Aviva Hope Rutkin

Scope Correspondent
avivahr@MIT.EDU
Aviva Hope Rutkin is a Long Island native whose interest in science was first sparked during long childhood afternoons at her mother’s veterinary hospital. She studied neuroscience and Chinese at Union College in New York, and spent her free time playing rugby, programming computer games, and manning the helm of her college newspaper for two difficult, wonderful years. Before settling upon a career in science communication, she worked a number of odd jobs, including Segway tour guide, robot camp assistant, tennis instructor, and country fair booth girl. She has also interned at Nature Publishing Group and Time, and will spend this summer writing about research at Brookhaven Laboratory. Her greatest accomplishment to date is winning a seashell identification contest in the Galápagos when she was sixteen. Keep up with Aviva on Twitter @avivahoperutkin.

Notes from a Citizen

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Scope Correspondent

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 »

She’s Got Milk

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Scope Correspondent
Katie Hinde wants to talk about breast milk.

She wants to talk about the vast and intricate differences between boy milk and girl milk. She wants to talk about the first possible lactating animal. She wants to talk about the many mysterious ingredients swirling in each glass. She wants to tell me, the total stranger on the phone, about the eight liters of monkey milk she’s keeping in a Harvard University refrigerator. I scribble madly to keep up with her frenetic pace.

Milk, Hinde says, is the magic potion. It carries everything a baby needs: fatty acids, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, and hormones. Milk hydrates, protects, and nourishes. And it’s ubiquitous, produced by thousands of different animals every day.

I first discover Hinde through her unusual blog, Mammals Suck. (Sample post: “The Invisible Breasts of the Free Market.”) Reading through, I learn to my surprise that scientists know very little about milk. On an individual level, we don’t know exactly what milk is composed of, how a mother’s body creates it, or how the infant assimilates it. On a broader scale, we don’t know how milk has evolved over time, or how it might have impacted, in turn, our own evolution. Full Article »

Ancestral Stock

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Scope Correspondent
One night I end up in a showroom in Springfield, watching my mother and dog trot in slow circles around a ring. My mother looks anxious. The dog looks hungry; she is drooling prodigiously, the long gooey lines of spit flecking off in all directions every time she shakes her head.

It is a good story, one that I find myself repeating often in the following weeks. Each time I delight in the telling of it. I learn when to pause for effect, what questions to anticipate, which slight nuances to watch for as my listener reacts. This is how I have learned to hold court in a family of funny people: by sculpting my little anecdotes to satisfaction.

My brother does it by brazenly copping all of my father’s jokes. Sometimes he will turn around, less than a minute after my father has delivered one, and repeat the line word-for-word back to me. Other times he will simply tag himself into the story. Observe, a typical dinnertime exchange:

Dad: “Butternut made a mess in the living room again.”

Brad: “Same.” Full Article »

The Remote Metropolis of Strange Objects

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Scope Correspondent
Start at the sun and travel out. At first, the view from our spaceship window is familiar. First there’s Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars in neat succession, then the thin smattering of rock and metal we know as the asteroid belt. Gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus follow, and way out on the end there is Neptune, shining bright and deadly blue.

But we’re not finished yet. Past there is a vast and icy expanse, nearly as long from end to end as the distance from Neptune back to the sun. Here, thousands of chunks of stuff float free, frozen solid at temperatures more than 300 degrees below zero. We still don’t know the half of what’s floating in this remote metropolis of strange objects.

For centuries, the space beyond Neptune had seemed like a ghost town, stretching out eerie and empty for miles upon miles. There were no planets or asteroids as far as we could see. Astronomers couldn’t figure out why the place was so deserted. Perhaps there really was nothing. Perhaps there were little objects too faint for us to make out. Maybe there had only been objects there once upon time, weak little rocks that got hoovered up by the mighty gravitational pull of a nearby planet. Full Article »

Missing Link for the Great White Shark?

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Scope Correspondent
A treasure map, an ancient jaw, an old scientific hunch. These might be the ingredients to solving a century-long dispute about the origins of the great white shark.

For years, researchers have been divided on this topic. Some argued that the great white descended from the broad-toothed mako, while others maintained that it was clearly related to the megatooth. Now, paleontologist Dana Ehret has proposed a new species that makes a powerful link between the broad-toothed makos and the great white. “The idea has been around for a while, but we haven’t had the specimens to show it,” says Ehret.

