Miscellaneous

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3D Printing Pills

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the manufacture of the world’s first 3D printed pill Spritam, a reformulation of the anti-epileptic seizure drug levetiracetam. In the late 1980s, Michael Cima, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, along with fellow MIT professor Emanuel Sachs invented the...

The Making of Life In the Death Zone

Starting in the early 1970s, two German boys—one from the East, one from the West—with binoculars around their necks spent their teenage years pacing either side of the insurmountable Iron Curtain, the “death zone,” looking for birds. Today, the former pen pals are striving to...

Kavli Awards Ceremony

[caption id="attachment_3321" align="alignleft" width="300"] pic credit: Kavli Foundation[/caption] This September, I was in Norway to attend the Kavli Prize Awards Ceremony. King Harald presented the million dollar award to scientists who've made important, or as they say seminal, contributions in these 3 fields: Nanotechnology, Neuroscience...

The Bigshot

Curious kids have been known to disassemble devices to see what makes them tick. How about letting them assemble something from its parts? If they can get the device to function, chances are they will understand the science behind it as well. This is the...

Mumbai is his Muse

Every big city has an ethos of its own: Paris (romance), New York (ambition), and Beijing (political power). “For Mumbai, that distinguishing trait would be jugaad,” says Parmesh Shahani. He translates the Hindi term as “innovatively making do with tremendous constraints.” Thanks to Mumbai’s energy...

Three Smart Bras

Did the Wonder Woman's bra confer any special protection on her? Was it good for anything more than, you know, the usual? I am not well up enough on my superhero comics to know the answer to this question, but here are three added-values bras...