Science Spotlights

2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience: A Discussion with Mildred Dresselhaus

Aug 17, 2012

Mildred Dresselhaus, this year's winner of the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, has had a long and illustrious career in physics. Dubbed "The Queen of Carbon" by her peers, she was instrumental in unlocking the secrets of carbon's electronic structure and the mysterious forms it takes on in nature.

2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience: A Discussion with Cori Bargmann, Winfried Denk and Ann Graybiel

Aug 17, 2012

How does the brain gather information from the outside world and use it to guide behavior? Three neuroscientists who have spent much of their research careers trying to answer that question were awarded the 2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.

Phoenix Rising: A Galaxy Cluster That's Breaking Cosmic Records

Aug 15, 2012

On the eve of their NASA press conference, Michael McDonald, Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT, and Bradford Benson, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, discuss the discovery of the Phoenix Cluster -- a galaxy cluster for the record books.

The Fantastic Plastic Brain

Jul 30, 2012

Recent research is beginning to answer these fundamental questions by exploring the plasticity of the adult brain—its ability to readily be shaped by experience. Contrary to the common assumption that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, there is increasingly strong evidence that the adult human brain is remarkably malleable and capable of new feats even in the last decades of life.