Results tagged “beakerhill”

Through his numerous TV appearances and books (including the recently released The Pluto Files), astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has shared his infectious enthusiasm for discovery with worldwide audiences. Tyson's show on WGBH, Nova scienceNOW, kicks off its fourth season on Tuesday night at 9:00, and we talked to him beforehand to get his thoughts on the state of science education and space exploration.

                 

Saturday, Bostonist checked out the Science Carnival at MIT, the kickoff event to the nine-day Cambridge Science Festival, and decided to take some pictures of the action. There were plenty of opportunities for kids to get involved with science, and if the reaction of one girl during the Cool Science Live demonstration ("I LOVE science!") was any indication, it sounds like we have a few budding scientists—and science writers—on our hands. We'll be attending several other Cambridge Science Festival events all week, so stay tuned!

  

“How do you tell what’s going on in a city?” asked Assaf Biderman, associate director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. “You can wire every piece of pavement, but it’s not very sustainable, it’s not scalable, it’s expensive. We’re partnering with infrastructure managers, trying to get information from them that we can process and use. The information they collect from managing their own network can be used to figure out what’s going on in the space.”

What forces are driving human evolution? Though scientists have witnessed natural selection of other species in nature and in the lab, our own changes have been a bit of a mystery. At the Harvard Museum of Natural History Thursday night, Pardis Sabeti of Harvard’s Center for Systems Biology explained how we have begun to scan our own genome to uncover evolution at work.

An urban legend claims that Boston's streets are haphazard because they trace the cow paths of the first European settlers. While that may be a bit of a stretch, it takes no leap of faith to say that our roadways make it difficult to drive...or walk. An article in the February issue of Scientific American adds some game theory to that assertion.

       

While Bostonist already passed on 200th birthday wishes to Charles Darwin, it didn’t seem quite right to end it there. So we decided to peruse some of the Darwin Day fare offered up by this uniquely scientific city. We think ol’ Chuck would’ve been pleased with the diversity of the events we managed to find. After all, if there is no variety within a population, natural selection can’t really lead to speciation…oh, never mind.

Maybe Mike Tyson was just ahead of the curve. Researchers at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge are developing fluorescent tattoos that may eventually replace glucose monitors for diabetics. The “tattoos” are actually made up of tiny polymer beads with two main components: a molecule designed to attract a specific compound in the blood (say, glucose), and fluorescent dye.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discussed his participation in the Personal Genome Project. (We’ll give you a minute to find our coverage of the PGP-10 from November.) Typically, we look at new frontiers in science and marvel how far we’ve come. Pinker’s account of his experience perfectly illustrates the amount of work still necessary to understand the mind-bogglingly complex machinery within us.

In Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, the “hot hand” in question is that of Joseph Priestley. Something of a forgotten man now (certainly in terms of his role in the American Revolution), Priestley could be considered the quintessential Enlightenment thinker, in much the same way that da Vinci is the embodiment of the “Renaissance man.”

A town that celebrates (or at least tolerates) the geeks among us never has a shortage of science news, and 2008 was no exception. We kicked off the year with the shocking revelation that ESP was DOA, according to researchers at Harvard. Distraught by the news that Miss Cleo and her ilk were frauds, we found that Harvard had set up a more scientific look at love just in time for Valentine's Day. (Maybe it was all part of the plan?)

As you can see, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet is not a typical science book. We attended Morton’s keynote address to the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy two weeks ago, remarking then that we found the speech “inspiring.” (We also said that this piece would appear on Bostonist last week, but were beset by delays caused by the holiday and runaway FedEx trucks.*) Given 400 pages to expand on that speech, Morton keeps up the same optimistic tone throughout, capturing both hope for the planet’s future and the joy of scientific discovery.

A classic salesman whose talents have been honed by his experience in the software industry, Agassi’s primary focus is customer convenience. “An electric vehicle was the name that was invented when we asked people to give up something from their car,” he explained. “You don’t need so fast: 28 mph is good, right? You don’t need all those seats: 2 is enough. It doesn’t need to look normal: 3 wheels!” Instead of trending toward the bizarre, Better Place hopes to give its consumers “a better car.”

With these inspiring words, Oliver Morton closed his keynote address at the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy, which Bostonist was fortunate enough to be invited to yesterday morning. Morton, the author of the recently released Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (stay tuned next week for a review and perhaps an interview!) shared his belief that photosynthesis has the potential to inspire new sources of energy in the 21st century.

