IEEE Pulse In late February 2020, a time when severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) still felt like an abstraction in the United States, New York City’s first infected patient was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room. Working a few doors down was Sean Pinney, the Director of Advanced Heart Failure and…

IEEE Pulse In spring 2020, the pandemic began shutting down the world—restaurants, colleges, even entire cities felt emptied and closed. A cloud of uncertainty lingered over most parts of the world and altered our daily schedules and tasks. But for a wide segment of society, it wasn’t the toilet paper, or the masks, or the…

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution I’m excited to share a new suite of educational resources I conceptualized and wrote for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Dive and Discover platform. These five online learning modules dive deep into one of the ocean’s most mysterious and vital regions—the ocean twilight zone. This dimly lit layer, stretching from 200…

IEEE Pulse When Kayla Edwards turned 13, she began to wonder if she was different. It started as a seed of suspicion when her friends began their menstrual cycles, and hers never arrived. Her grandmother was late, she learned, but for Edwards, it still seemed odd. She had hit puberty’s other benchmarks—the hormones, the breasts—just no…

IEEE Pulse In March 2020 -still the early days of the U.K.’s COVID-19 crisis-Rhys Thomas, a neurologist at Newcastle University, got a call at home from a concerned colleague. The colleague’s cousin was hospitalized, critically ill with COVID-19, and had developed brainstem encephalitis, a severe inflammatory condition of the brain causing a suite of symptoms,…

IEEE Pulse In March 2020, before COVID-19 laid claim to the United States, Vice President Mike Pence briefed the press about the coronavirus outbreak, which at the time was a threat to passengers aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship moored off the coast of California [1]. At the time, cases had spiked in Iran, Italy,…

Scientific American Deep-sea observatory tests technologies for eventual exploration of Europa or other icy moons

Discover Magazine Marine biologist Tom Iliffe is on a quest to understand the halocline, a layer of water that may hold the secrets to Earth’s earliest life. About 20 miles south of Cancun, Mexico, on a stifling summer day, Tom Iliffe squints over a limestone ledge and into a giant pool of scuzzy, brown water.…

IEEE Pulse A recent study of 300 maternal deaths within a year after delivery found that suicide was the seventh-leading cause of maternal death. Though PMADs overwhelmingly affect women with a history of depression or anxiety, they are indiscriminate, affecting mothers with no prior history whatsoever. And not treating it is consequential. A growing body…