Editor

Troy Farah is an independent editor and journalist specializing in science and public health. His beats have ranged from space, neuroscience, drug policy and much more. He was Salon.com’s Science and Health editor from 2023 to 2025, editing around 900 stories. He is proficient in AP Style.

His own reporting has appeared in National Geographic, WIRED, Scientific American, The Guardian, Ars Technica, Discover Magazine, Undark, VICE and others. For more on that, visit here.

Below are stories that Troy assigned, edited and published that he is most proud of.

Salon
Public health
⬡ Does your body need a parasite purge? Probably not
⬡ Climate change could return us to the pre-antibiotic era
⬡ Migrants are on the front lines of the bird flu crisis but deportation fears are causing chaos
⬡ More than a plague: How colonialism, class and incarceration feed disease outbreaks
⬡ As heroin in Afghanistan dries up, Europe could face an overdose crisis like the U.S.
⬡ The deaths from abortion bans you won’t hear about
⬡ Trump’s cruel calculus on public health is slashing lifelines for the most vulnerable
⬡ An Idaho regional health department banned COVID vaccines. Will others follow?
⬡ Abortion bans violate human rights, Amnesty International says in new report
⬡ National abortion ban “hidden in plain sight” in revised RNC agenda, legal experts say
⬡ Masks off: The lessons we didn’t learn from COVID
⬡ War zone innovation: For Palestinians, survival has meant creativity
Climate Change and the Anthropocene
⬡ Don’t fight uncertainty — embrace it
⬡ Erasing the stars: Satellite megaconstellations are a mega problem for Earth and sky
⬡ Our thirst for pineapple may be causing mutations in Costa Rica’s sloths
⬡ Trump is gutting environmental data, obscuring climate and pollution risks to the public
⬡ Can humans really extinguish all life on Earth? It’s complicated
⬡ The moms fighting for climate justice
⬡ “Universal suicide”: An imprisoned climate activist on why the fight for the planet still matters
⬡ Trump declared a “national energy emergency.” Experts say it’s a “farce”
⬡ “Fossil fascism”: How some on the right use climate change as an excuse to demonize migrants
Wellness
⬡ “More problems than it was helping”: Behind the growing distrust of antidepressants
⬡ You don’t want to throw a measles party
⬡ The FDA just approved a new painkiller. Is it too good to be true?
Science
⬡ “Mirror life” could pose unprecedented risks to the world, scientists warn
⬡ Digital smell has arrived. Are we ready for Stinkygram?
⬡ Is color even real? The true nature of the rainbow is deeper than it seems
⬡ Nature keeps evolving crabs and the internet is obsessed. What’s going on here?
⬡ Numbers game: Is math the language of nature or just a human construct?
⬡ Scientists recreate conditions of Saturnian moon in a lab — and it could help us find alien life
⬡ Death seems “kind of arbitrary”: Scientists want to upload the brain so we can live forever
⬡ Cetacean conversation: AI could let us talk to whales. Experts question if that’s a good idea
⬡ Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck
Misc.
⬡ A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time. Here’s what it’s like in a world without it
⬡ The toll of truth: What happens when you expose medical wrongdoing?
⬡ Feel like nothing you do matters? It may be “learned helplessness”
⬡ Grief is brutal, but there is value in it, experts say. So why do we try to “cure” it?
⬡ Is tech making learning foreign languages obsolete?
⬡ The desert “erases people:” Volunteers try to count migrant deaths, but the true number is unknown