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The Surveyor of Jungles

Priya Davidar grew up in picturesque Ooty, a town in southern India with the misty blue mountains of the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, as its backdrop. In the 1950s, the family lived in an isolated hillside bungalow, and the babysitter told the children ghost...

The Scent Expert

We humans use a combination of our five senses — sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste — to navigate the everyday world. Among those who operate without the benefit of one or more of these senses, the blind and the deaf have our immediate sympathy....

A Computer Scientist In a Lab Coat

In 1994, the world was on the verge of the dot-com boom and Ron Weiss, a graduate student in the computer science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, had just earned a master’s degree for his work on a Web application...

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...

Embedded Electronics Bring Pop-Up Books to Life

Move over Kindle, there's a new type of electronic book on the scene – and this one's got pop-ups. The Electronic Popable book, developed by the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, has electronic circuitry embedded in its pages that transforms...