Ever had an impulse you couldn’t shake?

So do most amputees. The electric impulses in the brain that control your arms, legs, fingers, and toes don’t just vanish into space with the loss of a limb.

Many victims of accidents and war-time violence experience “phantom” sensations when the brain mysteriously lights up in the same places an amputated limb used to send information about pain, tickling, or hot and cold sensations. The reverse happens, as well: electric signals sent by the brain to a body’s lost limb follow the same paths they used to, down nerve endings to muscles that still exist in the stump of an arm or leg.

In the 1960s, simplistic prosthetics were failing their patients, especially those who had lost an arm or hand. Doctors were beginning to realize that their patients only wore arm-like devices in public for their “human” appearance—a courtesy to others—but the heavy, frustrating things had no real use in the home.

Enter the rocket scientist.

In 1967 Robert W. Mann, a MIT professor and World War II veteran who spent the first part of his engineering career designing missiles, helped develop a mind-controlled prosthetic called the “Boston Arm,” the first biomechanical arm of its kind.

Prosthetic arms that could open and close a robotic hook had been introduced in Russia in 1964, but the Boston Arm had a force-sensing element that not only harnessed but measured Full Article »

On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 Lander touched down on Mars. This spacecraft, the first to softly land on the surface of the Red Planet, was weighed down with all the equipment that scientists needed to study the atmosphere, soil, weather, and biology of our distant neighbor.

One of the instruments on board was a one-foot cube workhorse: a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) designed to sort through the compounds it encountered and measure the mass of each. In this way, scientists could determine the structures, and hence identify, the chemicals present in Mars’ atmosphere and on its surface.

Klaus Biemann, now a Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Chemistry, was in charge of the team interpreting the data from the GC-MS. Biemann was a virtuoso at using mass spectrometers. Throughout his tenure at MIT, he collaborated with researchers from all over the United States and Europe, his skill attracting collaborators as disparate as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin Department of Zoology, and the FBI.

Biemann’s affiliation with NASA dates back to 1964 when he attended a conference called the Early Apollo Science Program to discuss topics as broad as the outgassing of space suits, the organic components of the fuel for the lunar excursion module, and the development of a sample collector for astronauts to use on the moon’s surface. The next year, in exchange for just $100, Biemann spent a month consulting on various aspects of the Apollo project. Full Article »

Every year since 2006 two billion sterile, factory-grown moths have worked as flying mercenaries for Arizona cotton growers, fighting to eradicate their own kind.

The moths are the adult form of the pink bollworm, an invasive species that, in its caterpillar phase, is one of the world’s most destructive cotton pests. Releasing extra bugs into the mix may seem counter-intuitive, but once the pink bollworms reach adulthood, they pose little threat to the cotton crop.

The sterile moths act as decoys: mating with the wild moths, distracting one fertile moth from another, and leading to a net reduction of moths in the next generation. While the sterile moth method of insect control seems brilliant, it hinges on having enough factory-grown insects to swamp the wild insect population.

The strategy has been tried before, but never with much success, just due to the sheer numbers of pink bollworm moths. The difference this time, says Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona, is that the sterile moths are helping to eradicate a bollworm population that has already been reduced through the use of genetically engineered cotton.

“It’s a synergy. You can get something from the combination of the two that you don’t get otherwise,” explains Tabashnik.

The cotton contains genes from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a bacterium that produces toxins. Since the cotton produces its own insecticides, farmers do not spray as many chemicals over their fields as they used to. Full Article »

With a patch of fur shaved off his head and an antenna-like transmitter glued in its place, a three-ton elephant seal prepares to dive 6,000 feet down into frigid Antarctic waters for his dinner.

The first type of mammal ever used to map the depth of the ocean floor, elephant seals are the stars of a recent study that suggests parts of the continental shelf are deeper than scientists imagined.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters on November 3, follows elephant seals residing on the Antarctic Peninsula near the Bellingshausen Sea—the same area where the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapsed in 2008. “The climate is changing more rapidly there than anywhere else in the world,” says Daniel Costa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Costa began studying elephant seal ecology in the Antarctic out of concern for how global warming might affect the animals’ habitat. But he soon realized much of his data could also be used to fill gaps in the study of ocean depth, called bathymetry. “Using animals as oceanographic platforms is not a new idea,” says Costa. “But nobody ever used mammals to map the ocean floor.”

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The Web world is buzzing with excitement over HTML5, the newest evolution of the Internet’s primary code. Some Web developers think it will even become the standard language of the Web, a big deal to people who have to write a handful of Web languages to get things done.

But Clay Shirky doesn’t think so. During a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the author and social media evangelist declared that in spite of HTML5’s approach as the new potential standard for web page formatting, he questions whether a “standard” language is even possible at all.

Web developers, he explained, are just too varied in tastes to expect a standard to emerge. And anyway, standards have failed miserably in the past; while HTML5 is a great next step in making web pages accessible to everyone (be it on laptops, desktop computers, or cell phones), it won’t be the end-all for web languages, suggests Shirky.

