About

 

Sindya N. Bhanoo is the Observatory columnist for The New York Times. The column appears on Tuesdays in the paper's Science section.

She was previously an environmental reporter for The New York Times, a tech reporter for The Industry Standard and a general assignment and health reporter for The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun.

Prior to that, she was patent examiner in the software division of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Her freelance work has appeared in numerous publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, Khabar Magazine, India Abroad and India Currents Magazine. 

Currently, Bhanoo also has a Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellowship in Health Reporting, an award given to 10 journalists annually. 

She earned a Masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 and a Bachelors in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002.

Other Awards and Honors:

2009 Metcalf Environmental Reporting Fellowship

2009 McCloy Fellowship in Journalism

2009 Knight Science Journalism Mini-Fellowship

2007 Wired Magazine Award of Excellence In Technology Reporting  

2007 AAJA Ken Wong Memorial Scholarship 

2007 Mark Felt Scholarship for Investigative Reporting (full academic scholarship)

2006 SAJA Award for Outstanding Editorial

1998-2002 Carnegie Mellon University Institutional Scholarship

Comments

[Eric Johnson]

Dear Ms Bhanoo
Calculating Emissions Is Problematic in the NYT - great article!

We published about this in the spring of 2009. Perhaps the key statement was: “If a tree is harvested for fuel, this reduces carbon stocks. However, current approaches to carbon footprinting – by presuming carbon neutrality – do not recognise this. This is problematic, because first, as Rabl et al. (2003) point out, this can lead to absurd conclusions: for example, if carbon neutrality is presumed, it makes no difference to a carbon footprint if a forest is standing or if it has been chopped down for fuel wood.”

If you're interested, I'd be happy to send the full, peer-reviewed article.

kind regards, eric johnson
Atlantic Consulting

[Elizabeth T.]

re: 20-year mapping effort. (4/2)

You write about Asian bittersweet replacing native bittersweet, but don't say anything about the ecological consequences. As as far as wildlife are concerned, are they equivalent.

Did you also notice the similarity with US society, that Asian and other third-world invasives are replacing native workers!

[Xander Parisky]

Ms Bhanoo,

I just read your short article about the trade off between a particular gene variant encoding pest resistance and stunting growth. I noticed that you referred to the plant as "mouse ear cress." Perhaps you thought Arabidopsis was too 'science-sounding' for the general public, and hopped over to wikipedia for common name. I would advise that in the future you refer to Arabidopsis as just that. It is by far the most studied genetic model plant, and almost nobody calls it mouse ear cress.

sincerely,
xander parisky
B.A, molecular cell biology, uc berkeley

[Pam Schneider]

I just read your article in the NY Times "Humans, like animals, fearless without amygdala."

Humans are animals.

I am dismayed by the number of supposedly scientific articles in the NY Times Science section which fail to call humans animals and to even suggest they are unique and unrelated to other animals.

[Willow]

Dear Ms. Bhanoo, I just finished your article in Friday's New York Times re banding penguins and how this practice interferes with their ability to feed themselves and their families. Thank you so much for bringing this to people's attention.

In the past, I have often wondered how harmful such invasive methods are to the creatures involved--in spite of being reassured by the friendly commentator on many a nature special that, "the animal will be just fine."

One always hears that these practices are in the creature's best interest in the end, because "we will learn more" about global warming, etc. How seldom, however, do we learn that humans have adjusted their behavior on the basis of these studies so that other creatures might exist.

[sindya]

glad you appreciated it! thanks for reading.

[Georgie Simpson]

Re: Amoebas Grow a Bumper Crop of Bacteria, in the NYT, I never realized amoebas were so smart! Next thing we know, they'll be getting agricultural subsidies from Congress!

[sindya]

:-).

