Thesis: S.M. in Science Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 19-23). / In 2009, Larry Leverenz, Eric Nauman, and Thomas Talavage at Purdue University formed the Purdue Neurotrauma Group (PNG), and set out to study concussions in high school football. They set up a study that combined helmet sensors with fMRI brain scans and cognitive testing, hoping to figure out what happens when a player gets a concussion on the field. Instead, they uncovered something shocking and wholly unexpected. Players' brains were significantly changing even in the absence of concussions, due to an accumulation of smaller impacts called subconcussive blows. Years of subsequent research have only confirmed their initial results-season after season, they found that about half of the players in their study that didn't sustain concussions exhibited significant brain changes over the course of a season. They don't yet know exactly how these brain changes relate to short or long-term cognitive damage, but when their findings are scaled across the landscape of high school football, the implications are enormous-brain changes may be occurring in some half a million teenaged athletes. However, even as public awareness of concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) reaches new heights, subconcussive blows continue to fly under the radar. For the past seven years, the PNG has run their research on a shoestring budget, and now, at the end of their funding, they are running out of time and options. Meanwhile, in a few short months, 1.1 million high school football players will suit up for the start of football season. / by Catherine Curro Caruso. / S.M. in Science Writing

Thesis: S.M. in Science Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, September 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2016." / Includes bibliographical references (pages 29-32). / Over the last 150 years, humans have wrought sweeping changes to the Great Plains. What was once the prairie is now the Corn Belt-row crops planted from fencerow to fencerow. What does this mean for the native wildlife, which evolved for millions of years to live only on the prairie? Here are the stories of three species-cliff swallows, western corn rootworms, and prairie deer mice-that natural selection has reshaped to thrive in the new agricultural landscape. With his finches, Charles Darwin read the record of evolution in the past. In the Corn Belt, today's scientists can see evolution in real time. / by Conor J. Gearin. / S.M. in Science Writing

Thesis: S.M. in Science Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / From skinny sea lions on beaches in California, to hundreds of enormous dead whales in the fjords of Chile, scientists have been recently puzzled by a spate of dead and dying marine mammals. These events are so complicated- influenced by disease, biotoxins, ecosystem changes, and human interaction-that their cause can appear impossible to untangle. Yet a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that climate change has a hand in them all. This thesis examines marine mammal stranding events of the past and present to show how climate change will, and already has, impacted marine mammals, and how these events could serve as proxies for broader ecosystem changes in the years to come. By paying attention to whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters, we may be able to learn something about our planet, and how its changes will impact its most abundant mammal: us. / by Claudia M. Geib. / S.M. in Science Writing

