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How Breastfeeding Prevents Breast Cancer for Nature
In my first piece for Nature, I was assigned an embargoed study (it hadn’t published yet) and had to put this story together over a weekend. I was able to speak with a principal researcher, Shirene Loi as she was on her way to Berlin for the prestigious ESMO conference, where she was presenting her…
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Not Every Women’s Midlife Health Issue is Perimenopause for New Scientist
The first of a couple of feature stories based on my book for New Scientist, this piece analyzes how both doctors and patients can make assumptions about healthcare for women in midlife. While it’s wonderful that perimenopause and menopause are receiving some (VERY!) long overdue attention, there’s also some pretty serious bandwagoning going on, with…
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Pregnancy and Endurance Athletics for CNN
In my latest piece for CNN Health, I wrote about how female bodies are built for endurance, a topic I covered in great detail in my book. For this piece, I expanded upon how that basic physiology has been ignored, especially in female athletes, who have been detrained when they followed the extremely conservative advice…
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Does AI Need a Body to Get Truly Intelligent? For New Atlas
I really did a lot of deep thinking both pitching and writing this piece for New Atlas, where I was given a wide remit in how to cover this topic by editor Rich Haridy. I talked to Chinese soft robotics experts, AI researchers, and one of the pioneers of robotics, Cecilia Laschi (quoted below), and…
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Science-led Startup Twelve for Nature Index
A truly inspiring article and my first for Nature Index. I covered the details of the technology behind the startup Twelve, which is doing some incredibly advanced work converting captured carbon dioxide from an ethanol facility to make critical chemicals. Namely, airplane fuels. This is the kind of work that may help humanity avoid the…
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New Book Debut: July 15th 2025
Preorder Now: My new book, The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body available on the Hachette site and at bookshop.org. Available July 15th, 2025 A myth-busting vindication of women’s physical strengths For decades, Starre Vartan–like most women–was told that having a woman’s body meant being weaker than men.…
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For National Geographic: Why Older Women Should Lift Heavy Weights
Proud that my first published piece of 2024 is this one for National Geographic about how older women can and should lift heavy weights to grow bone that was lost via osteoporosis. And also why starting lifting and getting stronger bone pre-menopause could stop bone weakness issues before they start. This information directly informed my…
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More Audio Adventures for SciAm: My Latest Podcast All About Puget Sound Kelp Forests!
Image Via Wikimedia Commons by Oliver Dodd I took my brand-new sound recorder out for a spin (more like a crash-course in recording in situ) at the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca to speak with Anne Shaffer about her new research on how salmon do indeed use kelp forests—and explored why these…
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My First Podcast! How Wildfire Smoke Affects Orangutans for SciAm
It was really exciting to write (and narrate) my first podcast with the wonderful multimedia team over at SciAm. I covered behavioral ecologist and biological anthropologist Wendy Erb’s fascinating work and her inquiries to determine how wildfire smoke impacts orangutan health. Erb’s wealth of recordings as a bioacoustician meant that podcast editor Jeff Delviscio was…
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Starre Julia Vartan 