Hi, I'm Anushka — a high school student at the Dalton School in NYC, and the person behind Pipettes and Popsicles. More than a year ago I got seriously ill on a family trip to India. It took weeks for anyone to identify what had made me sick (precious time wasted while my illness escalated) — and when they finally did, I couldn't stop thinking about that gap. Not just why it happened, but everything underneath it: how diseases get identified, how that knowledge travels across borders, from labs to doctors and to patients, and what gets lost along the way. That experience didn't give me answers. It gave me an overwhelming need to understand the science, not just to understand what happened to me, but to understand what happens to everyone who falls ill somewhere the system wasn't built to see.
So I started learning. Really learning — not just in class but in labs, reading papers that raised more questions than they answered. I've traced fish DNA through paleoclimatic history at the American Museum of Natural History, built a proof-of-concept machine learning model to detect infectious disease outbreaks from fragmented global data, and learned to edit genes using CRISPR — each project teaching me something different about how science actually works, which is slower, stranger, and more absorbing than anything a textbook suggests. The questions that brought me to each lab were never quite the ones I left with.
This blog is my attempt to document that journey honestly. I find that I can't write about an experiment without also writing about what it reminds me of — a popsicle mold, a stubborn fish, the way DNA looks under UV light while the sky darkens outside the lab window. The science and the story always seem to arrive together. So the posts here are part field notes, part reflection — attempts to follow a research question all the way to wherever it actually leads, which is rarely just the data. Understanding something deeply is only half the work. The other half is finding the language to make it matter to someone else.
If you're new here, A Year Ago is where the why behind all of this lives. And the namesake post Pipettes and Popsicles is a fun read.
Thanks for reading. I hope something here makes you sit with a question a little longer than you planned.