Last month I got an email from Max Nesterak, a journalist at NPR who works on the podcast called Hidden Brain. He had read my piece in Aeon about being bored during the the four-month isolation mission back in 2013, and wanted to know what it was like to be so bored. So I told him.

Here’s a sample:

Kate Green is a science journalist. She spent four months living in this tiny dome with five others. She wrote about her experience in Aeon.

She says that before she went in, she considered herself a person who never got bored.

“Well, things wear on you over the course of four months.” Green says. “And by things I mean a static environment. We were talking to the same five people every single day. Our home was a white dome with puffy walls that did not change day to day.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

After a long delay, here is a post about the very-fun-to-research piece I wrote for Lucky Peach about the food marathon swimmers eat when they swim for a hours on end.

Check it out here.

I have a new piece up at The Atlantic about a better wound dressing for deep cuts, lacerations and burns. These dressings–which can be 3-D printed into customizable shapes and have been shown to significantly reduce the time it takes a wound to heal–are being developed by an Aurora, CO company called Sharklet Technologies.

Last fall, Chelsea Magin of Sharklet presented the product-in-development at the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Clearly, better dressings aren’t just good for an imaginary starship. They could also be used on in hospital burn units, on battlefields, or anywhere else resources are limited and healing quickly is critical.

Details on how the dressing works and what sharks have to do with it are in the full article here.