Sarah Gulliford

On February 20th, 2024, I was driving home from the grocery store listening to NPR when a news segment came on describing that it was the 200th anniversary of the first scientific dinosaur name pronunciation. The story described that back in 1824 a man named William Buckland, looking at bones and fossils found outside of… Read more: The Megalosaurus

For Branch Magazine’s The Open Climate Issue (20m audio essay, transcript below) We were told that the Internet would “de-materialise” society and decrease energy use. Instead the opposite is true: the internet has quickly become one of the most carbon intensive information processing systems. The solution isn’t as simple as relying less on the internet or… Read more: The People’s Cloud: Manifesting community- and eco-led digital spaces

A summer fellowship at theLSI prepares Michigan under grads for the next leg of their STEM journey. This piece was written for UMich’s 2022 magazine. Read the full thing here! Jacquelyn Roberts knows firsthand the power of authentic research opportunities for young scientists. “It only takes a single experience to start building your research career,”… Read more: STEM Connector

“Sure, but what’s the latin name,” Heather asks about the tree that’s starting to bloom in small white blushed blossoms around the property.  Heather’s boyfriend knows it as juneberry, but she insists that it is serviceberry, hence going back to the scientific jargon to properly identify and name the plant beyond the regional nicknames. They… Read more: AMELANCHIER

Recently, I was asked to write a piece describing the “beauty of the Metaverse,” the augmented world through virtual reality. It’s arguably the next chapter of the internet and promises a new way to socialize and communicate with people around the world in a unique digital sphere. It’s made to be boundless, persistent, and immersive.… Read more: Lost Connection: what we lose when we’re plugged in

In 2016, a group of scientists publishing in PLOS Biology estimated that our bodies contain not the commonly accepted 10 human cells for every one microorganism, but something closer to a 1-to-1 ratio — with these tiny counterparts collectively weighing 4 or 5 pounds. This “other half” of us plays a vital role in human… Read more: The Cancer Microbiome

Book description: In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space, The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only home-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that… Read more: Assumptions and Expectations when Communicating with the Unknown: Alien Listening Book Prompt

A year into the pandemic, much more is known about the coronavirus. In any study, especially scientific ones, it takes time to collect data, it takes time to collect samples, it takes time to run experiments, and it takes time to find the right and diverse sample size to have meaningful and representative data. However,… Read more: Take Caution: Dangers of Heuristics and Headlines

This year, I’ve been hosting podcasts — a shocking thing to any of you who know that I hate public speaking and conversations with strangers — with the New Books Network. Luckily, once I finish their book, the authors no longer feel like strangers since I’ve spent time with their thoughts, their tone, their ideas… Read more: Metaphors and Meaning: Light in the Darkness Book Prompt

When the pandemic disrupted their research, LSI trainees forged new routes to scientific success.

Recently, a science-technology-engineering-math-medicine (STEAMM) project that I’ve been working on was published! EquilibriUM is a print magazine being distributed across the University of Michigan campus, but can also be found online. While I helped edit and put the project together, I also wrote a piece about how two modern philosophers, Descartes and Spinoza, conceived of… Read more: A Different Perspective on the Light of Reason

Note: This piece was published as a Commentary in the journal Structure! You can find it (paywalled) here, but I’m allowed to share the submitted version open access on my blog! Hope you enjoy, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written to date. During global pandemics, the spread of information needs to be faster… Read more: Structure of the Pandemic

When you think of a scientist, it’s probably someone in a white coat working in a laboratory, chemical bottles labeled on shelves, and computers displaying complex graphs and figures. Perhaps you might think of a biologist or a geologist out in the field collecting samples to bring back to a similar lab to analyze. There’s… Read more: Gentlemen and Scholars: How science is for everyone

How sharing notes could be best practices in open peer review When I was in middle school, I remember checking out a book from the YA section, opening the cover eager to start reading it to find something truly horrifying: the word “HI” etched onto the title page in bright pink gel ink. The whole… Read more: Not so marginal annotations

