In the summer of 2008, when Wired magazine ran a cover story titled “The End of Science,” former Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson wrote, “The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There’s no reason to cling to our old ways. It’s time to ask: What can science learn [...]

Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at UW, believes that data-driven discovery will become the norm, as he told Science Careers in a recent interview. This new environment, he says, will create and reward researchers (like Loebman) who are well versed in both the methodologies of their specific fields and the applications of data science. He calls such people “pi-shaped” because they have two full legs, one in each camp. “All science is fast becoming what is called data [...]

Even a graduate student working on a pressing, real-world problem needs diversions. That fall, Noah Wilson-Rich went to the Topsfield agricultural fair, an annual event in Essex County, Massachusetts. Naturally, he was drawn to the Bee House and its observational hives. Local honey was on sale, and apiarists were on hand to talk about what they do. The young entomologist—whose knowledge about insects had so far come largely from textbooks—put his name on the sign-up sheet for a beekeeping course. Before long, he was a [...]

Susmita Mohanty, the founder of India’s first private space company, Earth2Orbit, wants India to claim bigger piece of the space-launch pie.She is CEO of Earth2Orbit, which recently launched its first client satellite. An aerospace entrepreneur and spaceship designer, she has worked at NASA and Boeing, and holds a PhD in aerospace architecture How active is India’s space programme? The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which was founded in 1969, launches rockets, builds and uses satellites extensively for earthly applications and has recently started planetary exploration. [...]

In the acknowledgements section of NW, her 2012 bestseller, Zadie Smith thanked a computer application called “Freedom” for “creating the time” she needed to finish the book. It may be the highest-profile printed acknowledgment of a computer program in a work of fiction—The New York Times put NW on its list of the ten best books of 2012—and Smith is not alone in her admiration. The Economist called Freedom “the virtual equivalent of retiring to a remote getaway, or going on a writers’ retreat, to [...]

Here is a picture that represents the gestation of Project Prakash. In order to get a first-hand sense of childhood blindness in India, Prof. Pawan Sinha visited a few places in the country, distant from the ambit of urban medical care facilities. Here he is working in a village with a young girl who gained sight in one eye at the age of 7 years. She is 11 years old in this picture. Also seen in the picture is Dr. Asim Sil, an ophthalmologist who [...]

The year was 1969. F. C. Kohli had just computerized control of the power grid serving the city of Mumbai (then known as Bombay.) It had been an impressive feat for him as general manager of Tata Electric, a sign he was well on his way to leading the company. But the Tata Group, India’s largest conglomerate, had other plans for Kohli. He was asked to help get Tata Consultancy Services, its fledgling information technology services company, off the ground as its general manager. “TCS was [...]

Frugal Indian housewives, who extract the very last traces of condiments from unyielding bottles and jars, will be the first to appreciate the genius of LiquiGlide, which Time magazine has named one of the “Best Inventions of the Year 2012.” Prof. Kripa Varanasi’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a super-slippery, non-toxic coating for the insides of food containers, so these surfaces will concede the stored condiment down to the last drop. No scraping, rinsing or special maneuvers required. “And the compound is safe [...]

Plugging into sources of energy within our body — such as heat, internal motion or metabolites — to power implanted medical devices has long been the goal of biomedical engineers. Now researchers based in Cambridge, Massachusetts have demonstrated that a sensing device embedded in the ear can be powered by the ear’s own electrochemical battery. Our auditory mechanism picks up external sounds and sends information to the brain in the form of neural signals. When the sound wave hits the ear, the eardrum vibrates in [...]

“Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars.” This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt, she discovered the Kuiper belt, vastly increasing the number of known objects in the solar system. At the same time, her research helped reduce the number of planets in our solar system to eight. Yes, she shares responsibility for [...]