Gems in STEM: How Machine Learning and Remote Sensing Can Help Save Coastal Dead Zones — You’re a goldfish in a special fishbowl. It’s not a bad life, except that if you swim into certain spots of this bowl, you get suffocated. Whoops. You’re dead. It’s like those messed up “Would You Rather?” games: would you rather stay in the same place for eternity or die…

Gems in STEM: Discussion of Dean’s Method — Let’s time-travel back to kindergarten. You and I have found 4 cute rocks during recess, but we have to split them between us to take home to our rock collections. Easy enough, we each get two rocks–that’s only fair! But what if there are five rocks? Who decides which of…

Gems in STEM: A Brief Discussion of Sparsity — Wouldn’t it be nice if this article was over in just a couple sentences? It’d certainly be less work for both of us and free up some time to binge Netflix...I mean, read a book. Unfortunately, no can do. There would definitely be a major loss of information—you’d probably have…

Gems in STEM: A Quick Study of Ballots — It all started in fourth grade when I finished my debut novel The Magic Inside, a 10,000 word masterpiece for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) about three friends who learn magic together and unite to defeat an evil sorcerer…definitely not a Harry Potter rip off. As I proudly typed my…

Gems in STEM: Introduction to Quantum Dots — Does size matter? It’s an age-old question in all sorts of areas. Is it always “the bigger the better”? (If you think so, you might like Texas!) Or, can small prevail over tall (like a David v. Goliath type beat)? Honestly, the answer to this debate varies person-to-person. We constantly…

Gems in STEM: Diverse Role Models — Happy 2022 Women’s History Month! As you know, February was Black History Month. In honor of it, every February Friday I shared my artwork of historic, bold, and inspiring Black figures who have paved the way for the world and society we know now. …

Gems in STEM: The Friendship Paradox — You aren’t popular. Don’t take it personally, but mathematically speaking, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Cue the Friends theme song, “So no one told you life was gonna be this waaaay!” You might be thinking, “What friends?” It’s okay, I’m your friend, and one is…

Gems in STEM: The Microscopic Structure of Tears — What’s the big deal about crying anyway? You cry. I cry. Well, I guess I cry a lot. But it’s all totally warranted, like when I’m stressed about meeting deadlines or laughing at TikTok cats or watching those videos of returning soldiers reuniting with their dogs. I cry when I…

Gems in STEM: A Comprehensive Intro to Artificial Intelligence — Jarvis, please pull up some quick articles to teach me about AI…Jarvis? JARVIS? Oh wait, my bad, I forgot that you’re not real outside of Marvel. …