Starre Julia Vartan

This story was a year in the making, and a significant challenge but about such an important subject: fighting elephant ivory trafficking. Sam Wasser at the University of Washington developed a new way to track trafficked ivory based on the same DNA technique that was used to catch the Golden State Killer: Familial DNA matching.…

This article started with a simple query as someone who lives in a smoke-inundated-in-the-summer place: I’m told to stay inside and use an air purifier when the wildfire smoke descends. But what about all the wild animals? Turns out a researcher at the University of Washington had a similar question—she gathered all the currently available…

An assignment to cover how monitors for CO2 (as a proxy for covid) and smoke and pollutants delves into the detail of how we are all starting to care more about the air we breathe—and want to track it. Read the full article here.

What a joy to cover this incredible research from the University of Washington and Conservation Canines for CNN. I love dogs, I grew up with them, and I even run walk and run them today as part of my work as a dog-walker on the island where I live. The canines who sniff out orca…

I worked on this project for Undark with fellow science journalist Jenny Morber for more than 6 months. It was a challenge, as we dug into government archives, spoke with scientists about emotionally fraught situations, and endeavored to tell their stories with integrity.

I had no idea how researchers like Terrie Williams determine the metabolic rates of animals before I spoke with her for The Physiologist magazine. You put them on treadmills. Turns out it’s tricky work, but someone has to do it: How do you get a polar bear to walk on a treadmill? That’s a very…

  This was a fascinating story to report and I added to my knowledge of artificial intelligence and its uses in medicine. “Researchers at DeepMind Health, a subsidiary of Google’s artificial-intelligence company DeepMind, and their colleagues…designed an artificial-intelligence algorithm to identify factors that suggest someone is at risk of AKI—and to predict it 48 hours…

Really happy to share a positive, optimistic and (hopefully) interesting conversation I had with Nils von Heijne for his podcast. We talked about “Nature and the Future of Humanity.” You can listen here.

Pleased to share my second article for National Geographic: This one came about because during a trail run with a big German Shepherd I was caring for, we came across a long-toed salamander. I didn’t recognize this species since I grew up in New York and this is a west-coast-only type of sal. I moved her…