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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Out in the cosmos trillions of miles away looms a planet one and a half times as large as Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Kepler 7-b, an exoplanet circling a neighboring star, cannot be seen directly with current instruments. And yet, scientists at MIT now insist that the planet is covered with swirling clouds. How do they know?

Two years ago, the team only had a small amount of data from NASA’s orbiting telescope Kepler (for which the planet is named), which picks up pinpricks of light reflected from other solar systems. The Kepler telescope tracked Kepler 7-b’s orbit by recording its transit pattern –measurements of light at every orbital phase—as it circled its own star. Scientists noticed a region on Kepler 7-b was reflecting an unusual amount of light; though with limited information there was no way pinpoint whether it was clouds causing the reflections, Rayleigh scattering (the same phenomena that refracts light in our atmosphere and turns our sky blue), or heat from thermal emissions. Full Article »

A pair of cheetah cubs, a brother and sister named Justin and Carmelita, has charmed Smithsonian National Zoo visitors in Washington D.C. since their public debut in July 2012. The eleven-month old cats have shed their baby fuzz for sleek orange fur patterned with black spots. Yet despite their adult stature, the cats still act like rambunctious youngsters, chasing each other around their pen and playfully wrestling.

This is all good for now – but in a year’s time these young cats will be taken off exhibit, just like their parents before them, and started down parallel paths to confront their destiny as genetically robust cheetahs, sired to save their species from extinction.

The world has undergone a massive cheetah drain over the last century largely due to loss of natural habitats and conflicts with humans. Wild cheetah populations have plunged 90 percent, from around 100,000 cheetahs in the early 1900s to roughly 10,000 today. The situation is further complicated by low genetic variability among the species. Saving the cheetahs from extinctions means not only increasing numbers, but also ensuring the new population is genetically healthy. Full Article »

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 research illuminates why getting scared is good for your soul¬—revealing why BASE jumpers may be less crazy than you think.

A recent study found that extreme sports athletes, defined as those who partake in “activities where the most likely outcome of a mismanaged mistake or accident is death,” were not fearless, but utilized fear to stimulate positive outcomes and personal growth.

The study examined fifteen subjects, ten men and five women, who were involved in an extreme sport, such as big-wave surfing, extreme skiing, waterfall kayaking, extreme mountaineering, solo rope-free climbing or BASE jumping—launching from buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), or earth (cliffs), parachute equipped. The study debunked the bravado persona associated with extreme sports athletes, noting that participants are not fearless at all. “If you want the truth, if you want a true slogan for these kinds of sports it is ‘Oh please don’t let me die!’” said one BASE jumper from the Queensland University of Technology study. Full Article »

But, according to linguists, there are certain words that are so basic and essential, they just won’t budge. By examining 200 words thought to be resistant to change across 103 languages (from the ancient Tocharian to the more familiar Spanish), an interdisciplinary team of researchers came up with a map that shows how the Indo-European language family may have spread over time.

To do this, the University of Auckland team looked for similarities in words across the 200-word list that Michael Dunn, the group’s linguist, said has been the standard since the 1950’s or 60’s. 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 »

Demaine goes to the furnace to heat the piece up again and at this point, this malleable blob can be transformed into a cup or a bowl, a beaker or a flask, as they were made throughout history. He decides to make a cup and blows into the pipe again, expanding the bubble until it is more air than glass. After transferring the piece to another pipe, he opens up the glass bubble with a tool resembling oversized tweezers, all the while being careful to make sure that the walls don’t collapse, heating frequently so the piece doesn’t crack, because glass, like many things, requires constant attention. After careful manipulation, the glass has taken on the shape of a cup and Demaine knocks the piece off the rod to be slowly cooled down in an annealing kiln. 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 »