Recently, a science-technology-engineering-math-medicine (STEAMM) project that I’ve been working on was published! EquilibriUM is a print magazine being distributed across the University of Michigan campus, but can also be found online. While I helped edit and put the project together, I also wrote a piece about how two modern philosophers, Descartes and Spinoza, conceived of…
Note: This piece was published as a Commentary in the journal Structure! You can find it (paywalled) here, but I’m allowed to share the submitted version open access on my blog! Hope you enjoy, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written to date. During global pandemics, the spread of information needs to be faster…
When you think of a scientist, it’s probably someone in a white coat working in a laboratory, chemical bottles labeled on shelves, and computers displaying complex graphs and figures. Perhaps you might think of a biologist or a geologist out in the field collecting samples to bring back to a similar lab to analyze. There’s…
How sharing notes could be best practices in open peer review When I was in middle school, I remember checking out a book from the YA section, opening the cover eager to start reading it to find something truly horrifying: the word “HI” etched onto the title page in bright pink gel ink. The whole…
Online presence and shareability of content are ever-more important in our modern and increasingly digital world, and science and medicine are no exceptions. With published papers still being the standard for disseminating research, journals and publishing companies continue to largely serve as the gatekeepers of scholarly content. Accessibility is a critical component, with journals either…
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”…
Note from the author: I’ve always been interested in philosophy and have wanted to try and merge my philosophical readings with science writing for a while. The bold title gets its inspiration from an influential essay (Existentialism is a Humanism) by Jean Paul Sartre, which states, among other things, that individuals are responsible for themselves…
Originally posted by MiSciWriters. Header image by Sierra Nishizaki. Scattered around your house or apartment, lightly coating the surface of your coffee table and lurking in the nooks and crannies of each room, discarded layers of yourself can be found in the form of skin and hair cells. Regardless of how much of clean-freak you are, it’s unlikely…
This article, continuing from my previous one about snails, was inspired by a guest lecture for the Life Science Institute at the University of Michigan by Dr. Baldomero Olivera of University of Utah. Header image is of Conus furvus, a snail-hunting cone snail from Olango Island, Cebu, collected by fishermen in shallow water. In the warm…
Originally published on Hektoen International’s Journal of Medical Humanities. Submitted to their summer essay contest. On a warm spring day in Denmark in 1950 two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard, ventured out into the marshlands to gather peat to make fuel. With hefty sharp spades, they cut out earthen bricks of decayed organic matter to…
