben said.

Jun 21, 2023 | thesciencewriter.org | Rob Leigh

“Recent developments in molecular biology have taken the detection and study of epigenetic determinants of cancer to the next level,” said Shweta Kukreja, Ph.D., a cancer biologist and epigeneticist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. “It is now possible to work on very little amounts of sample and get highly reliable data on the epigenetic changes in human tissue that accompany certain cancer types,” she said.

Jun 21, 2023 | thesciencewriter.org | Dan Paley

In 2023, after roughly a decade of drought, fire, and dust that put water conservation and distribution policy debates front and center, California enjoyed a winter of plenty, owed to a body of water that isn’t in California so much as above it. Between October 2022 and March 2023, an atmospheric river carried 31 storms our way, lined up offshore like impatient cargo ships waiting to unload their goods at the Port of Los Angeles.

Jun 21, 2023 | thesciencewriter.org | Roberta McLain

Neuropolitics and the evolution of political differencesby Roberta S. McLainJune 21, 2023Imagine a social gathering at a college. Two professors are engaged in a heated discussion. These highly educated and typically empathic professors speak vitriolically at each other from opposing sides of the vaccination debate. The argument is emotionally charged, each aggressively defending their deeply ingrained beliefs. How can two intelligent people be on opposing sides of issues such as health and safety?