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Soumya Sagar

Soumya Sagar is a former medical researcher who conducted research in neurosurgery at some of the top hospitals in the U.S. His work has appeared in New Scientist, Science, Chemical & Engineering News and Live Science. He is a passionate science writer and a voracious consumer of knowledge, especially trivia. He enjoys writing about medicine, animals, archaeology, climate change and history. Animals have a special place in his heart. He also loves quizzing, visiting historical sites, reading Victorian literature and watching noir movies.

Stories from Soumya Sagar

A catfish with melanoma, a kind of skin cancer

A Strange, Never-Before-Seen Cancer Seems to Be Spreading Among Catfish in a New England Lake

More than a decade ago, fishers and biologists noticed jet-black tumors on the skin of brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog. Genetic testing hints that they are caused by the first contagious cancer ever documented in fish

The 1611 oil painting Air

Scientists Just Learned That This Bat Eats Birds Midflight. A Renaissance Painter May Have Known About It Hundreds of Years Ago

Last fall, scientists reported the first known recordings of greater noctule bats hunting and feasting on songbirds during night flights. But a 17th-century artwork by Jan Brueghel the Elder seems to depict the species flying with feathered prey in its mouth

Microscope images of an artificial cell, colored green, dividing into two

Scientists Say They’ve Made Cells That Feed, Grow and Reproduce, Bringing Them One Step Closer to Building Life From Scratch

The human-made cells show many hallmarks of life, but they can’t make all their necessary internal structures or divide for very many generations

Researchers came up with the new count by studying insect biodiversity in a conservation area in Costa Rica.

Earth Might Be Home to 20 Million Insect Species—More Than Three Times as Many as Previously Thought, a Study Suggests

Recent estimates have come to the consensus that our planet hosts roughly six million species. But new research reveals that those counts may be drastically underestimated

A time-lapse of an individual D. melanogaster sperm cell. The head is artificially colored pink, and the tail is teal.

These Male Fruit Flies Have Sperm That Are Nearly as Long as Their Bodies. Here’s How the Cells Don’t Become a Tangled Mess

Males of the species Drosophila melanogaster pack thousands of almost two-millimeter-long sperm cells into significantly smaller storage organs. A new study reveals how they move in an orderly manner

The bone was collected in December 1985 by the late geologist Mike Thomson, who described it as a "vertebra of large reptile" in his field notebook.

A Fossil From Antarctica Sat in a Drawer for 40 Years. It Turned Out to Be the First Dinosaur Bone Ever Found on the Continent

After being forgotten for decades, the mysterious tail vertebra has finally been identified as part of a titanosaur. The discovery helps researchers understand how dinosaurs may have traversed Earth’s southernmost regions