People are sometimes surprised to hear that I am both a research scientist and an artist, but I see them as quite similar in purpose, only different medium. They both involve imagination, visualization, and communication of those ideas in a way that makes it accessible and interesting for an intended audience. For me, they go hand-in-hand.


The cover of this year's Open Laboratory 2010, designed by myself, Andrea Kuszewski.

Mnookin's site

Offit's site    



Vaccine Epidemic's site

When I was a lad, we were taught that carbon had two allotropes, graphite and diamond.  Although they’re both covalently connected, in neither of these is there anything that one would regard as a ‘molecule’. 

Among environmental activists and their supporters, the use of genetic modification is a bad thing.   Obviously, tomatoes would be the size of our thumbs if our ancestors did not genetically modify plants so research continues.   A group of researchers has announced that plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds, a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation - something to which even the most anti-science people can object.

A study just published in the journal Nature by researchers in France, Portugal and Spain looks for the first time at the effects of climate change on the tree of life (that aggregates species according to their evolution/genetic similarity) to find that the whole of it will be affected. But this is not all bad news because even if the tree is to become “thinner” it keeps its structure as there will be no major losses of biodiversity contrary to what other studies had suggested (this would occur if localized “branches” were totally eliminated).