2025 Roundup: Bats, squid, and icebergs

Another year of quiet on this blog. But elsewhere, I got to write about fascinating stuff ranging from bats and neuroscience to icebergs. Here are five stories that I had the most fun researching and writing in 2025.

Eating with your mind first

If you like hot sauce and are expecting a milder sauce, say, because it’s labeled so, your rating of the heat level would likely be lower than that for an unlabeled bottle of the same sauce. However, if you don’t like hot sauce, what the label says won’t impact how you rate its spiciness, but would deepen your dislike for it regardless of which label it is. What’s actually in a particular food item makes for only part of how we taste it. For Big Think, I wrote about how our expectations, beliefs, and cultural representations, among other factors, also shape our experience of taste.

Why bats collide with turbines

Bats perish in colossal numbers around wind turbines. Peculiarly, they have observed engaging in flying patterns that suggest they might be attracted to them, much like moths driven to a flame. For Science Magazine, I wrote about a study that showed that the turbine blades, typically painted white, may be the problem. To the bat’s blurry vision, light reflecting off these blades might give the illusion of the distant horizon that they orient themselves to.

How the squid gets its spots

A lot of research at the intersection of biology and physics involves applying principles from physics to study biological systems. But investigating biological phenomena can also reveal totally new physics. For Physics Magazine, I covered a study that reported the first example of hyperdisorder in a biological system. Hyperdisorder is when the more you zoom out, the less uniform things appear, unlike the more commonly observed phenomenon of hyperuniformity. The random appearance of spots on a squid’s skin, combined with them getting stretched apart as the squid grew, produced a hyperdisordered arrangement.

Tracking athletes' vitals

While running, the body undergoes physiological changes that can cause injury and even death in some cases. Modern wearables allow athletes to track some, but not all, of these changes. Cramming more sensing units in these wearables isn’t a good solution, particularly as the wearables also need to be made to fit better for more reliable measurements. In a feature in Photonics Focus, I wrote about optical materials that could power wearables of the future, which could track multiple physiological parameters simultaneously.

How icebergs flip

Icebergs can occasionally flip, generating tsunami-like waves. Researchers don’t fully understand how these flips happen. It’s hard to get a close look at a real iceberg as it flips, and multiple factors, such as waves, currents, and wind, likely act as destabilizing forces. As an iceberg melts—at different rates above and below the water surface—it changes its shape over time. For Physics Magazine, I wrote about a study that shows how melting-induced change can cause an iceberg to flip. The researchers used tiny icebergs in a lab for this, capturing some gorgeous visuals in the process.

Curiosities 

I have struggled with motivation and ideas on what to put up on this blog. In 2026, I want to try something that I hope is a more manageable approach. When working on stories I’m commissioned, I often find myself going down rabbit holes where I learn interesting stuff that doesn’t make it to my drafts. I’ll turn some of those delightful curiosities into short articles here.