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Science at Sundance 2023

This year I had a chance to review two science-related films screened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah — two vastly different films, but both struck a chord. Illustration by Islenia Mil for Science Poacher A gunshot pierces the skull of a tusker, an adult...

Queen of Carbon

Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, of Lincoln Laboratory, who has achieved prominence as a solid-state physicist has been appointed Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read a small news item in the Boston Globe on 8 October, 1967. The appointment was...

Girl, Decoded

As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her...

Can postdocs be job creators instead of job seekers?

As Ronan McGovern was finishing up his Ph.D., he was eager to commercialize the energy-efficient seawater desalination process he had developed. He had already done some legwork to find a market and had found an interesting lead—but he had also hit some roadblocks. Like most...

A Living Room in Mylapore, A Lab for Ideas

In the summer of 1958, when Alladi Ramakrishnan returned to Madras, he carried with him the afterglow of a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton —an experience that had quietly rearranged his sense of what a life in science could be. 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...