As a child, I remember seeing the quasi-children’s movie Coraline and being utterly horrified. Its unique disturbing nature, to me, comes from the copious amount of motifs and references to insects & bugs. At the beginning of the movie, Coraline smashes a bunch of bugs at her apartment; after she enters the Other World, she…
Have you ever wondered how a firefly glowed in the dark? What about anglerfish—how do they have their own light bulbs in the water? The answer relies on a biological phenomenon known as bioluminescence. In short, bioluminescence is an adaptation where an organism interacts with the environment to undergo chemical reactions that result in light…
If you’re at all familiar with contemporary computer graphics, you will likely recognize the name of Adobe, a gold standard of assorted creative software. The multimedia company derives most of its profit from its products with capabilities ranging from photo editing to book design. Among them, the most widely known include Photoshop and Illustrator, two…
Are you a high school student who is interested in science and cinematography? Are you interested in competing for a chance at a $250,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 prize for your teacher, and an installation of a brand new science lab at your school? This might sound like an opportunity too good to be true,…
A couple years ago, I did a research project on the terrors of the Japanese Imperial Army against China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. I ended up finding the Nanjing Memorial, a Chinese work of architecture built to remember the 300,000 civilians killed during the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. It…
Most universities are divided into a subset of schools that house different majors categorized by their focus. A biomedical engineering student might consider the College of Engineering, a botanist might consider the College of Life Sciences & Agriculture, and the list goes on. But almost every university has a specific school: the College of Arts…
Imagine you’re looking at an apple. It sits on the table, looking very fresh and delicious. Naturally, you try to reach for it, but your hand just ends up grabbing air. You’ve just been tricked by a phenomenon in physics known as holography. You might recall seeing them only in sci-fi movies, but holograms…
Recently, I had taken upon a new hobby that some might consider to be rather niche: microscopy! I bought my first compound microscope a couple weeks ago from AmScope and have been playing around with it ever since, imaging all sorts of samples from fibers of tissues to saliva. One thing that struck me particularly…
Everything decays–a truth that encompasses pretty much all material things. However, we as a species have been really good at protecting things that we assign value to. High-end paintings are one example of this. As we know, most paintings done in the Renaissance era were done with fresco and oil. Those mediums are known to…
Varanus pransinus (Emerald monitor); accessed from Florida Museum Are you an artist interested in drawing animals? An animal enthusiast who wants to learn more about the anatomies of the thousands of species on our planet? If you’re even remotely interested in the topic of animal morphology, then there’s good news for you. This year, scientists…
