May 2008
12 posts
One Less, But One at a Time
by Katelin Mirkin, Northwestern University Anyone who’s turned on a television in the past year has the Gardasil slogan down pat. “I want to be one less” chants a human kaleidoscope of female ethnicities as the commercial goes on to discuss statistics supporting Gardasil as an effective vaccine against cancer caused by human papillomavirus or HPV. Contrary to the many implications supplied by...
Networks, Information and Society
by Rohan Dixit, Northwestern University By this time in the Digital Age, many electronics consumers are familiar with Moore’s Law, even if not by name. The “law” comes from the observation that computer processing power tends to double every two years, an exponential trend. The implications of this exponential growth pattern are manifold, but we see its effects in our own lives when a new...
“We said that once we had finished sequencing the genome we would make it...”
– Craig Venter
New Urbanism : The Advent of Sustainable Urban...
By Andre Tartar, Carnegie Mellon University Industrialized and industrializing countries alike wake up every day to smoggier skies, rivers polluted by chemical runoff, countrysides marred by mountainous land dumps, and cities growing unchecked. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the United States, where the “inherited city” – represented by the New England town – has given way to the...
Knowledge Factories: Universities and the shift...
by Daniel Choi, University of Chicago Adorned on Leland Stanford Junior University’s school crest is a single pine tree surrounded by the words “Die Luft der Freiheit weht,” German for “The Wind of Freedom blows”. Under Stanford’s banner and those of many other academic institutions, however, there lies a possible threat to the very academic freedom declared. In 1973, Stanford University’s Stanley...
Microfinance and the Global Poverty Problem
By Michelle Tsao, Northwestern University Microcredit is a banking strategy for offering small, “micro” loans to poor clients for self-employment projects. This type of initiative has spread to diverse countries around the world and offers a new, proactive approach to fighting global poverty. Microfinance institutions are designed to meet the credit needs of impoverished people, and...
“Love is metaphysical gravity.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
1 tag
Geckos and Mussels Yield Bio-Inspired Adhesive
By Kristin Landry, Northwestern University Professor Phillip Messersmith and graduate student Haeshin Lee at Northwestern University have successfully merged the natural adhesives found in geckos and mussels to create a novel, reusable sticky product they dub ‘geckel’. While the concept seems like something straight from sci-fi, this substance combines the power of geckos to scamper up vertical...
