Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Long Reads

Stories that take a bit longer to get through.

  • Modern Medicine

    I am a fan of technology, it says so right in my tagline. I also think that finding ways to apply developing technology to medicine is pretty cool, and is something I enjoy doing myself when the opportunities arrive. That being said, technology hasn’t always lived up to its promise of making life easier, and…


  • Fetch Quests

    My friends who play RPGs will be familiar with the concept of “fetch quests.” For the rest of you, they’re sort of in the same family as a MacGuffin, that largely interchangeable noun valued by a story’s characters in order to drive the plot. In games, the character must go out and collect an arbitrary…


  • Urine Output

    In the hospital we care a lot about urine. While we no longer taste the sweetness of diabetes mellitus compared to the flavorless diabetes insipidus, we measure urine output (UOP), volume (per kilo per hour), color, red cells, white cells, nitrites, bacteria… Pee-related reasons for sticking around the hospital range from the anatomic (a kid…