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I’ve written hundreds of articles on science, health and the environment. Here are some of my favorites.

[see my most recent work here, Muck Rack is most up-to-date]

SCIENCE + ENVIRONMENT

A Genome on a Knife’s Edge

How conservation science is relying on banks of genetic information to pause the sixth mass extinction.

Frances Gulland directed her gray Toyota Tundra north and hit the gas. She had more than four hours of driving ahead of her and the rosey flesh carefully stashed in her cooler was already more than twenty-four hours old.

It was early in the morning of November 5, 2017. Her truck and its pop-up camper were already dusty from driving around the desert beach town of San Felipe, on Baja’s Gulf of California. She was headed first to Tijuana, then to San Diego, where a fellow scientist named Phillip Morin would meet her…

Invasive ‘Jumping’ Worms Are Now Tearing Through Midwestern Forests

The voracious crawlers are now chewing through leaf litter in Minnesota and Chicago and disrupting understory where some birds nest.

The writhing worm in ecologist Brad Herrick’s hand is still fairly new in town, but it’s taken only a few years for its kind to collectively damage swaths of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum where he works. The unassuming invertebrates first arrived to this forest—a complex web of sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, and hemlock intended to mimic the state’s hardwood forests—in 2013, concealed in an order of mulch that carried castings of the invasive worm. Arboretum naturalists knew they were dealing with Asian jumping worms, but they had no idea how to stop them from taking over…

After the fire: Blazes pose hidden threat to the West's drinking water

At least 65 percent of the public water supply in the Western U.S. comes from fire-prone areas, and wildfires can taint water with toxins and parasites.

Gerald and Serene Buhrz were among the lucky ones. When they fled their home at 2:00 a.m. on Oct. 8, 2017, the flames of the massive Tubbs Fire had already engulfed most of the Fountaingrove neighborhood on the north side of Santa Rosa, Calif. They returned to their devastated street eight hours later to find their two-story stucco home still standing. It was surrounded by the embers of burned houses but untouched by flames. Not all fire damage, however, is visible to the eye. When Serene Buhrz turned the water on for the first time several days later, the chemical smell from their kitchen tap was overpowering…

HEALTH

INVESTIGATIVE

AUDIO

VIDEO

Climate-Proof Crops

Harnessing genes from the wild may be the key to securing our future food supply

Ghana’s rainy seasons used to ebb and flow in sync with the West African Monsoon system. The major weather system is considered one of the most complex on planet Earth, moving massive amounts of water back and forth across the equator and strategically depositing it throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. These monsoon rains are the manifestation of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) pulling and pushing energy away from the tropics…

The psychedelic ibogaine can treat addiction. The race is on to cash in.

Clinics and scientists around the world aim to turn a profit from a powerful Gabonese plant – but it’s an ethical and legal wild west

Lynn Smith was lying in a bed on the third floor of a beachfront house, unable to move her body from the neck down. A buzzing grew louder in her eardrums; just when she thought she couldn’t take it any more, it stopped. Then the visuals started…

Inside the Race to Create the World’s First Antifungal Vaccine

As climate change shifts where fungi live and how it functions, researchers are racing to create new therapies to stay ahead of the game.

In late 2022, the World Health Organization released a list of 19 fungi that pose the greatest threat to public health. When we think about dangerous infectious diseases, drug-resistant bacteria or deadly viruses like SARS-Cov-2 often come to mind. But in the coming years, scientists will need to be increasingly concerned about another potentially deadly group of pathogens: Fungi…

Black Americans Are Being Left Out of Psychedelics Research

One team is trying to figure out how to change that.

The concept of psychedelic-assisted therapy is now steadily gaining traction. What isn't immediately evident is how a person’s race or income level could prevent access to treatments that involve Schedule I drugs. Psychedelic research is super white, and that means access might be, too. Last year, when researchers at the University of Connecticut reviewed 18 studies on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, they wanted to know how many people of color were being included in psychedelic research worldwide. The studies they reviewed were conducted in eight different countries. Of the 232 participants, a full 82.3 percent of them were white…

Scientists Are Looking for Medical Cures in Toxic Waste

Superfund sites are the most polluted places in the United States, but scientists think they could provide the answer to antibiotic resistance.

