Eliza Strickland
What to Do When Your Brain Insists You’re Always on a Boat
Chris Perry had felt the world bobbing beneath her feet for nearly four months, suffering from a disorder rather poetically dubbed Mal de Debarquement syndrome.Photograph by Zvonimir Orec / Shutterstock A few years ago, Chris Perry went on an Alaskan cruise with her family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When she boarded the […]
What to Do If You Get Seasick on Dry Land
A new therapy holds hope for sufferers of Mal de Debarquement syndrome.
How Poverty Changes Kids’ Brains
Hill Street Studios/Getty Images When children grow up in poverty, their brains can take a different shape. That’s one of the stark and uncomfortable findings from the lab of Kimberly Noble, a pediatrician and cognitive neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Noble has used MRI scans to study the brains of children and found that […]
How Bioprinting Has Turned Frankenstein’s Mad Science Sane
In the United States alone more than 120,000 people are waiting for organ transplants, and many will die before their turns come. What if they didn’t have to wait, because doctors could print out replacement organs on demand? That’s the ultimate goal of bioprinting, a seemingly sci-fi spinoff of the burgeoning industry of 3D printers. […]
How Utter Darkness Could Heal Lazy Eye
The email from a professor offered an unusual spring break adventure: Come spend five days in complete darkness. To Morgan Williams, then a sophomore at Swarthmore College and a psychology major, it sounded like a great way to spend his vacation week. “I’m not really one for going to the beach,” he says. For those […]
How Can Microscopic Yeast Draw the Nautilus Logo? The New Art of Bio-Pointillism
Behold this magazine’s logo in glorious living color! Each dot of pigment is a cluster of yeast cells growing on the “canvas” of a Petri dish. This organic painting was created by Michael Shen, who’s currently working on his PhD in the NYU synthetic biology lab run by Jef Boeke*. It’s the latest work in a new […]
No One Knows What to Do With Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water
This is what passes for good news from Fukushima Daiichi, the Japanese nuclear power plant devastated by meltdowns and explosions after a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in 2011: By the end of last month, workers had succeeded in filtering most of the 620,000 tons of toxic water stored at the site, removing almost all of […]
The Most Dangerous Muse
Parkinson’s disease gave her the gift of creativity.
The Most Dangerous Muse
Parkinson’s disease gave her the gift of creativity.
Humans & Nature Can Co-Exist in “Cyborg” Ecosystems
An illustration showing how dirt-filled PodMod containers would drift out of the Mississippi DeltaBradley Cantrell, Charlie Pruitt, Brennan Dedon, Rob Herkes Some people gaze at the Mississippi River and see the majesty of nature: a mighty waterway that carved a path through our continent, draining the vast plains between the Rockies and the Appalachians before […]
