author : Mina KhanAMINA KHAN is a science writer at the Los Angeles Times. She’s covered the Curiosity’s landing on Mars and explored abandoned gold mines in pursuit of a dark matter detector. She’s appeared on national television representing The Times on issues of health and science. She’s an alum of the Kavli nanotechnology workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the HiPACC computational astrophysics bootcamp at UC Santa Cruz.