When hunting down the origins of the solar system, it’s all in the Belt

In 1930, a 23-year-old self-taught astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh saw something move in the sky. Working for Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Tombaugh had spent the last ten months photographing tiny patches of the night sky, taking one picture of each individual location then another of the same location several days later. Using a device called a blink comparator, which could rapidly flip from one photo to the next, Tombaugh spotted an object that seemed to jump between the pictures. On March 13, 1930, Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of the dwarf plant that would later be called Pluto. Full Article »

Winds of change are coming, and they’re bringing poised to upend entire ecosystems. Over the last 30 years, average surface wind speeds over areas in Europe, Central Asia, Eastern Asia and North America have slowed by about 10 percent. The potential effects of “global stilling” could affect land, air and aquatic systems worldwide.

New research published in Ecology illuminates what, exactly, global stilling could mean for the hunters and hunted of the insect world. For predators, stilling winds make it easier to chow down, says Brandon Barton, the University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoc researcher who authored the study.

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In 1888, a thirty-three-year-old MIT professor poured a glass of water, held it up for a class of young civil engineers to see, and over the course of an hour struck terror in the hearts of his listeners.

“He would scare us to death by saying that [the water] contained enough germs of typhoid fever to give the disease to a thousand people…,” wrote former student George C. Whipple. The professor then eased tensions by showing how engineering methods could be used to make water safe to drink. Full Article »

If you want to save California fish, give them water say the experts. In an effort to save fish populations threatened by the drought, a new study identifies dams where water flow could potentially be increased to help certain fish thrive. In a paper published in the October 15th edition of BioScience, researchers at the University of California Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences identified 181 California dams that could adjust water flows in order to restore populations of fish that rely on specific flow patterns to survive. Full Article »

Pet owners rely on their furry friends for love and support, but many know very little about what their pets are fed, and with good reason. Commercial pet food labels can be tough to decipher and since pets need a different balance of proteins and nutrients than people, it’s hard to know if an animal is eating what they should. Here are four things you may not know about what your pet eats (and what it should be eating). Full Article »

On a sunny day in 2009, a crew from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo plucked a 3,000-year-old mummy from its glass case, carried it out of the museum and across the parking lot, and loaded it, coffin and all, into a tractor trailer equipped with a CT scanner and a team of eager American cardiologists. Six years later, that scan, along with data from 136 other mummies from across the globe, are helping modern man fight one of his most deadly nemeses—coronary disease. Full Article »

MIT is a school that belongs to someone else, though to whom I’m not sure. When I got accepted here, I was fairly certain it was a mistake. Even days after the acceptance e-mails went out, when science writing program director, Tom Levenson, called to confirm that I actually got in, I had to put him on hold so I could freak out. Months later, I still haven’t told many of my friends, mainly because there’s a small piece of me that believes that a highly knowledgeable group of admissions reps somehow switched my application with someone else’s and will one day swoop down to take it back.

Here are some things I’ve learned about Impostor Syndrome since being at MIT—I.S. disproportionately affects women, it’s rampant at nearby Harvard Business School where about 75 percent of students felt like they were accidentally admitted, and it’s a thing that affects an almost intimidating number of top achievers in their field, from Fortune 500 CEOs to Supreme Court Justices to Pulitzer-Grammy-Tony Award-winning badasses. Even the phenoms feel like phonies. Full Article »