Category: Science & Tech

In the town of Alter do Chão, where my professor lived, traditional Paraense carimbó music dominated everyone’s social lives. As an undergraduate who was double-­majoring in music, I decided to join the town’s major carimbó group, Grupo Cobra Grande. Despite my rudimentary grasp of Portuguese, I knew that I could communicate with the group through music. With the help of offline Google Translate and charades, I managed to learn not only the intricate rhythms and dance moves involved in this traditional musical style, but also the meanings of the lyrics and the associated folklore. We began every rehearsal and performance with a song calling the mythical frog Muiraquitã into the Lago Verde lake to protect the town and the people from evil spirits. The dance moves in carimbó reflect stories about the famous Amazonian pink dolphin coming to land in the evenings to court young women—men wear hats to cover their dolphin spouts and dance in circles around the women like dolphins jumping in and out of the water. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I was lucky enough to return to Brazil two years later as a Fulbright scholar in Manaus, Amazonas, where I got to study natural rainforest materials such as curauá fibers and Marasmius yanomami fungi in the lab, research their traditional uses in artisanal crafts, and explore their potential as sustainable structural materials. I also volunteered at the Nobre Academia de Robótica, an organization that gives children from impoverished backgrounds, including Indigenous youths from the São Sebastião community, free access to education in coding, science, and technology. They learn to use drones for land surveillance and develop sensors to monitor environmental conditions, honoring their cultural legacy and extending it with technological capabilities. 

When I met a local clarinetist named Abner at the Manaus synagogue, he invited me to watch as he recorded music with Eliberto Barroncas, an art professor at a local university who played instruments he crafted from repurposed “found” objects such as cardboard tubes, rubber tires, and marbles. As Abner played the clarinet, Barroncas created a background that immersed the listener in the sounds of Amazonia: croaking frogs, flowing water, shaking leaves. Afterward, we discussed the interconnectedness of nature and music over coffee. Barroncas’s philosophy is that making music should come from the soul, as a tangible expression of one’s natural surroundings. This idea resonated with me, inspiring me to deepen the scope of my extracurricular research on eco-organology—the study of how instruments are connected to the natural world. I shared several of his quotes when I presented my research at the American Musicological Society annual conference in the fall of 2022.

Through my work with the Nobre Academia de Robótica, I also met the local music producer and arranger César Lima, who developed a virtual-reality app called “The Roots VR” to introduce users to over 100 Amazonian instruments. This app allows users to interact with a variety of these instruments in virtual settings, creating an accessible way for people worldwide to engage with and appreciate the rich musical heritage of the Amazon. His work demonstrates how modern technology can be harnessed to preserve and promote musical traditions.

“I told Fred that everyone needed to come to the Amazon. Everyone needed to taste the tingling jambú flower, drink suco de taperebá, and perform in the famous Teatro Amazonas opera house.”

I found myself sharing stories of these incredible people with my music friends at MIT and with Fred Harris, director of the MIT Festival Jazz Band, a group I joined as an undergrad. I told Fred that everyone needed to come to the Amazon. Everyone needed to taste the tingling jambú flower, drink suco de taperebá, and perform in the famous Teatro Amazonas opera house. We had to not just introduce other students to the music of the Amazon, but take them there so they, too, could collaborate with Indigenous performers. In the spring of 2023, Fred brought some 80 MIT student musicians, none of whom spoke Portuguese, to the Rio Negro in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. These students, along with approximately 20 staff, faculty, and guest artists, communicated with the locals through science and music.

The project Fred led, called “Hearing Amazônia,” was a testament to the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. Influenced by my experiences in the Amazon, and further inspired by guest artists Luciana Souza, Anat Cohen, and Djuena Tikuna, it culminated in a concert featuring Brazilian and Amazonian music influenced by the natural world. Working together, we created a musical narrative of the Amazon’s beauty and the looming threats it faces. We went on to perform it both at MIT and in the Amazon.

MIT VIDEO PRODUCTIONS

This project transcended the traditional boundaries between education and activism. Bringing MIT student musicians to the Amazon provided a platform for experiential learning unlike any other. It wasn’t just about playing music; it was about understanding music as a living entity, deeply entwined with the environment where it originates. 

In planning the trip, we knew that engaging with the Indigenous communities was essential. We partnered with the Nobre Academia de Robótica to visit the São Sebastião community so the whole group could learn about their culture, their traditions, and the ways in which science and tech are helping them protect their land and maintain their fishing economy. We also took part in workshops with César Lima and Eliberto Barroncas. The opportunity for students to play Professor Barroncas’s instruments and take part in an impromptu jam session was a powerful demonstration of music as a universal language, transcending barriers and connecting us to the environment and each other. He and Lima influenced us beyond the realm of music, offering insights into the broader implications of cultural sustainability and environmental stewardship. Their work demonstrated that the preservation of cultural practices and natural ecosystems is not only an artistic or environmental issue but also a matter of global responsibility.

