The Blog
The Cricket Woman
Physical courage is generally not a requirement for studying science, but field biology seems to call for this quality. Swati Diwakar spent many a night in an evergreen forest in South India collecting data for her dissertation on crickets taking the occasional viper bite in...
Read MoreThree Smart Bras
Did the Wonder Woman's bra confer any special protection on her? Was it good for anything more than, you know, the usual? I am not well up enough on my superhero comics to know the answer to this question, but here are three added-values...
Read MoreAn Interpreter of Interesting Research
No news story has written itself for me, thus far. This is not a complaint, it is a boast. As a science journalist, I work hard to file good articles, or copy, as we say in the business. I translate jargon into narrative for a...
Read MoreWhat’s that smell?
Eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath,” a Shakespearean character entreats actors in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Alliums are aromatics, eaten precisely for their smelly qualities. But what if you’re forbidden onions and garlic for life? Some vegetarians...
Read MoreMeeting Nexi
Nexi, the robot, features in articles on MIT Media Lab's Center for Future Storytelling. I am not entirely sure why this should be the case. Anyway, I decided to go meet this robot in Cynthea Brazeal's Personal Robotics Lab . Currently, the humans in the group are training their...
Read More