It is a Tuesday night, and on the quiet fourth floor of MIT’s otherwise bustling Stratton Student center, the MIT Science Fiction Society (MITSFS) is holding open hours.  A narrow doorway separates airy, institutional hallways from the colorful world of room W20-473, which is lined from ceiling to floor with books.

“We…aim to have a library full of science fiction and fantasy and horror, and tangentially related genres, that we can make accessible to MIT, the community, and anybody else who’s interested,” says Laura McKnight, the Society’s Vice for 2014-2015 (she describes her role as “approximately Vice President.”) To the left of the doorway, a small plywood box is stacked on its end.  This, McKnight says, is the Society’s original library. When freshman Rudolf “Rudy” Preisendorfer founded MITSFS in 1949, members would pass their books from dorm room to dorm room in this box.  Things have changed a bit in the last 65 years. “Our total book count is, last I heard, 63,000,” says Laura McKnight, the Society’s Vice for 2014-2015 (she describes this role as “approximately Vice President.”) “At one point, our goal was to collect all the science fiction that had ever been published. But with the rise of self-published science fiction, that’s not even sort of possible anymore.” Full Article »

“You ready?” the hairdresser asked me with a smile, holding foil and a tub of light cream in her hands.

This was supposed to be fun, I told myself. Staring in the mirror, surrounded by scissors, blow driers and chemicals, I paused. I had always been brunette. Why did I so desire a change? I’d just wanted to try something new, different. Why was I suddenly hesitant?

The pungent stench of the bleach raked my nose. I knew that once the hairdresser brushed the mixture, containing the same chemical used in fertilizers and household cleaners, onto my hair, the molecules in the bleach would begin permeating every brown strand. The hair’s walls must first be penetrated. When the chemicals gained access to the depths of my hair, they would rob the color from the hair’s proteins, leaving only colorless molecules in their wake. Foreign molecules of a new color would then take up residence within the hair shaft while the outer wall of the hair remained open. Those strands of hair would transform at the molecular level, never to return to their former state. Full Article »

In the backyard of my childhood home, there was a swamp, a mud kingdom of sorts. For hours each afternoon, we played hide-and-seek behind the ferns and skunk cabbage. Some days we crossed the wooden bridge to my parent’s garden to pick raspberries, blackberries, peaches, whatever the neighborhood kids hadn’t yet stolen. We walked through the creek that marked the border between towns, muddying our overalls. We hid toy parachute soldiers in trees, inside holes carved out in the trunks masking the secret lives of chipmunks. We pranced along the green moss carpet. As evening approached, we were herded like cattle to the dinner table to eat our chicken and carrots and drink a full glass of milk. The faster we ate, the more time we’d have outside before the sun went down. Full Article »

As promised, my guide took me straight to the tomb of Rosie and the Jolly Green Giant. Bundled up against winter’s relentless bite, we wound our way through a wide-open cavern spotted with the deserted artifacts of previous occupants.  Following a maze of makeshift partitions, we eventually came to what I believed to be a back entrance, although I was so turned around that I couldn’t be sure. Stepping out into the refreshingly crisp air for just a few steps, we crossed a patch of treacherous ice and entered the tomb. Full Article »

“Our chance to lead against climate change” is the motto of a new student group at MIT, which has joined the growing national movement calling for universities and other organizations to divest from fossil fuels.

The group argues that MIT, as a leading university in energy and technology research, is in a unique position to send a powerful message to other universities, the government, and the world about the future of energy and the environment.

“We’re at MIT; we know the science and we know what needs to be done,” said Patrick Brown, a 5th-year graduate student in Physics and one of the group’s founding members. Full Article »

I was born at the tail end of the creation of the world. Back then, most people could live in only one way, in the dull reality of one single place at a time. But I had a choice. In my dirty socks, I made regular pilgrimages to the basement, sidling past broken toys and half-folded linens. Our computer was, if I remember correctly, a dusty old Dell. I booted it up the way my mother had taught me. I waited. There was always that chance the connection wouldn’t make it—that AOL’s eerie mechanical music would suddenly falter, buck up, and die, taking all of my hopes down with it.

Back then, I thought that I was a regular earthly creature. I am an animal, therefore I must belong outside with the other animals. I should have known better. I should have known the first time I visited a beach in August heat, slathered in and reeking of high-powered sun goop. Children shrieking everywhere, while tears of sweat ran down the seam of my back. I waded into the ocean and asked for relief, and then it gagged me with salt instead. The message was loud and clear: This sloppy world is no place for someone like me. Full Article »

Take a look around your city. There’s the old man walking his dog, the flocks of pigeons on the roof, and the constant honk of cars rushing by the smeared windowpanes. But these images and sounds are more than fleeting. This is all data.

Data from taxis in New York, data from cell phone conversations in Brazil, data from trash collectors in Spain. Lines and lines of unending data are created every day, every second, by people going about their lives, including you. 2008 was the first time in the history of civilization that 50 percent of the people on earth lived in what is classified as an urban area. It’s not all data from companies or government entities either. It’s data from the average, plugged-in person, like his rants about traffic on Twitter or her images of potholes on Instagram.

The question is, what does this data mean? What can it do? Given a little exercise, a little insight, and a dash of design, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT hopes to explain. They want to use that data to turn a mere “city” into a “smart city.”

A city is like a clock, filled with interlocking parts that are dynamic and changeable but governed by the complex mechanics whirring just beneath the surface. Pry open the back and the inner contents are revealed, a mess of information from each user in the city. Full Article »

I sit in the small windowless room at the back of the MIT Humans and Automation Laboratory staring excitedly at the computer screen in front of me. The tutorial for the simulation begins. I will have four drones at my disposal, or unmanned vehicles as those in the know call them. Three are aerial vehicles. The fourth is a watercraft that navigates its way on a river cutting through the center of the digital battle ground. A series of controls will allow me to direct these drones, but there is a catch.

I cannot micromanage the drones the way one would move pieces on a chessboard. Instead, the interface asks me to pick from a variety of priorities, such as seeking out potential targets, babysitting ones I have already found, and destroying hostile ones. A complicated algorithm, I am told, will ensure my priorities are doled out to my machines in the most efficient way possible. In other words, my puny mind can’t fly three planes at once, but a computer can. The question is, how? Full Article »

Bossart’s research is part of a growing trend—exploring how modern conservation efforts are not only compatible, but often more effective, when combined with incumbent religious practices protecting natural areas. This success has caused some researchers to propose a formal partnering of the two.

To Bossart, all the rigmarole to get into sacred forests is good news. When it comes to these groves, “The ones that have weaker protective measures are not as high quality as the ones that have strong protective measures,” said Bossart, citing the noticeably better health of the latter (they generally had fewer gaps in their canopies). Protective measures vary depending on cultures but take the form of anything that restricts or discourages people from exploiting the sacred area, such as involved permission ceremonies, local patrolling by religious officials, or taboos condemning harmful resource extraction or even entrance. Full Article »