At the end of the poster session Saturday night, the judges crowded all 84 teams around in one of the narrow hallways to announce the six finalists. Unfortunately, we had only gotten a chance to talk to two of them earlier in the evening: our hometown favorites from Harvard, and the eventual winners from the National Institute of Chemistry in Slovenia. (The other four finalists were from Berkeley, Caltech, the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and NYMU-Taipei.)

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, we were able to talk to a handful of the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) teams during their poster presentations last Saturday evening. Here’s the (slightly) distilled version of what we found.

Over the weekend, one of the most prestigious student research contests took place in the labyrinthine halls of MIT’s Stata Center. 2008 marked the fifth year of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, in which 84 teams created anything they could think of, using the techniques of the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Over the next three days, Bostonist will be giving everyone a crash course in this new biological frontier.

After a two-week hiatus learning the finer points of the Neutron Dance, Beaker Hill makes its triumphant return! (Really, we’ve been working on two wonderful in-depth presentations for you, dear reader, that will be displayed with the best Bostonist shine over the next couple weeks.) But in the meantime, we’ve come across a ton of other interesting stories and felt compelled to cherry-pick a couple of our favorites as a small appetizer. So enjoy!

We start with the research of BU computer engineer Thomas Little, who is currently working on transmitting wireless internet through room lighting. Using LED’s from a flashlight and a router, Little has already developed a prototype of his system, which has received interest from several communications firms, and may be available for purchase in a year or two.

Rule #76 of science reporting (and wedding crashing): No excuses. Play like a champion. So we’re jumping right into champions for this week's "Beaker Hill" column.

It may have been this Bostonist’s 24th birthday yesterday (seriously!), but we’re the ones doling out the presents here in this week’s edition of Beaker Hill. Today, we’ll give you everything you ever wanted to know about stem cells, as the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is back at it again.

Ever the environmentalists, in this edition of Beaker Hill we preview Boston GreenFest 2008 (Friday and Saturday in City Hall Plaza) by examining some recent alternative energy breakthroughs that didn’t make it into the festival. So if you decide to head out to GreenFest, feel free to drop one or two of these stories to impress your friends. Mention that you read it on Bostonist and you’ll win a free shirt! (Not really.)

More MIT madness leads off this edition of Beaker Hill. We’re always thoroughly impressed by these Cantabridgian crusaders, not just for the intriguing work they put together, but also for the way completely off-the-wall concepts make perfect sense in their world.Take their new cancer-targeting system loosely modeled after a Viking longboat. No, it’s not a mashup of Beowulf and Fantastic Voyage (as entertaining as that would be) but a contraption out of the lab of Stephen Lippard. The system uses a carbon nanotube as the “boat,” which carries two passengers: a folate derivative used to target certain types of cancer cells, and the cancer-killing drug cisplatin. Once the boat reaches shore by virtue of the cancer cells’ folate receptors, the cisplatin is released to loot, pillage, and destroy everything in its wake. The Lippard team’s article can be found in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, along with a teaser for their next project: a Robespierre-inspired obesity targeting compound that slices through fat cells like a guillotine and screams, “Let them eat cake!”

Whether it's self-navigating robotic cars, hacking Charlie, or cracking the game of blackjack to win millions from Vegas casinos, the kids at MIT tend not to leave any stone unturned, and last week continued the trend. A team of MIT engineers announced the development of a tiny batteries partially assembled by viruses. The batteries, checking in at a scant 4 micrometers wide (compared to the 17-181 micrometer width of human hair), have similar performance characteristics to standard lithium-ion batteries. The MIT team hopes eventually to produce wholly virus-assembled batteries that can be implanted into living tissue for use in medical devices. No doubt the next step will be to use these virus-batteries in a device to make the female population of campus resemble fictional MIT student Kate Bosworth. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with considerably fewer references to 2008 movies based on card-counting.

For the most part, hospitals are disappointingly free of multicolored fluorescent lighting. If John Frangioni from Beth Israel Deaconess has his way, that may not be the case for much longer. Frangioni has developed a system in which near-infrared light makes microscopic particles glow inside a patient, with the results viewed on a monitor inside the operating room. Prior to surgery, a particular color of glowing molecule can be targeted to each different type of tissue, causing the patient to light up like in Trauma Center for the Wii (pictured left). This allows surgeons to ensure they have completely removed a tumor, and to keep from accidentally cutting blood vessels. Bostonist couldn't confirm rumors that the system is being adapted for a chain of hospital-themed nightclubs. Frangioni presented his results at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society earlier this week; the article describing his research is in Technology Review.

Bostonist is introducing a new science feature, Beaker Hill. Have some science you'd like us to include? Email tips at bostonist dot com.