What if materials in nature could be harnessed to design smarter technologies? Join MIT Professor Angela Belcher at the December 7 SciCafe, Material World: How Bioengineering and Nanotechnology Could Save the Planet, to learn how she creates more efficient technologies in clean energy, electronics, and medical research using materials from nature. Applying biology, engineering, nanotechnology, and materials science to her work, Dr. Belcher has created virus-enabled batteries and more efficient solar cells. Belcher will bring examples of her research to Wednesday’s event, including the first biological battery her team produced as well as a shell of an abalone, a relative of the oyster and the inspiration for many of her projects.
How does your research bridge various disciplines?
My team draws from chemistry, electrical engineering, biological engineering, and materials science, among other disciplines. What we care about is clean manufacturing and engineering efficient devices. To me, everything is a material. Proteins, DNA, conducting materials, parts of solar cells—all are materials, and we put those components together to try to self-assemble more efficient devices. We don’t stop and say we will look at as these as strictly materials scientists or biologists. We ask: what is the overall performance we are looking for? And can we apply some of biology’s expertise from billions of years of evolution to create an electronic device?
You were named “Research Leader of the Year” by Scientific American in 2006. What was the research that led to this honor?
That was based on my work genetically engineering organisms, mostly viruses and other simple structures, to be able to grow materials for electronics such as batteries. Though it seems like a bit of a strange connection, our group focuses on using biological mechanisms to grow inorganic material structures that could be made into important devices for use in everyday life. By looking to biology, we are able to create a more environmentally friendly, non-toxic design. Read more »
Museum scientists John Sparks and David Gruber have traveled the world in search of bioluminescent and biofluorescent organisms. On Wednesday, November 2,at 7 pm, the pair will host November’s SciCafe, Alive and Glowing: Adventures in Bioluminescence and Biofluorescence, and shed light on the way these phenomena have appeared throughout the tree of life. Dr. Sparks will also curate the Museum’s upcoming special exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, which opens March 31. Below, Sparks and Gruber answer a few questions about their enlightening research.
What’s the difference between bioluminescence and biofluorescence?
John Sparks: For an organism to biofluoresce, it must be illuminated by—in other words, absorb photons from—an external source of light. Turn off the light source, and there’s no fluorescence. In bioluminescence, the light-producing reaction takes place inside of an organism, requiring no external source of light. Some organisms combine both bioluminescence and biofluorescence, such as the jellyfish Aequorea. Read more »
A number of the Museum’s after-hours series were recently featured in TheNew York Timesarticle “Staying Up Late in Museums.”
Reporter James Barron noted the Museum’s history of offering stellar programs “since long before [the movie] ‘Night at the Museum,’” highlighting past SciCafes, including last summer’s Hunting the Hidden Reptiles of Madagascar. Check out the next SciCafe, which will feature bioluminescence experts John Sparks and David Gruber, on Wednesday, November 2.
On the first Wednesday of every month, the Museum hosts inquisitive minds for cocktails and conversation about the latest science topics at SciCafe. The popular after-hours series returns on October 5 with an evening devoted to scientific evidence about the nature of race and “racial” differences led by Museum Curators Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, who recently co-authored a book on the subject.
Dr. DeSalle, an evolutionary geneticist, and Dr. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, will discuss the lack of biological evidence for racial boundaries among human populations, the evolutionary processes that account for distinctions among Homo sapiens, and more. They recently answered a few questions on the topic.
Why is race a scientific myth? What has science or culture done to perpetuate it?
Tattersall: “Race” is a within-species phenomenon. And within a species there are two possible processes, the effects of which are diametrically opposed: diversification and re-integration. The human diversity we see today, and its distribution, is a product of both, producing a messy picture that is not helpfully clarified by trying to recognize discrete “races.”
DeSalle: Why race as a biological concept keeps raising its ugly head is a question that is addressed by biologists, sociologists, and historians all the time. Almost all racialist scientific approaches have been detrimental to our understanding of human cultural variation and have led in some instances to the worst atrocities committed in the name of science. Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Nazism, and the IQ Debate all stemmed from scientific racialism. Read more »
After more than 200 years of exploration, new species of snakes, chameleons, geckos, and skinks are still being discovered in Madagascar, the fourth-largest island in the world. At the next SciCafe on Wednesday, June 1, Christopher Raxworthy, associate curator in the Department of Herpetology who has spent decades working in Madagascar,will discuss the mix of modern technologies—including satellite imagery and DNA sequencing—and “muddy boots” field biology to remote parts of the island that is making discovery possible today.
In this video, produced in 2010 and shot partly in the field, Raxworthy describes surveying chameleons in Madagascar.
