Dirty and toxic air, fiery red skies, whole cities scrambling for respirator masks and sheltering indoors: this is what Bay Area residents experienced as two wildfires—some of the most destructive in California history—burned simultaneously in November 2018. As a post-apocalyptic scene dawned over the Bay Area, thousands of homes were destroyed in the blazes more
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I was conducting my first research interviews at the Botswana Innovation Hub in the summer of 2017, working to develop an ethnographic evaluation study of the Botswana innovation ecosystem. After each intense interview, I asked my respondents how I could make the insights more useful to them. Many gave answers I didn’t expect; instead of
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Why is it important to have technological innovation? It may seem too trivial a question to ask in the 21st century. After all, most modern people count heavily on smart phones, personal computers, microwave ovens, and internal combustion engines to organize their daily lives. Technologies, if used properly, enhance our well-being; they make previously impossible
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Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, texting—we’re on our smartphones all the time, expressing how we feel and what’s going on in our lives. And for every text or status update, a person is typing… a person who could be happy or manic, depressed or schizophrenic, have substance abuse problems or not. Most of the time, for most
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When one hears “space” mentioned in recent news, images are immediately evoked of SpaceX or Blue Origin landing reusable boosters, of galaxies far, far away captured by the Hubble telescope, or of an artistic rendering of human habitats on the Moon or Mars. While popular science has used these hooks to reel in the attention
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As a young biophysics grad student, I was naturally looking on the internet for resources to help give me context for what it’s like to work in this interdisciplinary field and what quirks of the field I should expect. I was surprised to find very few resources, and even fewer personal accounts, from biophysicists themselves
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