Online presence and shareability of content are ever-more important in our modern and increasingly digital world, and science and medicine are no exceptions. With published papers still being the standard for disseminating research, journals and publishing companies continue to largely serve as the gatekeepers of scholarly content. Accessibility is a critical component, with journals either… Read more: Changing Scholarly Publication Practices: The Open Access Movement

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”… Read more: Escaping the Darkness: Reflections on Stephen Hawking

Note from the author: I’ve always been interested in philosophy and have wanted to try and merge my philosophical readings with science writing for a while. The bold title gets its inspiration from an influential essay (Existentialism is a Humanism) by Jean Paul Sartre, which states, among other things, that individuals are responsible for themselves… Read more: Existentialism is an Organism

Originally posted by MiSciWriters. Header image by Sierra Nishizaki.  Scattered around your house or apartment, lightly coating the surface of your coffee table and lurking in the nooks and crannies of each room, discarded layers of yourself can be found in the form of skin and hair cells. Regardless of how much of clean-freak you are, it’s unlikely… Read more: Who owns cells & DNA? Property rights get messy in biology

This article, continuing from my previous one about snails, was inspired by a guest lecture for the Life Science Institute at the University of Michigan by Dr. Baldomero Olivera of University of Utah. Header image is of Conus furvus, a snail-hunting cone snail from Olango Island, Cebu, collected by fishermen in shallow water. In the warm… Read more: Oxymorons of the Cone Snail

Originally published on Hektoen International’s Journal of Medical Humanities. Submitted to their summer essay contest. On a warm spring day in Denmark in 1950 two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard, ventured out into the marshlands to gather peat to make fuel. With hefty sharp spades, they cut out earthen bricks of decayed organic matter to… Read more: Half-Digested Clues

Originally posted by the Life Science Institue.  Robert Hooke published the first known observation of cells in the mid-1600s, describing a cork tree sample as “perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb.” Since this observation, this smallest unit of life has been extensively studied, from its role in metabolism to mental activity, having a fundamental… Read more: The Power of One: Single-cell analysis

Disney’s Fantasia as a Model for Science Communication Browsing the radio for tunes, the classical station that’s always playing is likely skipped. Even taking the broader meaning of this genre of music, the calculated rise and fall of complex and layered melodies of symphonies created throughout the centuries often times do not carry through the… Read more: Composing a Narrative

The busiest bee can make up to 40 flights a day, averaging 100 flowers each. This means a typical colony can pollinate 20 million flowers each day! Through this symbiotic relationship, flowers depend on bees and other insects for reproduction and the bees collect and feast on flower’s pollen and nectar. One of the earliest… Read more: Pollination Sensation

Minimalistic living and the tiny house movement reject spacious dwellings in favor of efficient homes. Typically, these petite houses can be small enough to be towed around in nomadic fashion. While it can be aesthetically and economically appealing, what is it like actually carrying an entire house with you everywhere? Snails, and other members of… Read more: Ecology and economy of carrying your home on your back

This article was written during the 3rd annual RNA Symposium: Advancing RNA Bioscience into Medicine. I wrote others for this event, but this one’s my favorite. Check out MiSciWriters to read other posts that were live blogged!  Suppose you have some extremely important information in the form of a blueprint and it’s your job to… Read more: Through Space and Time: Monitoring RNA Translation

To coincide with the OpenCon London satellite event on 21st November, Know-Center, Digital Science and ScienceOpen are excited to team up with Authorea to announce an essay competition for short blog posts on this year’s Open Access Week theme of “Open in order to …”. This theme is an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly research outputs… Read more: Open in order to: Optimize scientific research process

This article was written for and published during the beginning of Peer Review Week 2017. Here on the Impact Blog, we’ll be featuring posts covering a variety of perspectives on and issues relating to peer review, and which also consider this year’s theme of “Transparency”. To kick things off, Jon Tennant, Daniel Graziotin and Sarah Kearns consider what can be done… Read more: We have the technology to save peer review – now it is up to our communities to implement it