Thesis: S.M. in Science Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "September 2016." / Includes bibliographical references (page 22). / We don't often think of modern American communities as places that disappear. But lead pollution erased the tiny Texas community of Smeltertown from the map. And Smeltertown isn't alone. Across America we've scraped communities from the landscape, smudged them from our memories. Pollution made these places unfit for human habitation. It turned the residents of these communities into environmental refugees. Another kind of pollution climate change - threatens to push even more people from their homes. That these communities are gone is tragic. That there are billions of climate change refugees poised to join these environmental refugees is terrifying. What can we do to stop this tide? What can lessons can we learn from the towns that have already disappeared? What lessons can we learn from Smeltertown? / by Kendra Pierre-Louis. / S.M. in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-42). / Since the fall of 2001, biologists have taught endangered whooping cranes how to migrate over a once-lost course stretching from the wetlands of central Wisconsin to the mud flats of Florida's Gulf Coast. Wildlife biologists did this through an unusual method of reintroduction: training the endangered birds to follow behind ultralight airplanes for the entire 1,200-mile journey. The technique is highly invasive and expensive, but by the summer of 2005, it had established the first population of whooping cranes migrating east of the Mississippi in more than one hundred years. To supplement these ultralight-led migrations, crane biologists tried a new approach in the fall of 2005. Biologists with the International Crane Foundation of Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released four captive-bred whooping cranes directly into the wild. Biologists hoped that there were enough graduates of the ultralight program already making the migration for a few first timers to simply follow the older birds south. But no one knew if this bold new experiment, which relied entirely on the young birds following older non-related birds, would work. This thesis follows a year in the life of Maya, Poe, Waldo and Jumblies-the first four "Direct Autumn Release" birds. / (cont.) The story begins with their parent's artificial insemination in the spring of 2005, describes their last-minute Thanksgiving-Day departure, and follows their successful southern migrations through Tennessee and Florida. The thesis relates the concerns of the biologists, who spent countless hours raising and tracking these birds. It also recounts historic episodes in the 80-year ongoing effort to save Grus Americana, the whooping crane, while providing a larger significance for why the conservation of biodiversity is needed now more than ever. / by Philip Rood McKenna. / S.M.in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-60). / All humans have certain genes that cause or predispose them to various diseases. In the ideal medical future, scientists will have hyperfast gene analyzers able to sequence anyone's DNA in a matter of minutes. In that future, a patient could have his entire sequence of DNA screened for mutations that cause or predispose him to disease, and health care would be truly individualized to fit the genetic profile of each patient. But science isn't yet able to make this future a reality; DNA sequencing remains too time-consuming and expensive to allow for such completely individualized medicine. In the meantime, scientists have discovered a useful shortcut: race and ethnicity. Many genes vary across racial and ethnic lines. Geography is linked to genetic variation, and people who have the same geographic ancestry are more likely, on average, to be genetically similar than people who do not. Although there is no gene for "race" or "ethnicity," many genes do occur in different ethnic groups at different frequencies. This means that doctors can use a patient's race or ethnicity - indicators of geographic ancestry - to make inferences about his genes, including his likelihood of developing specific diseases. / (cont.) Today's Ashkenazi Jews are appealing research subjects because they are both genetically interesting and culturally willing. For the past half-century, Jewish communities have been getting the genetic scrutiny other populations can expect in the future. Such research has helped scientists make significant headway in diagnosing, treating, and preventing certain genetic diseases. But as the research studies continued, some Jewish communities began to worry about their implications. Lessons learned from the participation of American Jews in genetic research will be important for and applicable to many ethnic groups as the approach expands. / by Emily Kennedy Anthes. / S.M.in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 26-27). / The rocks on which the city of Boston was built did not form as part of North America. They formed about 600 million years ago, at the South Pole, as the northern coast of a supercontinent called Gondwanaland. Boston's journey from the South Pole to its current location traces the world's geologic history over that period of time, including the emergence of animal life as we know it, the formation and destruction of Pangaea, and the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. More than that, though: the history of our understanding of Boston's journey illustrates how geologists think about their world, and how their ideas have changed over the last 150 years in one of science's great revolutions. / by Selby Cull. / S.M.in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 45). / Each fall, the entire monarch butterfly population of the Eastern United States and Canada funnels into a handful of oyamel pine groves in Michoacan, Mexico, to weather the winter months. Each spring, the butterflies mate and fly north to repopulate the continent in short generational bursts. The monarchs flying south in the fall are three generations removed from those that made the trip the previous year. With no parents to guide its way, a migrating monarch has only its genes to steer it to its Mexican overwintering site. Monarchs orient using the sun as a guidepost. Because the sun appears to move across the sky throughout the day, the butterflies must keep track of time in order to correctly interpret the sun's position. Although this so-called "time-compensated sun compass" was demonstrated in 1997, little was known about how it worked. Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA, is working to change that. His lab seeks to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms monarchs use to guide them on their remarkable yearly journey. Reppert and his colleagues believe they have pinpointed the sun compass, and the circadian clock that guides it, in the monarch brain. They have shown how the clock and compass might work together to allow the monarchs to find their way to Mexico. Their work has also uncovered some unexpected insights into the workings and evolution of circadian clocks in general. This thesis profiles these discoveries, exploring how circadian biology has illuminated monarch migration, and how monarchs, in turn, have illuminated circadian biology. / by Jocelyn Rice. / S.M.in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [36]-[38]). / Singing the Brain Electric Brain pacemakers, scientists have found, can treat depression by correcting neural circuitry gone haywire. This thesis examines how such technology - a technique known as deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted within the brain - was developed and how it works. We are introduced to a patient who received deep-brain stimulation for her refractory depression, and consider the risks, ethical issues, and questions of humanity and identity the technology raises. / by Grace Chua. / S.M.in Science Writing

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-43). / This thesis, a profile of astronomer Vera Rubin, highlights her scientific achievements, most notably the irrefutable evidence she gathered to persuade the astronomical community that galaxies spin at a faster speed than Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation allows. As a result of this finding, astronomers conceded that the universe must be filled with more material than they can see. Scientists call this mysterious substance dark matter. This submission explains the scientific history of dark matter, its acceptance, and the current research being done to test its existence. It also mentions counter theories to the dark matter hypothesis and looks at Vera Rubin's current work and how this research will help astronomers better understand the construction of the cosmos and its evolution. / by Ashley Yeager. / S.M.in Science Writing