Steve Perrin Ph.D, is the CEO of the ALS Therapy Development Institute, a non-profit drug discovery company that combines pharma savvy, scientific inquiry and patient advocacy. Founded by Jamie Heywood (of Patients Like Me) after this brother was diagnosed with ALS, the company develops and screens potential ALS drugs. The process operates at an industrial scale: “Treatments of all kinds are considered and tested rigorously and rapidly.” ALS TDI is hosting a “Leadership Summit” in November
Here, Perrin offers some advice to new student scientists now settling into labs across Boston.
Science is truly an amazing discipline. Its impact on the lives of the world’s populations is evident, whether we are talking about the time of Socrates, Galileo, Newton, Einstein or a host of others. Read more
Friday’s inauguration of new MIT president L. Raphael Reif included all the usual pomp, plus some. Music for the event included a piece by a Senegalese drum ensemble and a performance of “A Rhumba for Raphael Reif” written by MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison. More below.
The Museum of Science offers free admission to college students. And, they come. Get our student ID and head over to College Night.
At BU, former Talking Head David Byrne and scientific celebrity Steven Pinker meet at BU to ponder the Question: Are We Born Musical?.
Tuesday
“Big Love: Monogamy and Promiscuity in the Animal Kingdom.” The Harvard students behind “Science in the News” will describe: some extraordinary mating systems employed by diverse creatures, from shorebirds to giant slugs, and lay out some of the fundamental principles that affect whether males and females have multiple mates or just one.” This part should be interesting: “Following the talk, there will be a short demonstration during which the scientists will introduce their specific work in the field and show some real data.
Thursday
Calling Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring a book not about science, but about “environmental advocacy in the form of fable and narrative.” Harvard hosts a panel on how the two meet.
Every September, Marc Abrahams dusts off his top hat, gathers up local Nobel prize winners and MCs science’s silliest night. This week, he’ll once again give out The IgNobel Awards. The winners are a closely held secret, but you can tune in to the Thursday webcast and be one of the first to know. Or, grab a ticket – if there are any left — and show up at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. And, if you need to get a bit more Iggy, check out Abraham’s new book — This Is ImprobableCheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens, and Other WTF Research —a collection of the columns from The Guardian.
One World Books photo
Q: Has the term “What was I thinking?” ever entered your mind while you were standing on the stage at the Ig Nobels?
No, because when the day arrives, we’ve been thinking long and hard (and who knows, maybe even well) about what might go wrong. The Ig Nobel ceremony is a complicated piece of engineering. We spend the year planning it, trying to foresee tiny and big fizzles (This is a la Murphy’s Law, the namers of which were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2003, with Edward Murphy’s son coming to the ceremony to accept on his father’s behalf.) We can rehearse some of it (the new mini-opera about the universe, for example), and plan to deal with the most likely mishaps. But we don’t know what most of the parts are going to do – especially the ten new Ig Nobel winners arriving that day from various continents, and the bunch of Nobel laureates who will hand out the prizes. We have limited control over them. We also know there will be little surprises from the 1100 audience members, each of whom realizes full well that this is their supreme opportunity to show off, in public, their own personal 90/10% mix of genius/lunacy. Read more
They abandoned the titles – such as “The Many Faces of Chocolate” — but they are still promoting the chemistry of cuisine at the Science and Cooking lectures at Harvard. This week sees a return visit from White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses.
Another jam-packed night, highlighted by the Ig Nobles, the hilarious, quirky annual spoof with skits, music and awards for research like the gas-mask/bra. Sanders Theater at Harvard. Get Iggy and get tickets – if any remain. If not, check out the Quantified Self meet-up at the Asgard Irish Pub & Restaurant 350 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge.
Saturday
Rockin’ with Raptors Festival – Celebrate the tenth anniversary of the George Robert White Environmental Conservation Center. Hike the trails, enjoy lively entertainment provided by Branches Steel Orchestra, visit the petting zoo, see up close and learn about live raptors from Blue Hills Trailside Museum, and check out the exhibits and displays in Boston’s greenest municipal building.
