If there’s one thing about me that you should know, it’s that I love taking photos and videos. From a young age, I’ve been giving tours around my house, recording videos on how to toast bread, attempting to do karaoke, putting on puppet shows, and taking hundreds and hundreds of selfies in the mirror. I like going back to photos to re-experience the moment whenever I’m feeling nostalgic. Last week, I was feeling especially proud of myself in the lab. My mentor, Pedro, was ver

Before we moved to our new house ten blocks north, my family used to live in a two-bedroom apartment on 79th and Amsterdam. Although the move was a few years ago, I still find myself reminiscing about that home, where I spent the majority of my childhood. One particular memory is eating weekend dinners at the Indian restaurant Saravana Bhavan under our building. What my brother and I looked forward to most were the little seeds coated in sugar, called saunf ,   that were mean

At first glance , the above tubes look similar to popsicle molds, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so either. When I saw these tubes I was immediately reminded of the popsicles my mom used to make for me and my brother over long, hot New York City summers while we were growing up. I used to stand by her in the kitchen and watch her make a yummy purple smoothie, pour it into little ice-cream-cone shaped molds in a blue tray, and then put it in the freezer and tell me that

In the spirit of Halloween, I felt inclined to revisit something a little bit spooky—little glow-in-the-dark stars in petri dishes. To the average human, it is apparent that these little “stars” only seem to be glowing in the top petri dish and not the bottom. Was this a mistake? Wouldn’t it be cooler if the stars in the other dish were glowing as well? Turns out the stars are actually Escherichia coli bacteria—one genetically modified to glow just like jellyfish do. Yeah, yo