Smidt says she loves the lathe but is also very fond of a small tool called a French curve scraper, which she used to sand the curves of the desk that was her ambitious first project in the shop. The piece, which Smidt calls her “noodle desk,” consists of a butcher block top that S-curves to the floor for support. It’s made of reclaimed maple from MIT’s basketball court renovation, which the shop had salvaged. “It’s always such a pleasure to use the perfect hand tool,” she says. (Find a link to photos and step-by-step instructions for building the desk here.)

BLONDEGEEK VIA INSTRUCTABLES

Although Smidt was an undergraduate at MIT, she didn’t discover the Hobby Shop until she joined the faculty in September 2021 (after earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley). “For that first year, the Hobby Shop was pretty instrumental in my maintaining sanity,” she says, noting that MIT had just begun to relax its early covid restrictions. “I think I’ve now used just about every machine.”

Novices and experts

More than a workspace, the Hobby Shop is also a community—one where people from all corners of MIT can come together to share camaraderie as well as tips and techniques. “I’ve met some of my favorite people from MIT at the Hobby Shop,” Smidt says.

Fischman even owes his marriage to the shop. Thanks to a referral from a contact there, he wound up with a 25-year part-time gig teaching two night classes in woodworking at the Boston Center for Adult Education—where he met his wife. “That was a connection the shop made possible,” he says. 

Novices are always welcome, and the shop’s staff—director Hayami Arakawa and technical instructor Coby Unger—are always willing to provide expert guidance. “It’s encouraged to ask questions,” Smidt says. Classes and workshops provide more formal training on complex machines or in unusual crafts, such as steam-bending wood.

Projects undertaken in the shop run the gamut from simple cutting boards to fine furniture. Fischman says the piece he’s most proud of is a curved-edge walnut console table with hand-planed, tapered octagonal legs. But not everyone makes furniture. “We had a guy who came in to build a machine to put the caps on his yogurt containers,” Fischman says. “We’ve had harpsichords built in the shop, canoes built in the shop. It goes on and on.”

Smidt adds, “It’s really inspiring to see what other people are making.”

Now, nearly 50 years after his bowl was spotlighted in Fine Woodworking, Fischman says he still finds joy at the Hobby Shop. “The shop is fun,” he says. “I think that’s an important aspect of it.”

Another, he says, is knowing that he has created pieces that will live on. “I’m 76. I think about legacy a bit,” he says. “The woodworking gifts that I gave to people that they cherish now are part of my legacy.” 

Launching a legacy. As the steward of Paul’s estate, Mimi knew that using it to make an endowed scholarship gift would be a fitting way to honor his memory. “Paul’s MIT degree launched him on the career of his dreams,” she says. “I wanted to make a scholarship gift that will last in perpetuity so that others achieve their goals as well, and so that his name will be remembered.” 

A lasting bond. Paul’s Theta Chi fraternity brothers invited Mimi to what would have been Paul’s 30th reunion—a “beautiful, but bittersweet” experience for her. The friendships he formed at MIT made a profound impact on his life, she says: “Paul would be proud to know his contribution will assist others in fulfilling their dreams. He never missed an opportunity to inspire, encourage, and support his fellow human beings in making their dreams come true.”

Help MIT build a better world. For more information, contact the Office of Gift Planning: 617.253.4082; [email protected]. Or visit giving.mit.edu/planned-giving.

As efficient creators and stewards of wetlands, beavers provide a hospitable ecosystem for dozens of other creatures, from insects, frogs, and turtles to owls, otters, great blue herons, and even moose and deer. What’s more, by harvesting undergrowth for their dams and creating ponds and bogs that raise the moisture content of the soil, beavers lessen the likelihood that forest fires will spread. As forest fires devastated Oregon in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

While not all property owners who live near beaver habitats appreciate the animals’ tree removal services, the pro-­beaver movement seems to be getting more organized. In November 2023, some 300 beaver restoration advocates from North America and Europe gathered in the Beaver State (Oregon) for the annual State of the Beaver conference. “Seventy-five percent of the artificial wetland restoration projects done in America over the past 30 years have failed,” conference cofounder Stanley Petrowski told the Daily Yonder. “But when beavers do it, they do it perfectly.” 

BeaverCon, held near Baltimore in June of 2022, and the Midwest Beaver Summit, held in Chicago and online in September 2023, attracted similar crowds of humans interested in promoting beaver welfare.