[Laurence Topliffe]

I'm amazed at some of the commemnts you made in your article on meditation. You said "It's been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation,...". You did continue after this with a "but.." Your statement indicates that you really have not done any real indepth research on the scientific research on meditation, specifically the Transcendental Meditation technique which is being taught around the world in schools, businesses, prisons, the military and in medical institutions, with some insurance companies paying part of the cost. It's being taught in schools because it increases intelligence and creativity, academic abiliy as well as an interest in actually doing school work. It's being taught in prisons because it's been proven to improve one's psychology and behavior. Seven judges in St.Louis practice it and all of them sentence offenders to the practice. It's being taught in businesses because it has been proven to improve individual and business succes as well as the health of the employees. It's being taught in the military because it's been proven to help those with PTSD and depression, although the military is often not as supportive of doing this as they should, but I suspect that's because of their mindset. You really need to read some books, including mine which proves that human beings are the result of intelligent design and that the brain is designed to meditate. You can find it at www.cafepress.com/inteldesproof. You can find more at www.mumpress.com and www.tmeducation.org, www.tmbusiness.org, www.mum.edu, www.tesp.org, www.tm.org, www.istpp.org, www.permanentpeace.org. I hope you will write back, either before or after you've done the research, or both. I'll be able to answer all or most of your questions. You can include my email address in this post: forpeace@lisco.com

[Jeff]

I was on a 10-day meditation retreat over the holidays as well, in Occidental, CA. And I too live in San Francisco. If that's where your husband was meditating, tell him that I said hello!

[sindya]

will do!

[Dinesh]

Could you comment on this article.
i.e U turn Theory (search on google )
http://www.deeshaa.org/2006/02/16/rajiv-malhotras-u-turn-theory/

[Mike Gordon]

Dear Ms Bhanoo,

Your article "Pneumonia DNA Morphs To Dodge Vaccine" helps perpetuate a distorted view of evolution. We need to understand that evolution is alive and well and highly relevant to our sickness and health. But we need to understand how it works. Bacteria and viruses do not use little brains to plot and plan how to survive antibiotics and vaccines. They mutate randomly and if some mutations lead to resistance, those bacteria survive.

Pneumonia did not morph to "dodge" vaccines.
It changed in many ways and resistant variants survived.

Likewise, bacteria live and interact with their environment, but they don’t “attempt” anything.

Similarly, the bacteria did not mutate to "Better resist antibiotics and vaccines"
They mutated, and by pure chance some of the mutations made some of them resistant. Those ones survived.

[chelsea mongeau]

Dear Ms. Bhanoo,
I am about to enter college and I read the ny times. I want to be a journalist after graduating from college, focusing specifically on biological sciences. To be honest, it has been very difficult finding information on such a career mainly due to its specificity and limited numbers of people in the field. I was hoping you could shed more light for me on how to get into this career and what exactly your job demands (unfortunately, whenever I think of the publishing business, a devil wears prada-esque internship comes to mind). By the way, I loved the article about disproving darwin's theory on invasive species :) it's hard to imagine darwin being incorrect about something.
Your reader,
Chelsea

[Matt Chew]

Before getting excited about Darwin's error, it is worth noting that he was equivocal on the topic of introduced species (the authors of the paper you reported on even pointed this out in that paper). Darwin was equivocal whenever he suspected there were "unknown unknowns" in play. He also often drew attention to the metaphorical aspects of many of his proposals. He did not make such an issue out of calling the advent of an introduced species an "invasion" even though he may well have coined the metaphor in his 1833 'Beagle' journal. On a related note, the whole native/alien species conception (unchanged since c. 1835) has been repurposed by modern invasion biology and is fatally flawed as an ecological hypothesis. Darwin's sometime mentor John Henslow and his correspondent H.C. Watson proposed it as a criterion for separating 'natural history' from 'history'. For more see http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew/Papers/450641/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Biotic_Nativeness_A_Historical_Perspective

[LKH]

On your NYTimes 'rats' column: read this... http://neutronicstechnologies.com/ntc/study-shows-lab-rats-would-rather-mess-with-a-researcher-than-eat-chocolate/

[Gary L. Bennett]

Regarding your comment in "Observatory" in the 17 January issue of The New York Times, the idea of a planet orbiting a double star predates Star Wars. From the Heritage Auctions Web site one finds that Chesley Bonestell's illustration of a planet with two suns originally appeared on the cover of a 1954 Life Magazine.

http://comics.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=815&lotNo=4022

[Ellie]

Ms Bhanoo,
Regarding the Next Supercontinent - paleomagnetic data is NOT "a measurement of the force between the earth's rocks." Paleomagnetic data measures the orientation of magnetic minerals within the rock, which oriented themselves with the Earth's magnetic field when they formed. You could have at least looked up the term. Try wikipedia, for starts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleomagnetism