Starre Julia Vartan

I wrote about the fascinating subject of biosensors for Grow Magazine, exploring how they can be used to track and quantify the impacts of climate change.

What ARE biosensors? Great question:

“Akin to a filmmakers’ zoom lens, they allow scientists to get just the information they want from a given environment, whether that’s the human gut, damp soil in a cornfield, or even the ocean. At their most basic level, biosensors often work by “using biology to sense biology,” says Devora Najjar, a PhD student designing biosensors with the MIT Media Lab. Najjar’s biosensors are being tested at Tidmarsh in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Once a working cranberry farm, it’s now the largest freshwater restoration project in the Northeast United States, almost 500 acres of ponds, meadows, pine-oak forest, bogs, and red maple and Atlantic white cedar swamps.

Read the full story here.