Vijee Venkatraman

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Scientist Dads Step Up

The Human Genome Project officially came to a close in June 2003. For Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis program at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, the event was a professional milestone....

Tangible Media Group, MIT, Cambridge, MA USA

Smartphone add-on will bring eye test to the masses

HAVING trouble reading your cellphone's screen? If that's because you need glasses, your phone itself could be used tell you what strength lenses you need? Ramesh Raskar of the Camera Culture group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devised a method of providing basic...

18th century Painters give Photographers new Perspective

Wide-angle lenses are great for taking dramatic photographs with a big scenic sweep, but they've got a big weakness too – they distort objects towards the edge of the frame. Now software can make wide-angled digital photos with perfect perspective, thanks to a secret of...

Time to Hire A Housekeeper?

This article made the Best of Science Careers 2010. It stirred up a lot of debate and readers pretty much demanded the follow-up which was fun to write. When Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, learned that she had...

Conventions of Scientific Authorship

Pardis Sabeti published her first scientific paper when she was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her name had appeared in acknowledgment sections before, but that was the first time she was listed as an author -- and she was first on the...

Of Math & The Monkey God

Centum is Latin for hundred. I don’t know if Italians use the word anymore, but some people in India still do. To them, centum is what a smart kid would score on a math test. In the middle class neighborhood where I grew up, many...