About Us
The Mission
There’s nothing in our world more powerful than the stories we tell each other. They bring us together and telling them is the best way to educate one another and understand ourselves. By exploring the secret science that informs the fantastic universes in popular science fiction and fantasy stories, we can learn more about our own. With equal parts fanaticism and criticism, we dig into the real science of the popular culture stories that make us wonder. We write stories about the science in movies, television, books, comics, video games, you name it. Our goal is to use these stories to teach science in an entertaining and understandable way.
The Author
Conceived of and created by Connor Criswell, StarStuff launched in 2019 with the mission of empowering humanity to see the science all around us. Connor is a science communicator based in San Francisco, California. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Hendrix College in 2016. He enjoys running D&D games with his friends, playing the guitar and viola, and hanging out with his two cats.
Publications
Liu, Y. et al. ‘An Extra-Circadian Function for Human CLOCK in the Neocortex’, March 2023. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.13.531623.
Hough, A. et al. ‘Barbamide Displays Affinity for Membrane-Bound Receptors and Impacts Store-Operated Calcium Entry in Mouse Sensory Neurons’. Marine Drugs 21, no. 2 (February 2023): 110. https://doi.org/10.3390/md21020110.
Ayhan, F. et al. ‘Nuclei Isolation from Surgically Resected Human Hippocampus’. STAR Protocols 2, no. 4 (December 2021): 100844. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xpro.2021.100844.
Willyard, A. et al. ‘Phylogenomics in the Hard Pines (Pinus Subsection Ponderosae; Pinaceae) Confirms Paraphyly in Pinus Ponderosa, and Places Pinus Jeffreyi with the California Big Cone Pines’. Systematic Botany 46, no. 3 (October 2021): 538–61. https://doi.org/10.1600/036364421×16312067913435.
Berto, S. et al. ‘Gene-Expression Correlates of the Oscillatory Signatures Supporting Human Episodic Memory Encoding’. Nature Neuroscience 24, no. 4 (March 2021): 554–64. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00803-x.
Jeong, H. et al. ‘Evolution of DNA Methylation in the Human Brain’. Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (April 2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21917-7.
Mendizabal, I. et al. ‘Cell Type-Specific Epigenetic Links to Schizophrenia Risk in the Brain’. Genome Biology 20, no. 1 (July 2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1747-7.
Berto, S. et al. ‘Accelerated Evolution of Oligodendrocytes in the Human Brain’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 48 (November 2019): 24334–42. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907982116.
Richardson, R.B. et al. ‘A CRISPR Screen Identifies IFI6 as an ER-Resident Interferon Effector That Blocks Flavivirus Replication’. Nature Microbiology 3, no. 11 (September 2018): 1214–23. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-018-0244-1.
Fontenot, M.R. et al. ‘Novel Transcriptional Networks Regulated by CLOCK in Human Neurons’. Genes & Development 31, no. 21 (November 2017): 2121–35. https://doi.org/10.1101/gad.305813.117.
Willyard, A. et al. ‘Pinus Ponderosa: A Checkered Past Obscured Four Species’. American Journal of Botany 104, no. 1 (December 2016): 161–81. https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.1600336.