Vijee Venkatraman

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Millipede as Catalyst

An arthropod notorious for train delays and household intrusions ends up delivering a gift to green chemistry. Chamberlinius hualienensis, once just a pest, is now at the center of a biotech pivot—thanks to that stealthy enzyme tucked in its cyanide-secreting physiology. Swarms of this cyanide-secreting...

Retinal selfie

Taking a selfie is easy: just point your smartphone toward your face and shoot. But taking a selfie of the interior of an eye is impossible, imaging specialists might’ve told you, until now. Researchers at the Camera Culture Group, headed by Ramesh Raskar at the...

Curiosity Rover Driver

The first motorized vehicle that Vandi Verma ever operated was a tractor. “I must've been 11 years old at the time,” she told Science. During school vacations, she visited her grandparents in a village in central India. At their farm, her uncle let her take...

A rubella-based murder mystery

In 1943, Hollywood star Gene Tierney, radiant at 23 and expecting her first child, volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen to lift the spirits of servicemen. Days later she contracted German measles — rubella — a seemingly mild illness that proved devastating. Her daughter, Daria,...

The Naming of Exoplanets

Last September when I was in Oslo, I sat next to Thierry Montmerle at the banquet hosted by the Norwegian Science Academy. He was the general secretary of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which had just announced the NameExoWorlds contest to crowd-source names for 20...

Mobile Stethoscope for Diagnosing Lung Disease

Take a deep breath before you read this: A team from MIT has built the world’s first USB-powered mobile stethoscope. Plugged into a smartphone, its companion app transforms the device into a low-cost diagnostic tool, which health workers and nonspecialist physicians can use to diagnose...