Hannah Cheng

Scope Correspondent
hayche@mit.edu
Hannah Cheng was composing silly little poems about the (literal) birds and bees at the age of six. However, after many years of practice and proper instruction from true gurus of the art, she began to feel burnt out and uninspired by pure academics. She decided to minor in environmental science on a whim and found that catching and identifying aquatic insects was an entirely fun and rejuvenating break from hunching over the computer keyboard. Obsessing over the mating habits of leopard slugs and dragonflies rekindled her love for the natural world, and reading research papers sparked an interest in dedicating her writing skills to science. To get a handle on what the laboratory world felt like, she became a polysomnographic technician, gluing electrodes to people’s scalps and reading their brain waves. After spending a year processing raw data, she returned to the writing world, invigorated and in style, by practicing science writing in New Orleans.

Seeking Unobtanium

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Scope Correspondent

In James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, humans are willfully exploiting the planet Pandora for a metal subtly named “unobtainium.” What could be so desirable that humans would theoretically be willing to destroy an alien culture to possess it?

As nerdy chatroom discussions have revealed, the fictional substance unobtainium is superconductive at room temperature—and the search for an equivalent is actually taking place.

Superconductivity means that a material (a metal, ceramic, or oxide) exhibits exactly zero electrical resistance. All materials naturally pose some resistance against the flow of electricity through their atomic structure, and unfortunately the slightest resistance causes some energy to be lost. The monstrous heat your ancient laptop shunts into your lap, for example, is waste from this resistance. An electrical current introduced to a superconductive material, on the other hand, would be used to its full potential without frying anybody’s eggs. Full Article »

Search for the Loneliest Whale

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Scope Correspondent
Somewhere off the west coast of British Columbia wanders a whale—at least, his voice can be heard there. He appears to be alone.

Simply by eavesdropping, scientists have deduced a few details about this whale. He swims the cold waters of the North Pacific, probably in pursuit of food and love. In all likelihood, he is a baleen whale: a long, grey tanker with a pointed head and generous lower jaw. For food, he would chase clouds of plankton and tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill, gulping gallons of water into his mouth and pushing it all out through two long furry-looking plates sprouting from the roof of his mouth where one would expect teeth. These plates, called baleen, filter krill and other crustaceans out of the expelled water. Miraculously, these tiny creatures are all the sustenance this giant mammal needs to survive.

For love, he calls out in long, low moans. Each intonation lasts anywhere from five to fifteen seconds, and he waits up to thirty seconds between each cry, taking ten minute breaks between each song. He will sing like this for hours. His voice carries for miles, and any females nearby would surely take note of his voice’s strength and range, the variety of his repertoire, the duration of his song. In the murky dark where a whale can barely see its own tail, the quality of these musical elements should prove that he is a worthy mate.

Despite his efforts, he receives no reply. Meet 52 Hertz: the loneliest whale in the world. Full Article »

The Evolution of “Hack”

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Scope Correspondent
To ease freshman into the intensive world of MIT, Stephen C. Ehrmann, class president of 1971, completely rewrote the student handbook, formerly known as The Social Beaver. Originally an impersonal list of local services and conveniences, the revised “How to Get Around MIT” was a casual, easy-to-read record, “a survival guide written by students, for students.”

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 »

She F***ing Loves Science

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Scope Correspondent

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 »

And a Helping of Worms, Please

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Scope Correspondent

To run properly, our bodies require a good balance of rest, nutrients, minerals—and apparently some worms, if you want to make sure your immune system doesn’t overheat.

Using worms to treat inflammatory bowel diseases is looking good: a 2005 study saw that forty-three percent of thirty colitis patients treated with worms had decreased ulcers, while another 2005 study saw seventy-two percent of twenty-nine Crohn’s patients go into remission after two weeks of worm therapy.

The mechanisms behind these interesting results were recently explored in a mouse study conducted by Joel Weinstock, who had been one of the lead authors for the two 2005 human studies and is now at Tufts Medical Center. Understanding the mechanisms behind how worms seem to alleviate and protect against autoimmune diseases could open a brand new area of research and study, says Weinstock, if human clinical trials continue to build worm therapy’s case. Full Article »

Designing the Cat’s Pajamas

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Scope Correspondent

The cat’s pajamas might always be striped, but any cat owner knows there are different coat designs. Who—or what—is designing your kitten’s wardrobe?

As it turns out, a gene known as Taqpep cloaks tabby cats in stripes when functioning correctly. However, if the gene has mutated, the same species of tabby cat will instead sport irregular blotches.

The blotchy trait is recessive, so striped tabby cats still may carry the mutated gene and pass it to their offspring, the same way brown-eyed humans may carry the blue-eyed trait. The blue eyes or blotchy coat can only be visible if Junior gets the mutated gene from both Mum and Daddums.

Geneticist Stephen O’Brien, now based in Russia but whose previous lab in Maryland helped discover the gene, noted that the Taqpep gene is present in at least thirty-one separate feline species, but it affects coat patterns among those animals differently. Full Article »

New Way to Separate Oil from Water

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Scope Correspondent

A unique magnetic contraption offers a new way to pick a needle out of the haystack—if your needle is 500 barrels of crude oil and your haystack is the ocean.

Efficiently separating fluids with minimal cross-contamination to collect pure samples for re-use or experimentation has been a challenge with fluids like water and oil, and this new method could save time, effort, and resources. Quickly recovering oil from spills means we can clean the environment faster, while also extracting usable fuel that would have otherwise chemically dispersed into the environment.

Magnetically separating tiny particles from a stream is not new in biology or chemistry, and the advantages — including speed and ease of automation — are easy to see. Where isolating tumor cells from millions of healthy blood cells with radioactive labels could alone take several hours or days, using magnets for the same problem reduces processing time to 10-20 minutes. The speed allows biologists and chemists to create pure cell cultures for experiments faster and in larger quantities so that they can explore more possibilities with less effort.

In addition to saving time, magnetic separation is qualitatively efficient, as separated biological samples are generally 80-90 percent pure on the first run-through. The samples can be processed further to ensure minimal cross-contamination, so that the number of unknown variables and potential reactions is reduced when used practically or experimentally. Full Article »

Computer Games Help the Blind Navigate in the Real World

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Scope Correspondent

Blind people can create mental maps from playing a computer game, then use that spatial knowledge in the real world to navigate efficiently without assistance — better than people given explicit directions.

Comprehending unknown territory without aids currently remains a challenge for blind people, especially inside buildings where a smartphone’s GPS signal is unreliable. But using a custom-mapped computer game to explore an area can give blind people the autonomous navigation skills that technology has so far failed to provide, as shown in a recent Harvard study.

In the study, a group that had played a customized computer game and another group that had received specific directions in a guided virtual tour were asked to navigate the real-life building both of their simulations had been based on.

The participants first had to navigate from point A to point B, a task that both groups managed with an 80 percent success rate, showing that playing a game without actively memorizing directions was just as good as being given specific directions. Full Article »