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. Read more
MIT houses a lot of futuristic-looking devices, and some actually focus on technology that – at this point — we can only imagine. One would be the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a warehouse-sized, magnetized device that scientists are using to do research on fusion energy. This tokamak, one of three in the U.S., looks like a 20-foot high water tank overrun by pipes, vents, pumps and monitoring devices. Read more
Patricia Kohl, of the University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, is known for her work on how early exposure to language alters the brain. She comes to Harvard for two talks this week as part of the Mind/Brain/Behavior Distinguished Lectures. She begins Tuesday with “The Linguistic Genius of Infants: Early Learning and Brain Plasticity.” … Read more
Harvard on Green cities: … Read more
MIT’s Science Journalism Tracker does it for you. Here’s a sample. Read more
The concept of the First Night festival took hold in Boston 35 years ago. This year, most of the events lean toward the cultural, but the celebration also offers free admission to the Museum of Science Boston for the first 500 button holders. (The $15 buttons get you into most of the events, which are spread all over town.) The Children’s Museum offers admission to all button holders. Read more
Doing Christmas? Looking for a gift for the pinhead on your list? Check out these Cambridge, Mass. options. … Read more
Don’t worry about the bird flu. We’ve got it covered. Like everyone else, we’re focused on outer space: From The New York Times: In what amounts to a kind of holiday gift to the cosmos, astronomers from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday that they had discovered a pair of planets the size of Earth orbiting a distant star. The new planets, one about as big as Earth and the other slightly smaller than Venus, are the smallest yet found beyond the solar system. The Globe has an excellent graphic and story: Even with these two planets, the team had difficulties … Read more
Michael Specter of The New Yorker has a piece on Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center . Read more
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