Vijee Venkatraman

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A Biological Battery

Cambridge, MA (November, 2012) 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...

Starry-Eyed Astronomer no more

"Curiosity Rover Lands 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,...

The “Raman Effect”

Cambridge, MA, 2012 Abha Sur is part of the humanities faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A physical chemist by training, she taught this subject and also published several papers on laser spectroscopy, her field of specialization. Then, the focus of her research shifted,...

YouTube at the Bench

As a graduate student at Princeton University, Moshe Pritsker tried in vain to grow a culture of embryonic stem cells using instructions from the methods section of a journal article. A colleague with more bench experience tried and also failed. Finally, Pritsker flew to Edinburgh...

Those TAs with Thick Accents

Progress has been made in recent decades on ensuring that foreign graduate students at American universities have sufficient facility in the English language that they're most likely to be teaching in. The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), or the comparable IELTS exam,...

What’s that smell?

Eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath,” a Shakespearean character entreats actors in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Alliums are aromatics, eaten precisely for their smelly qualities. But what if you’re forbidden onions and garlic for life? Some vegetarians...