Brooke Borel

Science writer, journalist, author.

Brooke Borel is a science writer, journalist, and author. She’s a contributing editor at Popular Science and she has also written for the Atlantic, Slate, and PBS’s NOVA Next, among others. Her first book, Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World published in 2015.

From this contributor

Spectrum from The Transmitter.
Spectrum

Of mice and women

By Brooke Borel
19 October 2015 | 19 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Spectrum

Infant Brain Imaging Study findings, and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 23 March.

By Jill Adams
24 March 2026 | 2 min read
The big picture

Trading places: What happens when neuroscience turns into machine learning, and machine learning turns into neuroscience?

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other. I asked eight experts to weigh in on what we stand to learn from this exchange.

By Samuel Gershman
23 March 2026 | 22 min read
DNA strand
Spectrum

Exon-skipping approach boosts levels of key Rett syndrome protein

Deleting a small region of the MECP2 gene partially restored function in neurons derived from people with Rett-associated variants.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
20 March 2026 | 5 min read