It is, in fact, possible to find ways to allow beavers to continue creating their watery habitats in ways that minimize damage to human infrastructure. For example, devices such as the Beaver Deceiver can be installed to prevent beavers from damming culverts, which often leads to flooding of roads. Skip Lisle, founder of Beaver Deceivers International of Grafton, Vermont, first developed the device in the 1990s to beaver-proof the Penobscot Nation’s 130 miles of roads in Maine. “In all likelihood, they are the first large landowner to completely beaver-proof their property nonlethally,” he says.

Living organic chemical factory

At the base of their tail, all beavers have two castor sacs that store castoreum, a complex, granular substance with a strong and long-lasting musky smell. It is made up of at least 24 different compounds, primarily derived from the barks of the various trees in the beaver’s diet. Beavers deposit castoreum atop foot-high mounds of mud, sticks, and grass to mark the edges of their territory. 

Humans have long valued castoreum. About 400 BCE, Hippocrates, a chronicler of natural cures, wrote of its wonderful medical properties. Around 77 CE, the Roman naturalist Pliny listed castoreum as a cure for headaches, constipation, and epilepsy. In the Middle Ages the list of maladies castoreum was said to cure expanded to include dysentery, worms, fleas, pleurisy, gout, rheumatism, insomnia, hysteria, memory loss, and liver problems. 

COURTESY OF WILLIAM MILLER

As it turns out, quite a few of the tree barks that beavers prefer contain compounds with known medicinal benefits. Phenols, for example, are often anti-­inflammatory and antiseptic and can have antiviral properties. They include salicylic acid (a precursor to aspirin), which can be found in the bark of willow, poplar, and alder trees—all beaver favorites. The beaver’s system functions as a natural pharmacy, extracting these compounds (among others) and secreting them in the form of castoreum. 

Humans have also used castoreum for several nonmedical applications, such as in high-end “leather note” perfumes including Shalimar, Givenchy III, and Chanel’s Antaeus. It is an ingredient in some bourbons and vodkas and has been used in Sweden to flavor “Bäverhojt” (literally, beaver shout) schnapps.

Today, most castoreum is harvested in a sterile environment by anesthetizing beavers and expressing the castor sacs near their tails. As a food additive, castoreum extract is “generally recognized as safe,” according to the FDA. But at close to $100 per pound, it’s used sparingly. The total annual US consumption of dried castoreum is around 300 pounds.

The road to economics

Thompkins’s experiences as a youth advocate set her up to dream big about what she might accomplish on behalf of the disabled community. Her hope as a teenager had been to go to law school and become a disability rights attorney—that is, until she surprised herself by falling in love with an economics course in high school. She majored in mathematical economics at Scripps College. And by the time she arrived on MIT’s campus for grad school, she had become enthusiastic about the possibility of using economics as a tool for disability justice.

Angrist, a Nobel Prize winner who served as one of Thompkins’s thesis advisors, wrote one of the early papers analyzing the Americans with Disabilities Act and concluded that it had in many ways been counterproductive. He and his coauthor, fellow MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu, found that the ADA increased costs for employers and wound up having a negative effect on employment of disabled workers. Thompkins built on their research, writing the first two papers analyzing the long-term impact of the ADA. Both have been cited often.

She also wrote a report on disability policy in India for the World Bank and then conducted more sophisticated econometric analysis, using the same World Bank data, of an Indian program designed to give assistance to disabled workers and working-age disabled people. That research became a chapter of her PhD thesis and was later published in Applied Economics and Finance. Angrist, who remembers Thompkins as a “hardworking and tenacious student,” says that “Allison’s paper at the time was one of the few to look at labor market effects of disability policy in that part of the world.”

“Even to hold my neck in one position is kind of like mountain climbing would be for some other people.”

The Indian program was unique at the time because “mainstream microlending programs systematically excluded people with disabilities from receiving loans,” Thompkins says. After digging into the data, she realized that many of the disabled people who received microloans were not on schedule to repay them on time because they used the loans not to expand a business but to go to secondary school, which she calls “a luxury that many disabled people in rural India do not get.” But her analysis concluded that researchers needed longer-term data to determine the loans’ ultimate impact on these participants’ economic outcomes. In other words, it wasn’t fair to assume that just because disabled people weren’t using the microloans in the exact way that the lenders had expected, the investment was wasted.  

