I am going to be keeping a close eye on science-related news and events around Boston, and reporting my summaries here, hopefully on a regular basis. If there is something interesting going on at your institution that you think I should attend (note: I will never complain about getting out of the office), or read about, please do let me know. Without further ado, the following bits are the Boston science news that I dug up over last week! Anna
Scientists at the New England Aquarium are blogging their way through an expedition to the El Bajo Seamount (from Wikipedia: a seamount is “a mountain rising from the ocean seafloor that does not reach to the water’s surface”) in the Sea of Cortez, carried out as part of a National Geographic magazine article. The team of researchers, photographers, and conservationists are SCUBA diving and taking a 1500 submarine down 1000 ft twice daily to explore the biodiversity of the seamount, or a mountain on the sea floor that does not reach the top of the water, or and In one post, Alan Dynner writes “If we were to step outside of our sub, there would be 1,617 pounds per square inch pressing on our bodies, and we would implode to the size of a pint of jello. Needless to say, we decided to stay inside the sub!”
Al Gore is scheduled to give a keynote address at Harvard University’s Sustainability Celebration on October 22. In the event invitation, Harvard President Drew Faust says that the event “will mark the official launch of our new greenhouse gas reduction effort and will also celebrate Harvard’s broader environmental initiatives, including the critical role we play as a university in teaching and research in this area.” More details about the upcoming event and keynote are available on the green.harvard.edu site.
A bill drafted by an enterprising 16 year old who was turned away from his school’s blood drive because of his age, was signed into law yesterday by Governor Deval Patrick, as reported in the Boston Globe. The bill lowers the minimum age for donating blood from 17 to 16 and requires parental consent. The Red Cross supports the bill as recruiting donors young may help alleviate the blood shortage in blood banks and to “interest young people in becoming lifelong donors.”
The Broad Institute recently profiled one recipient of this year’s The NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which funds interdisciplinary or ”cutting-edge” research that may not be supported by traditional grant schemes. Aviv Regev, a computational biologist at the Broad, will apply this $2.5 million 5-year award toward characterizing “how biological networks change over time, including transient changes that occur over short periods, such as the course of disease or an organism’s lifespan, as well as permanent changes that take place over thousands and millions of years of evolution.” These studies will be both computational and experimental and will test the regulatory networks of humans and yeast.