Just a year ago, I graduated from Virginia Tech with my degree in electrical engineering and now I am in Phoenix, AZ with Solar Impulse, a 326 ft. wingspan solar-powered airplane, preparing myself to travel across the United States, Europe, and finally land in Abu Dhabi. How did this happen? Graduating college, I did not even know […]
Guest Post
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Retraction Watch: Nerd tabloid or societal good?
We work hard for the privilege of being scientists. We study, we do research, we struggle and we fail. We spend time in dark rooms and cold rooms and mouse rooms and we work weekends and nights and holidays. And when we’re very lucky, we publish the product of all that effort. But stuff happens, […]
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Herpes: The virus we may not want to hate so much
For decades we have known that microbes cause many diseases known to plague us as humans (did you see what I did there?). It’s easy to identify the microbes that cause disease but it’s harder to identify the microbes that do not harm us or more interestingly the ones that actually benefit our survival. Now some resourceful folks […]
- Guest Post
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Did you hear? Pentaquarks!
If you weren’t too busy waiting for photos of Pluto, you might have heard some news coming out of CERN, Geneva, this week. LHCb, an experiment based at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator there, announced that it had found evidence for a completely new type of particle – a pentaquark. That might sound slightly […]
- biology
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The CRISPR gene revolution, all the cool kids are doing it
CRISPR: It’s all the rage. It’s time to pack up your pog collection and Lisa Frank organizational system. If you want to be cool right now and you happen to be molecular biologist, you should probably be ‘CRISPRing’ something. What is CRISPR? Isn’t that the drawer in my refrigerator where vegetables go to die? Is it even a […]
When things go right! First images and data from SMAP
So I’m now the proud parent of one orbiting, deployed, spinning, fully functional spacecraft! The SMAP satellite is done initiating all its systems and has taken its first global soil measurement maps: Since the Earth environment where we built SMAP is very different than the space environment where we operate SMAP, we never before had […]
#DenimDay: Raising awareness about sexual assault
April 29th is Denim Day – an opportunity to raise awareness about the issue of sexual assault. Denim Day emerged from an Italian court case in which a rapist walked free because it was the opinion of the court that the 18 year old woman could not have been raped because she was wearing tight […]
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The ongoing fight against #Ebola
What we’ve learned from the most recent Ebola outbreak The most recent reports from the CDC estimate over 10,000 deaths as a result of the current Ebola outbreak. That number of deaths is more than 6 times the deaths from all previous ebolavirus outbreaks combined since its discovery in 1976. At a recent Harvard Medical School seminar a doctor from Sierra Leone shared […]
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Can boys be surgeons, too?
My daughters were three and five-years-old when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 at the age of the 32. For me, one of the scariest parts of my diagnosis with breast cancer was the challenge of keeping life as normal as possible for those little girls. How would I explain things so that […]
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Launch Day Nerves
You don’t know how stressful launch days are until you live through one … or in my case, three. Hundreds of us met before dawn on a golf course near Vandenberg Air Force Base and waited with anticipation as our satellite, SMAP, sat on the launch pad. We were nervous and excited and hopeful. But […]