In addition to training writers from across the globe, the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT keeps an eye on what we all produce. The KS Journalism Tracker web site notes that, for the past six years, its writers have “commented on the effectiveness and balance of thousands of news stories.” The program recently lauched a redesiged web site, but the Tracker’s mission remains the same. Today it counts 30,000 hits a month, including many from Spanish-speaking readers interested in posts on Latin Amerian science journalism. The site hopes to offer the same service to Chinese-speaking science writers.
Earlier this week, Nature Boston talked Phil Hilts, the former New York Times reporter who runs the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT.
What is the thinking behind the Tracker?
Knight Science Journalism Program director Phil Hilts
(Charlie Petit’s) original idea was just to do a little round up of a bunch of stories. What he noticed was — science writers, while they know each other and see each other at meetings, they don’t really see each other’s work very much.
… He started getting into the idea that you could pick out a couple of good stories and identify them and do a little critique – and once in a while do a critique when something went wrong. (The posts) are all supposed to be relatively short. They’re starting to get a little too long and I’ve started complaining to (the writers.)…I like a mixed length and not too much analysis.
What’s the difference between an analysis and a critique?
My sense of analysis is that it tends to go pretty deep and long. I don’t really want deep and long.
Why not?
This is a blog and … (Readers) go to it because they’re interested in what is going on. … If you give them this large post, it’s going to quickly put them off. Once in a while, a little longer that’s fine. But mainly they want to jump on and see two or three or four items – here are some good stories or everybody is doing this story this way. Read more
Cinema versus Sous vide tonight. In Brookline, Harvard forensic psychiatrist Thomas G. Gutheil gives a talk before the film Se7en on, “the psychology of serial killers and issues of insanity and the law.” Two detectives “hunt for a serial killer who meticulously stages each murder based on one of the seven deadly sins.” Part of the Science on Screen series.
Across the river, Spanish brothers Joan Roca and Jordi Roca of El Celler de Can Roca return to Harvard for the Science and Cooking program. They’ve been called pioneers of technologies that have transformed cooking. They are joined but Salvador Brugués, co-author of the book Sous-Vide Cuisine. This video is from Joan Roca’s 2010 visit: Read more
As of April 13, 2012, Voyager 2 was 9.127 billion miles from Earth, beyond the orbit of Pluto. Voyager 2 is leaving the solar system at 36,000 miles per hour, or 1 light year per 18,600 years. So reports the MIT Space Plasma Group.
NASA
MIT will be among the institutions celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Voyager mission this week. The ship’s Plasma Science Experiment (PSE) is the work of the MIT group. Thirty-five years ago they put two instruments on Voyager 12 –“Plasma” or “Faraday” Cups. They’ve been collecting data on solar wind speed, density, temperature, and pressure ever since. According to the MIT Museum, the cups have sent data back every 160 seconds of its “Grand Tour” of the planets and beyond. They now post the data on the MIT web site; last year, the team published 8 papers
The site includes an animation of the spherical bubble created by solar wind called the heliosphere, that continually expands over the lifetime of the solar system. The MIT website also describes 1970s era time capsule that went into the ships — a phonograph record with music and images.”selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” Read more
Harvard’s popular food science lecture series is back. This session features two food writers, Dave Arnold, chef and Equipment & Kitchen Science editor at Food Arts and Harold McGee, an expert on food chemistry and a columnist for the New York Times. Read more
The message seemed kind of cryptic: Meet in the oak collection, north of Valley Road at the northern end of Oak Path. But, the term “collection” was the tip-off that this mob meeting would be more horticultural than clandestine.
The Arnold Arboretum, a 265-acre botanical garden run jointly by Harvard University and the city of Boston, now hosts what it called “Tree mobs.” Late on Thursday afternoon about 50 people wandered into the garden looking for the oaks. Some were guided by signs posted along the way that read “Join our Tree Mob. Casual learning in the landscape.” Others had scanned the QR code on the signs or the arboretum’s website for a GPS map that led the way to the oak-lined path.
(The codes on many of the garden’s plant labels –and the nod to the flash mob concept — reflect the Arboretum’s embrace of digital technology.) Read more
Recent comments on this blog
Science events this week: Talking heads, Rachel Carson and monogomy
Guest Post: Science is about passion. Find yours.
HIV Research: How the Berlin Patient led to the Boston patients