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Joshua Sokol

Joshua Sokol

Joshua Sokol is an award-winning freelance science journalist in Boston with broad interests in natural history. Hire him to write cool idea-driven or narrative features, please.

Joshua has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and in English literature from Swarthmore College, and a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a CASW Taylor-Blakeslee Fellow. In between, he worked as a data analyst for the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. His story on the search for life in the subsurface oceans of the moons Europa and Enceladus won the 2017 Jonathan Eberhart award from the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science.

Two fish heads against a slate background

Something in the Water: Life after Mercury Poisoning

From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso chemical factory discharged up to 600 tonnes of mercury into the Shiranui Sea. This led to mass poisoning and a UN treaty.