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Cranberry Harvest Celebration
… canned to zest up roasted turkeys, Native Americans used the indigenous North American fruit for food, medicine, and … with an eye toward commercial use by Captain Henry Hall, of Dennis, Massachusetts. Today, the fruit is the state’s … wagon to the bogs of the A.D. Makepeace Company to watch machines whisk the water to loosen berries, which then float …
Issue: September-October 2016
Synthetic Biology’s New Menagerie
… In the summer of 2009, a team of Cambridge University … prize at that year’s International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, in which high-school and … “Engineering biology for the good of the world.” No surprise, then, that synthetic biology has exerted such an …
Issue: September-October 2014
The Modern World Reconceived
… Who are the protagonists of The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New … rich through entrepreneurship and the funding of enterprise, of the officials of states and government who see …
Issue: May-June 2023
Does Money Matter?
… These days , super PACs (political action committees) don’t … support from one, while his money-flush rivals dropped off one after another. Jeb Bush fizzled out in February when the $100 million spent by his Right to Rise super PAC failed to generate liftoff. Marco Rubio threw …
Issue: July-August 2016
From the Archives: The Wired Society
… The Internet’s applications, the fortunes made (Amazon, … victim, here, from the dot-com bust at the beginning of the millennium), and now the rising threats to privacy, … empower consumers or further concentrate commercial enterprise? And how will society cope with abuse of the new …
Off the Shelf
… A Sea of Glass, by Drew Harvell (University of California, $29.95). The Blaschkas, of glass-flowers fame, first modeled marine … in late medieval Marseille and Lucca reveals the rise of the modern consumer economy, with valuables enmeshed …
Issue: July-August 2016
Off the Shelf
… This learned, brilliantly written account explains how the European avant-garde came to captivate the American elite—as now embodied in that “hegemonic empire of art and money,” the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a … “10 dangerous trends” from “the mother of all debt crises” and the demographic time bomb (aging) to the “coming …
Issue: November-December 2022
Chapter & Verse
… source for a story about two patients so frustrated by their psychiatrist’s silence in response to whatever they said that they conspired to get a rise out of him. They made up an elaborate dream full of bizarre …
Issue: July-August 2014
Brainy Women
… The human brain rests in cupped hands as easily as a cantaloupe. It is softer and spongier to the touch, of course, and its surface … contemplated the brain and wondered not only how it gives rise to everything we feel, know, accomplish, and create, …
Issue: May-June 2002
Hope-builder
… to Santiago, Chile — to find his current family, but the one he has settled into is a doozie. Little about growing up east of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or concentrating in chemistry … up residence with 43 children at Hogar Esperanza ("House of Hope"), an orphanage at the base of the Andean foothills. …
Issue: July-August 2004
Mapping the Ganges
… In the summer of 2005, Anthony Acciavatti, M.Arch. ’09, and his … in rural, north-central India, not far from the sacred city of Varanasi. They had stopped to watch the “soupy, brown … future of the country’s water supply, though, he is not surprised that he has yet to hear back about those ideas. Indian …
Issue: January-February 2016
Tying Knots
… to create decent housing for 160 struggling families. In the center of Chile's sprawling capital city, students at the College … glass office towers of Providencia and Vitacura, the high-rise apartment blocks in fashionable Las Condes, north and …
Issue: May-June 2004
Anna Jacobson Schwartz
… Anna Jacobson Schwartz had been a full-time economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for more than a decade when she … made it possible to “get downtown to use the [calculating] machines.” Unlike most NBER economists, Schwartz was part of …
Issue: November-December 2023
The RoboBee Collective
… One day nearly a decade ago, Gu-Yeon Wei was walking the corridors of Harvard’s newly established School of Engineering and … a page in a children’s pop-up book. Manufacturing complex machines with tiny, integrated piezoelectric motors in this …
Issue: November-December 2017
The Cell’s Power Plant
… at Harvard for medical school and found that New England weather was like nothing he’d known growing up in Texas, he was … snow. When he arrived, she gave him a towel to dry off. Then, as she made dinner, the storm became a blizzard, … stress of physical exercise. This result didn’t surprise him, because of the numerous adaptive responses to …
Issue: November-December 2018