In the Media

"As the cells get older, they acquire clumps of proteins and extra pieces of DNA, but when Angelika Amon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues tracked spores from old and young yeast cells they found that such abnormalities disappeared, meaning all spores had the same lifespan."

"As a teenager in Costa Rica, Franklin Chang-Diaz had an improbable goal: becoming an American astronaut. Ultimately, he would fly a record seven shuttle missions and today wants to fly to Mars."

"The simple Rubik’s Cube is a harder problem than most people realize. Using the currently provided best algorithm for solving the cube, for example, would take the computer you’re reading this on now about 35 years to perform."

"At the same time, communities emerge that have little to do with geographic boundaries. While some follow state lines, others split states in half or combine them."

"The water-filled bowls, when rubbed with a leather-wrapped mallet, exhibit a lively dance of water droplets as they emit a haunting sound. Now slow-motion video has unveiled just what occurs in the bowls; droplets can actually bounce on the water's surface."

"Ted Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I recently completed a detailed technical study of the proposed missile defense system. Our main conclusion was that the system as planned would 'result in an apparent paradox.'"

"It's definitely the coolest liquid trick I've seen since the bouncing shampoo demonstration a few years back."

"Barzilay found that putting a machine-learning system to work on Civ gave it a victory rate of 46 percent, but that when the system was able to use the manual for the game to guide the development of its strategy, it rose dramatically to 79 percent."

"Only the most hardcore puzzle-solvers ever go beyond the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's cube, attempting much larger ones."

"Back then, grandmothers didn’t e-mail, and Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones didn’t exist. Teens argued with their parents about watching too much TV, not whether they could text all night long. Politicians lost their jobs for real-life sex scandals, not virtual ones."

"You will learn a lot from 'For the Love of Physics': How to see rainbows in the shower and fogbows in the fog (car headlights; pull over); how to give yourself a halo; how to make a battery with a potato, a penny, a nail and a couple of wires."

"The smell of public activism wafted across this year's Knight Civic Media conference at MIT."

"Tickle a particle here, and its partner should instantly dance, no matter how far away it had traveled."

"We have all encountered the problem. You visit a site and suddenly a serious and convincing looking pop-up appears on your screen to tell you that your system has a virus on it. Most people just ignore them, but a few users are so scared that they pay."

“It’s not about stitching devices together, it’s about stitching people together,” Borovoy told the crowd.