Rahul Rao
Contributor, Science
Rahul Rao is a former intern and contributing science writer for Popular Science since early 2021. He covers physics, space, technology, and their intersections with each other and everything else. He lives in London, and is a massive fan of snakes, old genre fiction, trains, and classic Doctor Who, in no particular order.
Highlights
- Deeply interested in physics, space, infrastructure, technology, and the bizarre
- I’m a firm believer that everything I write about—even the most seemingly arcane theoretical physics or outlandish technology—means something to the world
- Frequent writer for IEEE Spectrum and Space.com
Experience
Rahul Rao has been a freelance science writer since 2019, and is currently writing regular physical science articles for Popular Science. Past and present, he’s written for Gizmodo, Physics Today, IEEE Spectrum, and Space.com. He has also been a US National Science Foundation Physics Journalism Fellow. In addition to his own background in astrophysics, he covers a wide range of fields—from infrastructure to research policy, from clean energy to theoretical physics, from archaeology to the future of space travel—all of which, he believes, can cross borders and help make a better world. He’s especially interested in showing how seemingly disparate things—medicine and frog eggs, for instance, or ocean waves and clean energy, or hydropower and decomposing plants—can actually be quite connected.
Education
Rahul holds a masters degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). Prior to that, he completed his bachelors at Vanderbilt University, where he studied physics and English, interned at a national lab, simulated the gravitational waves from black hole clusters, and wrote about space for the university newspaper.
Favorite weird science fact
Trains aren’t just the coolest way to travel: Seismologists can use them to scan under the earth.
Notable Work
- We could live in caves on the Moon. What would that be like? Popular Science
- Researchers just linked three atomic clocks, and it could change the future of timekeeping Popular Science
- These skeletons might be evidence of the oldest known mercury poisonings Popular Science
- This Swiss bridge proves it’s possible to reuse concrete Popular Science
- This may be the highest resolution microscope we’ll ever get Popular Science