Erin Garcia de Jesús

Staff Writer

Erin Garcia de Jesús is a staff writer at Science News. She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington, where she studied virus/host co-evolution. After deciding science as a whole was too fascinating to spend a career studying one topic, she went on to earn a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in Nature News, Science, Eos, Smithsonian Voices and more, and she was the winter 2019 science writing intern at Science News.

All Stories by Erin Garcia de Jesús

  1. Animals

    An immune system quirk may help anglerfish fuse with mates during sex

    Deep-sea anglerfish that fuse to mate lack genes involved in the body’s response against pathogens or foreign tissue.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Close relatives of the coronavirus may have been in bats for decades

    The coronavirus lineage that gave rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in bats for around 40 to 70 years, a study suggests.

  3. Archaeology

    Ancient DNA suggests Vikings may have been plagued by smallpox

    Viral genetic material from human remains provides direct evidence that smallpox infected people dating back to the year 603.

  4. Animals

    How some superblack fish disappear into the darkness of the deep sea

    Some fish that live in the ocean’s depths are superblack as a result of a special layer of light-absorbing structures in the skin.

  5. Health & Medicine

    4 reasons not to worry about that ‘new’ swine flu in the news

    Researchers identified a pig influenza virus that shares features with one that sparked the 2009 pandemic — that doesn’t mean another one is imminent.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Here’s what we’ve learned in six months of COVID-19 — and what we still don’t know

    Six months into the new coronavirus pandemic, researchers have raced to uncover crucial information about SARS-CoV-2. But much is still unknown.

  7. Health & Medicine

    COVID-19 lockdowns helped people get more, but not necessarily better, sleep

    Two studies report that people began sleeping more and more regularly after countries imposed stay-at-home orders to slow the coronavirus’ spread.

  8. Earth

    50 years ago, scientists were getting a better glimpse inside storms

    In 1970, experts were harnessing technologies that provided a three-dimensional picture of the inside of a storm.

  9. Health & Medicine

    How often do asymptomatic people spread the coronavirus? It’s unclear

    A WHO official said people without COVID-19 symptoms rarely spread the virus, but there’s a lot that researchers don’t yet understand.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Lockdowns may have averted 531 million coronavirus infections

    Policies that kept residents at home and closed businesses were largely effective at slowing the pandemic’s spread, two studies suggest.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Wastewater could provide up to a week of warning for a COVID-19 spike

    A new study adds to evidence that sewage may serve as an early warning signal that the coronavirus has hit a community.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Is the coronavirus mutating? Yes. But here’s why you don’t need to panic

    Some studies claim there are new strains of the coronavirus, but lab experiments are needed to see if mutations are changing how it infects cells.