HTML (or Hypertext Markup Language) is the blueprint of Web pages. Web developers use HTML to speak to browsers—Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer, for example—by telling them how to display information on a page, much like a blueprint tells architects how to construct a building. And what makes HTML a favorite of many in the Web world is the fact that it is “open source.” In other words, learning and using HTML requires no purchase.

Until now, HTML hasn’t been enough for every Web designer. Competitors like Adobe and Microsoft have offered (for a substantial cost) alternatives to HTML, such as Flash and Silverlight, to run movies, music, and games (think Netflix and Hulu). And until the fifth version, HTML lacked sorely in all these areas.

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Eating ice cream from a gold-striped bowl while reclined in a leather seat, watching the world go by at 100 miles per hour. This is a vision of rail travel luxury at its finest. But it’s also the result of sweat and science in the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel at MIT.

The Wind Tunnel is well-known for its use in aircraft research, but it played a different aerodynamical role when it served as the testing grounds for America’s first high-speed, a stainless steel diesel train known as the Burlington Zephyr.

During the Great Depression, rail-travel use slumped across the country. Ralph Budd, President of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad in the 1930s and ’40s, noted that local railway traffic in 1933 was a grim twenty per cent of what it had been a decade earlier. Not one to back down from a challenge, Budd commissioned the engineering of a train that would defy travellers’ expectations, hoping it would make them want to ride the rails again.

Budd’s solution to the train travel problem measured 197 feet in length, weighed 85 tons, and owes its name to Geoffrey Chaucer. Budd, who was reading The Canterbury Tales during the train’s design, was inspired by Chaucer’s mention of the west wind—Zephyrus—which uplifts the weary pilgrims’ spirits.

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What do the telephone, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fossil snails, and Shakespeare have in common? Thomas Augustus Watson.

This is the Watson of first-telephone-call fame; the “Mr. Watson” Alexander Graham Bell had wanted on the evening of March 10, 1876. When Watson ran to Bell’s aid, he was also running into history’s spotlight. Unfortunately, he ran right through it, as this is when he vanishes from public memory.

In retrospect, it’s hardly surprising. Watson was not the type to sit still. At sixteen, he had taken his first job as a bookkeeper and found it boring. He quickly moved on to carpentry, which was too tiring. Eventually, he wound up at Charles Williams, a Machine Shop in Boston, which is where Bell found him.

Watson is often treated as a sidekick, but by his early twenties he was a gifted electrician and deserves credit for his ability to fabricate the grand ideas of Bell. (If Bell is the father of the telephone, then Watson is arguably the midwife.)

Though he spent several years working on the telephone, Watson was happy to move on once he was satisfied with his work. “After 1881,” he notes in his autobiography, “neither Bell nor I played a noteworthy part in the great development of the telephone.” He was only 27 years old.

Newly liberated from his responsibilities to—and aided by his royalties from—the telephone, Watson wandered a bit, both mentally and physically. His body went to Europe, his mind turned to philosophy. There was much he yet wanted to learn. He was aware of his searching nature, reflecting later: “It seemed as if in my present life I had been reincarnated several times. School life, clerk life, machine-shop life, telephone life—each was like a separate existence as I looked back on it.”

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Being tall is good for more than just reaching high shelves and seeing over crowds. It also makes the act of walking cheaper, energetically speaking, say scientists who released a new study last week.

The findings are the latest in a growing body of research looking at how differently proportioned people walk, and how it affects the energy and calories they spend doing so.

“No one had come up with a universal prediction equation,” notes Nancy Butte, a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine who worked on the study published November 12 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The team developed an equation to calculate just how much energy a person uses while walking, depending on their stature. The equation could be useful in military training, helping predict how much energy soldiers expend in the field so they can be given the right amount of food and water to refuel. It could also help to develop more customizable pedometers.

“We’re in the day and age of personalized electronic gadgets,” says Peter Weyand, a locomotion researcher at Southern Methodist University who headed the study, adding that pedometers for the general population could be programmed with the equation anytime now. Full Article »

Just as pumping carbon dioxide into the air can have environmental consequences, so might pumping carbon dioxide into the ground. Therefore, scientists are planning ahead to minimize the risks of underground carbon storage.

Recent research from Duke University shows that leaks in those storage areas could be easily monitored, so capture and storage might be feasible. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), where carbon dioxide gas is put in deep underground storage areas such as saltwater aquifers, is a way of balancing the emissions from coal-fired power plants. Like any new technology, CCS could have long-term effects that will not make themselves known until after the technique is in use.

The team at Duke studied the impacts that a carbon dioxide leak would have on three proposed carbon storage sites in Virginia/Maryland, Illinois, and Texas. All of the sites are located under freshwater aquifers, which are major sources of drinking water. At each site, a carbon leak could lead to contaminated groundwater. Full Article »