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Ryan Mandelbaum

As seen in: Facebook, Gizmodo Brazil, Medium, MSN, The New York Times, UOL, Yahoo Entertainment, The Washington Post, Earther, Gizmodo and
Covers:  Physics, food, chemistry, space, gross stuff, bionic limbs, wearable technology, birds, energy, the macabre, taxidermy
Doesn't Cover: Lifestyle, nutrition, environment, psychology, animals that aren't birds
bird-brained writer find me here ryanfm.bsky.social (they/them/opinions mine) buy my book wild nyc (pinned tweet)
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How 'Metal Gear Solid' Helped Turn An Amputee Into A Maker

How 'Metal Gear Solid' Helped Turn An Amputee Into A Maker

Popular Science — James Young's bionic arm will be Bluetooth-enabled, with a screen to control his electronics. It has a laser and a torch, and it can fly drones. But it has trouble picking up a grocery basket. After losing his arm and leg in a commuter rail accident four years ago, he applied to receive a bespoke and partially 3D-printed "art arm" as part of a project called Phantom Limb, inspired by the video game Metal Gear Solid and funded by game company Konami. The arm has changed Young's life.
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How high-powered microscopes can help make fat taste even better

How high-powered microscopes can help make fat taste even better

Washington Post — Tell me to picture something "awe-inspringly beautiful," and my mind will probably wander to an infinite pile of baked goods, a cheese store with endless free samples, or any other stockpile of rich, buttery milk fat. It turns out that many scientists would agree with me. Fats themselves don't look all that gorgeous at face value. To the human eye, they look like smooth white pastes or thick yellow liquids. But their appearance, taste and nutritional value all depend on microscopic building blocks - the individual fat molecules themselves.
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This Enormous Telescope Will Study Neutrinos From The Depths Of The Ocean Floor

This Enormous Telescope Will Study Neutrinos From The Depths Of The Ocean Floor

Popular Science — If trillions and trillions of tiny particles rained down from the depths of space and passed through your body right now, would you be concerned? If yes, too bad. Since you started reading this sentence, it's already happened. But have no fear: Some of those little dudes carry messages about the universe's strangest secrets. The particles are neutrinos, likely the second most common particle in the universe behind light particles. The Earth is constantly bombarded with them, and understanding where the highest energy ones come from can give us a whole new view on the craziest things that happen in space, like supernovae or the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
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Scientists recreate Mercury's surface and find it looks more like a mantle

Scientists recreate Mercury's surface and find it looks more like a mantle

Astronomy Magazine — If you walked into a home and the kitchen was strewn with dusty old copies of National Geographic, you'd probably wonder where they came from. That's basically what Mercury looks like. Well, except instead of magazines, it's a strange distribution of rocks on the planet's surface. But like the magazines, scientists think the rocks came from Mercury's basement. A team of NASA scientists led by Asmaa Boujibar subjected a Mercury-like substance to different high pressures and temperatures.
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Why scientists are freezing the sperm of sex-swapped flounder

Why scientists are freezing the sperm of sex-swapped flounder

Washington Post — You probably didn't expect to learn about flounder sex changes today, but here we are. There aren't any southern flounder farms yet, but the fish has some traits valuable for aquaculture, or fish farming. "It's one of the few food-sized flounders that can grow in freshwater," said Harry Daniels from North Carolina State University. And that's great, because freshwater farms - which are typically built on land - avoid some of ocean aquaculture's environmental problems, like pollution and the disruption of native fish populations. There's just one problem - while female southern flounders are plump and juicy, their male counterparts are puny in comparison.
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Gravitational Waves From Colliding Black Holes Detected Again

Gravitational Waves From Colliding Black Holes Detected Again

Popular Science — Two black holes whirled violently towards each other, under the pull of the immense gravity between them, combining into a mass around sixty times that of our own sun. They collided with such force they created a disturbance in spacetime itself. In September of 2015, the disturbance made itself known on Earth as an infinitesimal shiver in two 2.5-mile-wide L-shaped tubes. In December, the day after Christmas, the tubes shivered again. "It's wonderful," David Shoemaker, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's LIGO lab, told Popular Science. "It's so different from the first one ... but its importance is no less."
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Natural gas versus natural beauty

Natural gas versus natural beauty

scienceline.org — A tiny salamander in the Appalachian Mountains just won a major victory over a proposed natural gas pipeline, with the help of the U.S. Forest Service. But it will take more than a finger-length amphibian to take down the $5 billion project, which will bring fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to power plants in Virginia and North Carolina that now rely on dirtier coal. In January, the Forest Service rejected the Atlantic Coast Pipeline's proposed route through 40 or so miles of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests in West Virginia and Virginia, citing a threat to sensitive Cheat Mountain salamander habitats.
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