Superfund sites take many forms: abandoned mines, shuttered manufacturing facilities, former military bases, and, in the case of New York City’s infamous Gowanus Canal, waterways. These places are so contaminated with hazardous waste they pose a serious risk to human health and the Environmental Protection Agency has made cleaning them up a national priority…

The high cost of diabetes drugs has led to a flourishing black market

To save money on insulin and diabetes equipment, people are turning to online groups where strangers offer their extra supplies.

When Rena Rossi, 41, was diagnosed with a rare type of diabetes at age 36, one of the first things she did was seek out other people living with the illness. The easiest way to do that was through social media and online groups dedicated to diabetes. The groups she joined and the accounts she followed had what one might expect: information about different equipment and medications and posts about difficult days and triumphs. 

Opioid Crisis Response Leaves Black Americans Behind

Treatment options aren’t equally available to all communities, resulting in more deaths among Black Americans.

The opioid epidemic has garnered an increasing amount of attention from public health officials in the past two decades, but who the interventions have helped has largely depended on class and race. As a result, Black Americans are being left behind as treatment options are made more available to white communities than communities of color. And the number of Black Americans dying of opioid overdose is rising…

Medical device makers spend millions lobbying to loosen regulations in D.C.

“It makes things easier for industry, it makes things worse for patients,” said cardiologist Rita Redberg about a recent industry-backed rule change.

After Teresa Hershey nearly died from complications of a hysterectomy, she wanted future patients to know about the potential dangers of choosing robotic surgery for the operation. In 2013, the California woman added a detailed account of how the robot that operated on her had burned a hole in her bowels to a database maintained by the Food and Drug Administration. The database is meant to warn the medical community about the risks associated with medical devices. Hershey’s was one of hundreds of similar accounts about the same robotic device. But earlier this year, the FDA made a rule change that could curtail that database, which was already considered to be of limited scope by medical researchers and the FDA itself…

NYC Lags in Reinstating Public School Water Fountains After Finding Lead

Roughly a year ago, New York City’s Department of Education announced the results from a series of lead tests in public schools: 8 percent of water outlets had high lead levels, including more than 33,000 water fountains, all of which were taken out of service. Today, the city has reported that all problematic fixtures have been replaced. But a WNYC analysis found only 20 percent of schools have notified parents that the water has been retested and is safe to drink, leaving hundreds of schools with drinking fountains that are out of service and forcing students to bring their own water to classes…

The Maternity Divide

Expectant mothers are more likely to face severe complications when they deliver their babies in New York City than elsewhere in the United States. Serious injuries and deaths have been rising among New York’s mothers, with the rate of maternal deaths statewide rising from 13.2 per 100,000 live births in 2006 to 25 per 100,000 in 2015. State hospital reports disclose instances where inspectors uncovered negligence and missteps that harmed babies, injured mothers and in rare cases led to death. African-American mothers in New York City have a higher rate of severe maternal complications, three times higher than white mothers, regardless of income or education levels. Latina mothers are likely to face complications at about double the rate of whites. Haitian-American immigrant mothers are likely to face severe problems at more than double the national rate…

Aftereffect

In the summer of 2016, a police shooting upended the life of Arnaldo Rios Soto, a 26-year old, non-speaking, autistic man. Aftereffect tells Arnaldo’s story — a hidden world of psych wards, physical abuse and chemical restraints — and asks the question: What made Arnaldo’s life go so wrong?…

The Realness

Rap star Prodigy is best known for The Infamous, an album he released when he was just a teenager as half of the venerable Queens duo, Mobb Deep. But as Mobb Deep took over the world, something was happening to Prodigy behind the scenes, a piece of his life set apart from his legendary lyricism and New York realness. A pain so excruciating it could make Prodigy feel like his bones were on fire; a pain that landed him in the Vegas hospital where he died last year. The Realness takes you behind Prodigy’s music to his life with sickle cell anemia, revealing how his condition touched almost every part of his life: from the sound of his rhymes to the circumstances of his death.…

The Bee Guardian

For more than 20 years, Corwin Bell has been on a mission to save the honeybees. Though the rates of Colony Collapse Disorder — first identified in 2006 after colonies of worker bees mysteriously disappeared — have declined in recent years, honeybee populations continue to be threatened by pesticides, mite infestation, low genetic diversity and climate change. In 2017, beekeepers across the U.S. lost 40 percent of their colonies, which Bell attributes in part to extreme temperature shifts that are occurring more and more frequently. To that end Bell, who had already been making hives based on the traditional top-bar design, eventually invented what he calls the “cathedral hive” to help bees survive cold winters and preserve their genetics.…