Thompkins earned a reputation at MIT for her warmth and excitement about her work. “She’s always very joyful and was really passionate about what she was doing, and just exuded positivity and enthusiasm,” says Autor, who also served as her thesis advisor. Kathleen Monagle, associate dean and director of disability and access services, adds that she’s also generous with her time and energy. Thompkins helped author a brochure for MIT on best practices for communicating with people with a range of disabilities—which Monagle’s office still uses—and has served as a mentor to numerous students who have come through the office over the years.

After earning her PhD, Thompkins became a research economist at Mathematica, where she conducted research on employment among people with disabilities, among other topics. Now, though she no longer works full time as an economist, she still takes on consulting gigs occasionally.

A deepening spiritual practice

Though stepping back from work for health reasons wasn’t what she would’ve planned for herself, the shift cleared the way for Thompkins to begin writing more about something else that had become important to her: the pursuit of a spiritual life that could sustain her in the face of challenging circumstances. She grew up going to church with her family, started meditating at age eight, and began modifying her meditation practice to fit her abilities in her teens. As an adult, she has continued to expand her understanding of spirituality through extensive reading. Yet her personal experiences, as well as her relationships with others in the disability community, had long made her aware of the barriers to participating in spiritual life for many people with disabilities. While practices like reading a book or praying quietly might seem almost effortless to some, they can be incredibly challenging for others, she notes.

“Even to hold my neck in one position is kind of like mountain climbing would be for some other people,” she says. (In her book, she notes that “researchers have estimated that someone with cerebral palsy uses three to five times more energy than someone without a disability.”)

Today, NASA operates a fleet of 27 spacecraft to study the sun. NASA even sent a probe to scoop up plasma and touch the sun’s surface, where the temperature registers 10,300 °F. With all that technology, however, total solar eclipses still offer rare insight. Uniquely in our solar system, Earth’s moon is just the right size and distance from the planet to fully cover the sun’s face and only its face, briefly exposing the roots of coronal discharges and solar winds for observation and measurement. “Even our best instruments have a hard time getting down to the connection at the surface,” says Korreck.

Back on May 28, 1900, after weeks of preparation, Burton was enthralled by the eclipse, which lasted 85 seconds. Everyone set down their smoked-glass viewers to look directly at the extinguished sun. “At first there seemed to be but two broad streams of light,” he wrote, “extending from a jet black disk, all against a background of dark blue sky.” 

Nearly 125 years later, the Fitzpatrick still welcomes visitors to Washington. Drop into town on April 8, 2024, with a pair of eclipse glasses and you might witness a partial eclipse. It may not have the chilling, mystical effect that comes with the sun going totally dark (for that you would have to be somewhere between Dallas and Cleveland), but it is still a spectacular reminder of the cosmological phenomena that govern everything. 

Bill Gourgey is a science writer based in Washington, DC. He also writes fiction and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins.

Since the fall of 2021, Viaje al Microcosmos has organized walks on the river to encourage the general public to explore the space and make new connections with this misunderstood body of water. In the last few years, participants have created their own microscopes to study water samples they’ve collected; created an immersive art installation to showcase the species that live on the river; produced a podcast; developed a template to help people document water quality; contributed to the Río Santa Catarina’s Wikipedia page; and more. Each activity helps build a community of city dwellers who believe the river is a natural resource worth protecting. The effort seems only more urgent against the backdrop of a regional drought, rising temperatures, and a government that continues to place environmental issues on the back burner. 

LORENA RíOS

Viaje al Microcosmos’s goal is multifaceted and ambitious. The activists want to build a community of citizen scientists that pushes back against the belief that the river is for sale. They want to produce information about the river that can shape public policy and aid in its preservation. But perhaps most important, they want to instill the revolutionary thought that the Santa Catarina River can, in fact, be just that: a river. 

Lorena Ríos is a freelance journalist based in Monterrey, Mexico.

Career trajectory: “I grew up with a green thumb and was always looking to work at the intersection of science and policymaking,” says Brown. A master’s in environmental science from Johns Hopkins University and, later, work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the climate conservation unit of Broward County, Florida, helped her become a true “social environmental scientist.” 

Engaging frontline communities: A lot of the communities Brown works with are wary about the implications of climate change. “We are trying to work with people that have been historically exploited and neglected,” she says. “A successful program means creating opportunities for them so they have a say in decision-­making. Just throwing a few workshops isn’t enough.”

She adds, “People need real-life, grassroots solutions to get them out of their current situation. All we are offering them is data, science, and jargon right now. This has to change.”

But that change requires an equitable and inclusive approach informed by data. To identify groups that are good candidates for specific programs, Brown supplements official poverty figures with information on socioeconomic factors like historical disenfranchisement, cost of living, ethnicity, disease burden, and physical disability. This is part of the strategy, she says, for delivering “a cleaner future to everyone.”