Colloquially known as HowToGAMIT, this student-only publication contains the only written record of MIT slang, originally compiled from Ehrmann’s circle of friends and associates. Successive editors of HowToGAMIT have adjusted definitions according to the popular usage of their time, and modifications of culturally rich words like hack act as windows into MIT’s history.

The original 1969 definition of hack listed “a trick, prank, parlay” as the first and foremost usage. This meaning has not changed much over time, as MIT remains famous for its colorful history of elaborate pranks. In its founding years, MIT was small, new, and scandalously unpopular. The faculty couldn’t afford the drastic disciplinary actions that Harvard imposed. Perhaps in recognition of their teachers’ leniency, the creative engineering students sculpted their mischief into an art, defining a very specific kind of prank that was unequivocally bound by a sense of responsibility and the aspiration to do no harm. Full Article »

For over a century, the appetite of dermestid beetles—so named for their love of skin—has earned them a small but significant role in the annals of natural history. More recently, the beetles have proven forensically useful for dating, cleaning, and even identifying dead bodies. The insect’s prodigious ability to skeletonize carcasses in a quick, clean, and noncorrosive fashion has kept it the gold standard over a variety of other methods. Burying bodies or soaking them in water gets the job done but takes a long time, while using chemicals like acid or bleach can damage the quality of bones and pose health risks to researchers.

Though flesh-eating beetles make strike you as exotic, chances are you pass colonies of them every time you hop on a highway or country road. Dermestid beetles inhabit every continent except Antarctica, and they can usually be found on decaying remains. They show up to the road-kill buffet about a week after an animal’s death, following one or two waves of other insects that don’t mind eating through fur or feathers. Full Article »

Each of these led to the successful conviction of a cold-case homicide.

These type of prints left on evidence, called latent prints, are often key in investigations and can be recovered from objects like windows, bodies, bags, and letters. Unlike fingerprints taken when a criminal is brought into a police station, called tenprints, they aren’t left under ideal conditions. For this reason, they can prove difficult for forensic chemists, particularly as each surface at a crime scene is different in the way it holds prints.

A newly discovered method may hold the key to unlocking latent prints on porous surfaces like paper. To do so, the crime lab uses a combination of gold nanoparticles and silver chemicals to darken the paper underneath the print, rather than the print itself, to reveal the fingermarks.

Old methods rely on chemicals to darken the print itself, attaching to the oils of the fingers. These can be done either on scene using powders or at the crime lab using more expensive, time-intensive materials. Full Article »

In March 2012, Elise Andrew was working on her dissertation in biology at the University of Sheffield in England. She had been analyzing data sets for six months and was ready to beat her head against the wall. Science had become less enjoyable, and she wanted to get back to the “the fluff and the easy stuff.”

Her friends had been encouraging her to start a Facebook page for all of the fun, science-related posts she had been putting on her personal profile. In a bout of boredom, she created the page, humorously named it “I fucking love science,” and intended to do no more than amuse her sixty or so classmates.

By that night, she had a thousand subscribers. Now, only six months later, almost 2 million people follow her page. Andrew has become the queen of Facebook’s most successful science news page, with an audience larger than the city of Philadelphia. Full Article »

Late Friday, November 8, 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had his moment of inspiration in a University of Würzburg laboratory. He was tinkering, as geniuses do, with a Crookes tube, a glass tube enclosing a low pressure gas. After covering the tube, he placed a barium platinocyanide plate on the one side he had left open. He then applied an electric current through the tube. Röntgen noticed that the plate fluoresced, a clue that something was emanating from within the tube. He eventually called them X rays in his famous December 28 publication. For this work, Röntgen was awarded in 1901 the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Röntgen had in a way invented a telescope, but he didn’t realize the galaxies that resided ahead. Using X rays in clinical diagnosis, bequeathing a new sight to medicine, was for someone else to achieve. Full Article »

Forget boring public meetings. Instead, imagine sitting at home in your pajamas while contributing to the development of a new marine management plan.

Odd as this may sound, the development of SeaSketch, a new online program, may make this seemingly unlikely situation a reality.

Officially launched on October 31, SeaSketch offers a new way for people to “collaborate remotely in the development of marine planning,” according to Will McClintock, whose research team from McClintock Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara created the technology.

The program uses a geographic information system (GIS) platform to create an online workspace where stakeholders—fisherman, conservation groups, and other ocean users—can visualize a marine area, suggest elements of a marine management plan, and get real-time feedback on the potential consequences of their proposals. Full Article »

Some inventions take hold and change the world. Many—such as automobiles, computers, and iPhones—fundamentally alter the way we work, play, travel, and even think.

Others flop and end up forgotten or, perhaps even more ignominiously, sequestered in the “Archives of Useless Research,” a collection of books and pamphlets stored in the gold mine of knowledge that is the MIT Archives.

As its name implies, the Archives of Useless Research is, in and of itself, a curiosity. Assembled by Albert Ingalls, the associate editor of Scientific American from 1923-1955, and given to the MIT Libraries in 1940, they consist of materials that rejected contemporary theories of physical sciences or explored hypotheses not yet accepted. The Archives has since been added to, and now contains writings and publications from 1900-1965. Full Article »

Oenosaurus—meaning “wine lizard”—inhabited the earth around 150 million years ago, during the era of Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Stegosaurus. The fossil was named for the wine-producing part of Germany in which it was found, but its closest living relative is the tuatara, an unusual reptile native to New Zealand.

The only surviving member of an ancient lineage called rhynchocephalians, tuatara resemble iguanas but are not true lizards—in fact, iguanas are more closely related to snakes.

The skull of Oenosaurus, whose discovery was announced last month in the journal PLoS ONE, defies the long-standing notion of the tuatara as “a living fossil” by demonstrating impressive diversity in its evolutionary lineage.

The owners of a limestone quarry in Bavaria, Germany, found the fossil. Recognizing its significance, they donated it to a nearby paleontological research institute. Full Article »

The human body is really picky when it comes to receiving new blood. There are four dominant blood types in humans—A, B, AB, and O—and if you mismatch types during a blood transfusion the consequences can be fatal.

Besides blood transfusions, the role of blood type is unclear. Our genetic cousins, monkeys, may offer some clues as to the significance and evolution of blood types, reports a new study.

In humans, the most common blood transfusions involve the most numerous cells in the blood: red blood cells. These cells transport oxygen to body tissue. Coating the surface of red blood cells are substances that serve as the body’s guard dogs. The type of substance your body has defines your blood type. For example, someone with red blood cells covered in substance A is said to have type A blood.

During a transfusion, these substances are on alert. They can detect whether new red blood cells are covered in similar material (meaning the new blood is compatible with the body) or a different one (meaning the new blood is not compatible). If an incompatible substance is spotted, the security alarm is triggered and the body launches an attack. Similar substances are found across monkey species, from chimpanzees to vervet monkeys to gibbons. Full Article »