Features

Every once in a while, if you walk through the guts of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, you might see a man tinkering with what looks like a giant Lego wheel. But Dr. Jan Egedal isn’t just playing around: he’s trying to fix something called the theory of ideal magnetohydrodynamics.

Many people are skeptical about meddling with this theory, and until recently Egedal has had trouble grabbing his peers’ attention, he says. But if something’s broke, you should fix it — especially if it governs things like crashes in magnetic fusion devices or solar flares that can wipe out satellites.

The theory has to do with plasma, a collection of (rarely-colliding) charged atomic particles that shields itself from outside electric fields. These particles travel along magnetic field lines like cars on an expressway. read more »

Trilobites, by Heinrich Harder

Lindsay Hays remembers having conversations with paleontologists about whether trilobites would taste good. “They’re like horseshoe crabs, basically a shell with legs,” she says.

Trilobites, once ubiquitous, suddenly and mysteriously died out 250 million years ago. It turns out they weren’t the only ones. Something big changed on the planet at that time, wiping out 70 percent of land organisms, and 90 percent of marine life. Trilobites didn’t stand a chance.

“This Permian-Triassic extinction is unlike anything we’ve seen before,” says Lindsay. Today, no one knows what caused this extinction on such a scale. Lindsay, a molecular paleontologist and graduate student at MIT, is investigating one of the main suspects—poisoning. read more »