Having learned a few years ago that my father worked on and witnessed some atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in the mid-1950’s, my appreciation has grown for the precarious world I was born into. I came of age in the era of ‘duck and cover’. I felt envious of my friends who had bomb shelters. My most vivid childhood nightmares were of Russians, pointing guns at me in my nearby park. I knew my dad worked at a lab in Livermore when I was little—he called it LRL, or sometimes th

It’s been said before (and more explicitly), but I f-ing love science! A scientist can envision many peculiar worlds; not only the one we all see at face value, but also worlds far more vast, microscopic, outlandish, logical and logic-defying than what the rest of us observe. Imagine the creative leap it required to look up on a clear night and imagine that everything you saw didn’t revolve around you. Consider looking at moldy food and thinking: I can use that to cure diseas