Author Archives: mtekant

On November 3rd, 2020, millions of Americans’ eyes were glued to their screens, eager find out the results of the general election. While the presidential election certainly garnered most of the attention, voters across the United States also cast ballots for a variety of other representatives, from local to state officials, and measures, from marijuanaContinue reading “How Nationalized are Local Elections? Comparing the 2020 Gubernatorial and Presidential Races”

Forget the ice-caps melting, the simple fact that water expands with higher temperatures could raise the sea levels considerably. Here I use back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate this effect. By 2050, the world is estimated to warm by 2C compared to the pre-industrial average, and some models predict that by 2100 the world could be 5CContinue reading “How much will thermal expansion of water raise sea levels?”

Check out my article on the Science in the News Blog on the cool chemistry might happen when Europa’s surface is bombarded by high energy particles from Jupiter!

Our episode on the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry given to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for CRISPR is live! Check out our episodes here, or follow us on Spotify! The episode is also up on SoundCloud.

The novel coronavirus has spread rapidly across the US, but the trends of individual states have been far from uniform. Though the exact reasons for the discrepancies are not fully known, some hypotheses range from the varied policies enacted by the states, to the seasonal weather patterns. For example, while in the Northeast people mightContinue reading “Categorizing US State-Level Trends of COVID-19 Cases Using Hierarchical Clustering”

Check out my article on the buried lakes on the southern pole of our neighbor, the red planet, on the Science in the News Blog!

Check out my article on the discovery of a possible biomarker in Venus’s cloud decks on the Science in the News Blog!

Our paper on topological turbulence on the membrane of starfish oocytes is out, and it made the cover of Nature Physics! By performing a biochemical manipulation, we observed dynamically evolving spiral waves on the membrane of a starfish oocyte. The spiral waves are oscillatory on a point in time, and can be expressed as aContinue reading “Turbulent Spirals on the Starfish Oocyte Membrane”