There’s more to our genetics than what’s within our DNA code. Though the code itself the basis for life, on its surface there are chemical alterations that change how it’s expressed. Because DNA’s structure is that of a helix, modifications either make it coil up or unwind where the unwound form allows for transcription. Epigenetics… Read more: Marked Changes in Medicine

If you saw a hippo on campus, you would remember it. But, would you expect that seeing such a pachyderm roaming on a university would alter the expression of your DNA? A recent study found that rats placed in an environment that tested their memory had alterations to their DNA, or epigenetic changes. For a… Read more: Methylated Memory

After you get home from work, perhaps after eating dinner, you may start working on other projects that you have, something that you might call a hobby. Humans aren’t the only ones that have a life after hours. Recently it’s been discovered that many proteins also have roles in the cell outside of their main… Read more: The After Hours Life of a Protein

Technology is being incorporated more and more into our daily lives. Social media platforms allow researchers to easily connect with one another and to simply find citations or resources. Artificial intelligence and big data make it relatively easy to obtain the information scientists need to move forward with their project. With the extended push to publish data,… Read more: Knowledge Networking in Scientific Practice

Competition has its worth: it can provide significant motivation to work late in order to generate enough data to have your paper be first rather than a replicate study. The desire to ‘one-up’ a competitor’s lab can lead to researchers designing novel methods to study the system in question. It is not without its drawbacks… Read more: Practical actions for a collaborative culture

Non-damaging Techniques for Monitoring Cells Studying the interior of cells offers insight to the biochemical processes occurring. However, the process of collecting data involves bursting the cell open in a process called lysing that may also destroy important biochemical interactions. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Michigan are developing technologies at the micro-… Read more: Analyzing without Lysing

After the inauguration of president Trump, peaceful protest rallies were planned namely the March for Women to support women’s rights and the continuation of funding going to women’s health, and the March for Science to promote the role of scientific research in government policy. As a female scientist, it might surprise you to hear that… Read more: Marching Will Not Help Science

The following blog article was written live at the 2nd Annual Symposium of RNA in Precision Medicine at the University of Michigan through the Center for RNA Biomedicine. Check out MiSciWriter blog for the full coverage of the symposium and follow the #umichRNA on Twitter.  “Sequence-based rational design of small molecules targeting RNA” Keynote Speaker :… Read more: “Sequence-based rational design of small molecules targeting RNA”

The following blog article was written live at the 2nd Annual Symposium of RNA in Precision Medicine at the University of Michigan through the Center for RNA Biomedicine. Check out MiSciWriter blog for the whole coverage of the symposium and follow the #umichRNA on Twitter.  “Integrating Genome, Transcriptome and Electronic Health Records for Discovery and… Read more: “Integrating Genome, Transcriptome and Electronic Health Records for Discovery and Translation.”

Mapping RNA to DNA with MARGI Over the past decade, it has become much easier, quicker, and cheaper to sequence the human genome. Organizations, like 23&me, have even made it possible for anyone to understand about their genome and any downstream effects their genes have on their health. However, there is still a lot about… Read more: Expressing Missing Links

In a previous post, we discussed how proteins fold into unique shapes that allow them to perform their biological functions. Through many physical and chemical properties, like hydrogen bonding and hydrophobicity, proteins are able to fold correctly. However, proteins can fold improperly, and sometimes these malformed peptides aggregate, leading to diseases like Alzheimer’s. How can… Read more: Computing Levinthal’s Paradox: Protein Folding, Part 2

This is the first article in the series Pocket Science. With it, I want to discuss the context and importance of recent research in shorter articles potentially with more visual media. I hope that this will help people be more interested with the research going on around the world and want to stay updated with… Read more: As a Matter of Fact…

Protein Folding Part 1 Originally posted by Michigan Science Writers Editors: David Mertz, Zulierys Santana-Rodriguez, and Scott Barolo Proteins do most of the work in your body: Depending on their shape, they can digest your food, fire your neurons, give color to your eyes and allow you to see colors. Proteins follow instructions encoded in… Read more: How to Fold (and Misfold) a Protein