Ehret’s investigation began when fellow paleontologist Gordon Hubbell donated his extensive private fossil collection to the University of Florida. Among Hubbell’s boxes was a rare find: the intact jaw of an ancient, big-toothed shark. Full Article »

In Canada, a New Charge Is in the Air

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Scope Correspondent
A man drives his car into a garage, parks it, and walks away.

Meanwhile, a magnetic gear on the ground starts to spin. This causes other, similar gears inside of the car to turn too, generating electric power in a battery. When the driver comes back four hours later, his car will be fully charged—all without the use of any wires or cords.

“It’s as if the magnets are coupled together by a magical rubber belt that you can’t see,” explains physicist Lorne Whitehead.

Wireless chargers can be helpful for electric car owners, who sometimes forget to plug in their car overnight. The chargers would also free drivers from dealing with messy or tangled cords.

This particular variety, pioneered by Whitehead’s research team at the University of British Columbia, is the newest attempt to make wireless connection easy. The team hopes that their chargers’ simple design, in which magnets rotate one another from a distance, may find its way into a number of different devices in the near future. Full Article »

You Have (Not) Died of Dysentery: One Man’s Encounter with Contaminated Water in World War I

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Scope Correspondent

Ohio surgeon Vergel Heber Seargent had an unusual request.

“You all remember Curel and what happened to us there,” began his typewritten letter to John Ely Burchard. The two men had served together in a mobile hospital during World War I—Seargent as a medical student, Burchard as an ambulance driver. Now, in June 1942, Burchard was a successful MIT architecture professor and a combat scientist for the United States government.

But Seargent was not writing to reminisce about battlefield experiences, or to reconnect with his old army buddy, or to discuss the ongoing Second World War.

Instead, Seargent wanted to wax nostalgic about diarrhea.

“No one could forget those days and nights of illness when typhoid and dysentery made life for us a burden, and an awful nuisance when we had to change our underwear and had no clean suits of it to change into!” he wrote. “How could anyone forget the speed with which we had to leave those barn-lofts, slide down steep and broken ladders, and do a Marathon out toward the latriny suburbs above the church, in the dark and drippy darkness of a French winter night?” Full Article »

Keep My Face Out of It

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Scope Correspondent

To help keep brain scans anonymous, scientists have developed a way to erase your face.

Many medical imaging techniques preserve a ghostly outline of a person’s facial features. As more and more research data gets shared online, some scientists worry that experimental subjects will be recognized by their brain scans. That concern is amplified by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which mandates the protection of patient privacy. Additionally, many grant-giving foundations require researchers to share their experimental data online, making subject confidentiality a priority.

Now, a new computer program promises to remove all identifying characteristics without damaging any of the important scientific information. “When you start sharing a lot of data, the chance of being recognized increases,” explains Mikhail Milchenko, a computer scientist at the Washington University School of Medicine. “The problem is extracting the data without interfering with the actual tissue that researchers are interested in.” Full Article »

Hitching a Ride Toward Earth

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Scope Correspondent

Picture this: Some bacteria are taking a ride through the universe. They travel by rock, safely encased inside one about the size of your average preschooler. For tens of millions of years, the little organisms hurtle from solar system to solar system at only 200 miles per hour, a glacial speed by space standards. Then suddenly, one day—incoming!—they land on their new home: prehistoric Earth, perfectly primed to harbor life for the first time.

This story of life commuting by meteorite is known as panspermia, and it’s one hypothesis of what might have happened during our planet’s formative years. However, many aspects of the theory have long remained uncertain, such as how the itinerant rocks would have been caught by Earth’s gravitational pull. Full Article »

Internet Users Helping Conduct a Major Marine Study

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Scope Correspondent

Ordinary people are giving a hand to science’s biggest study ever of the ocean floor.

Using a website called Seafloor Explorer, internet users can help catalog the density of specific animal populations along the northeast continental shelf. Knowing where fish, sea stars, scallops, and crustaceans live today will help future scientists understand how these populations shift over the years.

Seafloor Explorer is an example of “citizen science,” an emerging research trend that relies on the input of hundreds or even thousands of non-scientist volunteers. This approach helps scientists deal with unusually large volumes of information.

Though the site has only been live since September 13, it has already uncovered important information. Several users have spotted a possible new species, a tube-dwelling worm with black and white stripes. For now, the scientists have taken to calling the animal a “convict worm.” Full Article »