Science
When All Science becomes Data Science
Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at UW, believes that data-driven discovery will become the norm, as he told Science Careers in a recent interview. This new environment, he says, will create and reward researchers (like Loebman) who are...
Read MorePollinating His Own Science
Noah Wilson-Rich began studying the health of honeybees as a graduate student at Tufts University in 2005. Growing up in Connecticut, he was not a nature-loving kid -- he recalls being scared of "creepy-crawlies." An undergraduate course in sociobiology, and a subsequent lab project, changed...
Read MoreFreedom Isn’t Free
In the acknowledgements section of NW, her 2012 bestseller, Zadie Smith thanked a computer application called "Freedom" for "creating the time" she needed to finish the book. It may be the highest-profile printed acknowledgment of a computer program in a work of fiction—The...
Read MoreA Scientist Becomes a Social Entrepreneur — In Science
Nina Dudnik, a molecular biologist from Harvard, is the founder and CEO of the Boston-based Seeding Labs. The non-profit organization tries to bridge the resource gap between research labs in the U.S. and the developing world, starting with lab equipment. Dudnik is on the Massachusetts High...
Read MoreStarry-Eyed Astronomer no more
"Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars." This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt,...
Read MoreYouTube at the Bench
As a graduate student at Princeton University, Moshe Pritsker tried in vain to grow a culture of embryonic stem cells using instructions from the methods section of a journal article. A colleague with more bench experience tried and also failed. Finally, Pritsker flew to Edinburgh...
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