nature writer

casey
rentz

selected works

“Can genetic engineering create a decent cup of decaf coffee?” @Slate.com

Who cares about decaf coffee? I do. I’m a slow caffeine metabolizer, like many millions of others. We folks with a particular type of CYP1A2 gene may adore a perfectly pressed single-origin Arabica but cannot drink a fully caffeinated cup without the caffeine accumulating too quickly, making our hearts beat like bass drums and our brains feel momentarily vaporized. At parties, we leave half cups of cold coffee to be tossed into the sink. At coffee shops, we pronounce, “half-caff or decaf” like our day depends on it (because it does). Baristas wince at the thought of heavily stripped decaf grounds grazing their precious portafilter. Many of us give up and drink tea. Pregnant women know our pain. But now there’s a chance for us, the metabolically mismatched…more

“There’s a citrus pandemic lurking in california backyards” @slate.com

In a sunlit backyard somewhere in northeast Los Angeles, a homegrown citrus tree blossoms. A stranger stands a few meters back in contemplation. She scans the tree’s billowing foliage. She moves in, grabs a fruit, and turns it over in her hands, looking for the telltale green flush at the navel. It’s the 20th tree she’s seen today, and none have caused her worry. But she keeps searching, house to house, backyard to backyard. Bountiful clementine trees, whimsical potted finger limes, and mangy Meyer lemons: All are potential threats…more

“what does it look like to turn on a gene?” @knowable

In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek — and when that happens, other colors flare. The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue and green blobs were two key bits of DNA called an enhancer and a promoter (labeled to fluoresce). When they touched, a gene powered up,

“this channel isn’t big enough for two behemoths” @hakai

In the spring, thousands of blue, fin, and humpback whales thread through California’s Santa Barbara Channel as they migrate to the cool waters of the northern Pacific. Navigating that narrow route, however, places the whales in the crosshairs of multi-tonne cargo ships heading to port. Collisions with ships are one of the principal causes of death for baleen whales off the coast, and the problem is only getting worse. In 2018 and 2019, ships killed at least 20 whales in the state.* Dozens more likely met that same fate and now lie at the bottom of the ocean.…more

“The supernova that launched a thousand gorgeous space images” @smithsonian.org

In 1990, Dana Berry was messing around with a precursor to the software program Photoshop at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, where he worked as a science visualizer. The Hubble Telescope had launched that year, and all around him, the Institute’s scientists were busy analyzing and releasing about a half dozen deep space images. The images were grainy and monochrome… more

short works @wonderhowto and @Huffington post

Fun daily column about random science/nature discoveries at WonderHowTo

Fun short works about the science/nature of parenthood at Huffington Post

video work @veritasium and @scishow

Fun, insanely popular science videos at Veritasium

Fun science videos at Scishow