New funding pushes lab-grown meat closer to reality
By Brady Jones Medill Reports Netherlands-based Mosa Meat announced Tuesday that it had secured €7.5 million in new funding to support its efforts to produce the world’s first lab-produced commercial meat product, prompting them to predict the culinary revolution could appear on the market by 2021. The funding, which equates to roughly $8.7 million, came […]
Shell stuff: Monitoring the health of California’s shellfish amid climate change
This is the second is a series about Medill News Service reporter Rebecca Fanning’s embedded reporting experience at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Lab in Bodega Bay, California. Read the original post here. By Rebecca Fanning Endangered black abalone receive an aromatic spa treatment while hundreds of baby oysters float in tiny cages next to winding […]
Tracking marine life on the edge of the Pacific
By Rebecca Fanning Medill Reports Bodega Bay, California. I’ve spent the past several weeks working with marine ecologists –holding tiny porcelain crabs, named for their propensity for losing limbs, picking seaweed out of small buckets to be dried and weighed for an animal diet experiment, peering through microscopes at fish larvae and gazing at baby […]
Making Sense of Surface Chemistry
THESE NU SCIENTISTS WANT TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THEIR WORK, AND THE VALUE OF OBSCURE SCIENCE. By David Thill Medill Reports There’s a language barrier between Mike Mattei and most of the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s more of a dialect barrier. Mattei, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University’s Department of Chemistry, […]
Making science fun for eighty years
By Puja Bhattacharjee A unique store in the Northwest Side of Chicago is helping kids bond with science. American Science and Surplus has been in business for 80 years. It stores every scientific item one can think of. It is popular with parents of school going children who often come looking for items needed in […]
The dual force of climate change on sea level rise
By Kelly Calagna Sea level rise – a direct impact of a warming climate and melting ice – threatens island nations and coastal communities across the world. [vimeo 192673914 w=640 h=360] What Causes Sea Level Rise? from Medill Reports on Vimeo. Photo and video by Kelly Calagna.
Parasites, pathogens and politics
By Mariah Quintanilla Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States, and a popular question these past two weeks has been, “How did we get here?” While the media have done some collective soul-searching in an attempt to answer this question, one possibility that we’ve all failed to recognize is biology. Psychologists and biologists have […]
Revolutionary weather satellite to aid in earlier warning of severe storms
By Kelly Calagna CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NOAA’s revolutionary weather satellite successfully launched Saturday from Cape Canaveral at 6:42 p.m. EST. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R) means earlier warnings, expected to save lives from severe weather situations. GOES-R, called GOES-16 as soon as it detached from the booster, is the first in a series […]
Innovation on the launch pad: How media capture a NASA rocket launch
By Kelly Calagna KENNEDY SPACE CENTER – Duct tape, bubble wrap, aluminum foil, plastic bags, ground stakes, bungee cords, squares of plywood and plastic storage containers are just some of the sophisticated tools adapted by journalists and photographers as they set up their remotely activated cameras at Saturday’s GOES-R weather satellite launch site at the […]
Why ‘Girls Who Code’ is just for girls
By Lucia Maffei “You know, first prize is $10,000. It could be the first share of your college tuition.” The 10-something girl with a cat ear headband sits at a computer desk at DePaul University’s downtown campus. Two friends of hers work side by side. It’s Saturday morning and every Saturday, Nancy and her friends […]