Individuals against Recent Legislation Recent blackouts of government organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency by President Trump have lead to the rise of unofficial, yet well supported, agencies. This uprising against legislative decisions suggests a movement toward the rise of private organizations run by passionate individuals. Keywords:  privatization, science funding, politics, environment, individualism. Photo by… Read more: Ungagged Support

Context in Privatizing Science The amount of funding going to science research with respect to the federal budget has been reduced greatly over the past few years. This may or not have lead to the increase in private organizations funding, but either way more projects and research institutions have been entirely sponsored by philanthropists and… Read more: The Private Side of Scientific Research

Understanding the Gravity of a New Theory Both the motions of planets orbiting around the sun and a pencil rolling off the table onto the floor are described by the gravity. However, despite this phenomena being so easily recognized, why and how it happens is still very much up to debate. Theories of gravity have… Read more: Going Against the Masters of Physics

  DNA, the genetic code of life, is read over a million times per day to make proteins, the biological molecules that do all the work in cells. If this process goes wrong then it leads to cell destruction or disease states such as cystic fibrosis or cancer. Luckily, the cell has a multitude repair… Read more: Just a Wobble Away from Disease

Recently, a lab mate of mine presented a paper at our weekly research meeting. She ended her analysis saying that she was skeptical of the methods and the rigor of the results because it came from the open access journal PLOSOne. This got me thinking and realizing that even though scientists are constantly demanding data… Read more: Assessing Impact in Open Access and Conventional Journals

In my research of open access tools, I came across this feature called the Open Access Button. It is a web browser extension that, when you feed it a url of a paywalled article, it will try to find it for free somewhere else. This process is totally legal, since the papers were republished or… Read more: Paywalled articles for free with the click of a button

The peer review process in science publication has been imperative in making sure that articles and journals written are based off data that was obtained ethically. With the push to make publications more transparent and cheaper, the importance and existence of peer reviewing have been called into question. How Peer Review Works Right Now It… Read more: Peer Review in Open Access: Struggles and Successes in Obtaining Quality Articles

Cancer is one of the biggest threats to a long and healthy life, accounting for approximately one in four American deaths. It is a disease that is characterized by uncontrolled cell growth leading to tumors and shutting down of biological processes. These issues arise from mutations in the genome that accumulate over time and can… Read more: Gene Mutations Involved in Ovarian Cancer

By Sarah Kearns. Originally posted by The System Scientist. DRACO stands for Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer, and it’s an amazing tool that has the potential to treat and cure Ebola, Zika, and HIV in one shot. The incredible part is that the method of treatment goes down to fundamental attributes that only viruses have, the… Read more: Scientists endeavor to eradicate all viruses with a universal treatment

Originally posted on The System Scientist. When one thinks of a virus, notions of ‘health’ do not immediately come to mind. Historically, viruses like the common cold or the flu, and even more serious ones like HIV and Ebola, have killed millions of people around the world so it makes sense to try to avoid… Read more: Using viruses to combat Alzheimer’s

The emergence — and explosion — of media has lead to an impressive amount of content being shared. While this has lead to some amazing things, with not only news traveling globally in nanoseconds but also open source initiatives, it has had some unforeseen and very unfortunate consequences in the realm of science. Namely, the… Read more: gap between science and the media

Originally posted on The System Scientist. Recently there has been a lot of buzz about a gene editing tool, CRISPR Cas. For good reason though: it allows a for relatively simple method of deleting and inserting DNA nucleotide base pairs which has enormous implications in curing genetic diseases and preventing the spread of viruses. How… Read more: From Ancient Viral Mugshots to Potential Cancer Therapy: The CRISPR Cas System

Headline: Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington has broken a new record, managing to store and retrieve 200 MB of data on strands of DNA. In today’s technological age, tons and tons of data is being produced to the EMC Digital Universe Study expects there to be 44 trillion GB by 2020. With current… Read more: New Biological ‘Golden Records’