In 1997, the ride’s ideal patron took the form of my ten- and twelve-year-old Californian cousins and, by extension, their foolish Minnesotan ally. A nine-year-old sucker, my sole ambitions were Advanced Math class and snowpants without shoulder straps. I was a sitting duck. Full Article »

New Jersey and New York lost thousands of trees to Hurricane Sandy. “They were uprooted, they were snapped,” says Lawrence Hajna, a press officer at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. State parks “focused on removing any hazardous trees that would impact public areas” including trails and visitor centers, he adds. Trees not in the way were largely ignored.

However, the fate of broken non-hazardous trees on private land is more variable. If past storms are any indication, these trees are likely destined for the axe for cleaning purposes. But “the forest does not need us to clean,” says Audrey Barker-Plotkin, an ecologist at Harvard and author on the study. And will “probably recover more quickly and less dramatically if we leave it alone.” Full Article »

Responding to online pleas for help, around 400 Hurricane Sandy relief volunteers arrived at the doors of 1128 Olympia Boulevard in Midland, Staten Island, early Saturday morning, December 1, 2012.

Wanting to do more than follow the relief efforts remotely and or to give donations that would be used in unknown ways, this motley crew of volunteers, some of whom had bused in from neighboring states, wanted to make on-the-ground tangible impacts.

So they turned to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, online tools that promote community information sharing, to connect with folks managing community relief efforts—or sometimes directly with the people in need—to find opportunities to help. Full Article »

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 »

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 »

The Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter is a bona fide endangered species these days. The clunky clack-clacking word processor that filled Italian offices circa 1960 is now relegated to curio shops, hobbyist attics, and eBay. I hadn’t seen one in years, and yet as I enter a darkened corner of the M.I.T. Museum, one appeared before me like a phantom from thin air. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m coming around to holograms.

My brain knew, on some level, not to trust my lying eyes. It understood that what I’m seeing is actually a light interference pattern transposed on to a reflecting surface by a split laser beam. Yet the spectral image is so tantalizingly lifelike that it isn’t so hard to imagine an author’s fingers tapping away at its keys. A single page—crinkled, ink-stained, and the only “real” thing about the exhibit—rests above the ribbon spool; it contains the faded text of a Jorge Luis Borges poem. Borges would certainly recognize the motif; the plot of his 1942 story “Death and the Compass” turns on a cryptic page found in a murdered man’s typewriter.

Suffice to say, Dora Tass’s Perturbing Object casts a spooky spell. As mixed media art, it’s a commentary on modern day communication, a riff on the notion that words and ideas are transmitted via intangible means. As science, it’s an example of holography’s enduring power to entice the eye as it interacts with that most fickle substance, light. The artist has clearly gone to great (wave)lengths to calibrate the 3D image fidelity; this is no cheap parlor trick like Pepper’s Ghost, which uses lights and mirrors to create a hologram-like effect. Unlike two-dimensional media, each piece of a transmission hologram, no matter how small, contains the entire image. I tilt my head and the refraction contorts, adjusting to my glance. A half step to one side and it dissipates entirely. I play with other angles, searching for the precise point where my brain sees a typewriter instead of an empty wall.

Tass’s artwork is surrounded in the hall by holography displays from other international artists. Wandering through, I admire a bust of Aphrodite; a cascade of color-morphing leaves; a molten obelisk; and the most prominent display, a tight-lipped visage of Queen Elizabeth. But walking home, I keep returning to that typewriter; it takes up quiet residence in my thoughts. We think of holograms as vaguely futuristic (even though they’ve been around for the better part of six decades). But will they become the way that humans experience the recent past, too? Our cultural artifacts preserved in virtual verisimilitude? The bulkiness of an Olivetti transformed into pure light?

The patient came to Boston City Hospital in fall 1929 after two weeks of difficulty urinating, when he noticed “a watery foul-smelling pus coming from an opening just above the pubis.” The patient was a 52-year-old African-American man, likely poor in money and education, who arrived in the urologist’s office pale and weak, reeking of urine and rotting flesh. The doctor, the same age as his patient, was a urologist and Harvard professor, graduate of Oberlin College ’03 and Harvard Medical School ’07. Dr. Augustus Riley lived at a posh address in Boston, 857 Beacon Street, and went golfing on weekends with other physicians. Dr. Riley would publish an account of this surgery in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A surgical photo shows the scrotum of this African-American male. Dr. Riley’s paper doesn’t mention the race of his patient, but you can tell from the dark pigmentation of his hand, holding up the hospital gown to expose his “gangrenous peritoneum.” In the black-and-white photograph, now in the archives at Harvard’s Countway Medical Library, the patient’s abdomen is punctured with holes, his penis attached to the catheter that saved his life. The nasty-looking gashes to the right of the patient’s belly-button are the surgical treatment for urinary extravasacation: incisions of the abdominal wall to drain urine that has leaked out of the vasa, or tubes, poisoning the abdomen. The resulting gangrene, without the aid of modern antibiotics, almost certainly killed him, according to present-day surgeon Dr. Norman McGowin. But such cases nevertheless required documentation and attempts at treatment.

Dr. Riley published this article at the height of his career as a surgeon and professor in Boston. But his life at Harvard was only possible because the doctor hid a secret. On the day this photo was taken in 1929, the patient was not the only black man in the room.

Gus Riley’s mother, Sallie McCreary, was born a slave.

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Recently unearthed “castles” deep in the Sahara may be evidence of a “lost civilization,” says a group of British researchers. The discovery could redefine an ancient people long characterized as nomadic barbarians.

The University of Leicester researchers believe the ruins are vestiges of the Garamantean kingdom, dating from the time of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. Project leader David Mattingly says the structures suggest a large population living in over 100 permanent settlements on 600 square kilometers of Libyan desert—a far cry from a nation of nomads.

The Garamantes’ name itself hints that traditional understanding of its people was incorrect. Garamantes is “very close to the Berber term for citadel, agharam,” says Mattingly. “So one neat possibility is that the name meant something like ‘village people,’ [as opposed to] ‘wild nomadic wandering people.’”

The villages’ inhabitants were “advanced agriculturists with sophisticated irrigation systems,” says Mattingly, adding that the settlements’ number, scale, and planning indicate a civilization strikingly unlike the one previously theorized. “This is a large population mass living in the central Sahara at a time when it was already high prairie desert,” he says. “You would not be prepared to find what we’re finding.”

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