by Gina Spadoni

Created on: May 16, 2008   Last Updated: December 09, 2008

Boston has long been known as a learning mecca, housing over a quarter million students at any given time and having premier universities throughout the city - Boston University, Boston College and Northwestern to name but a small sample.
Furthermore, across the Charles River from Boston proper lies Cambridge, Massachusetts (named as an homage to the U.K.'s University of Cambridge), which, like its namesake, has produced some of the world's finest minds from its star institutions. The two most famous are, of course, Harvard and MIT.

The economic impact just MIT graduates have made on the world is staggering; in fact, according to a 1997 BankBoston study, "...4,000 MIT-related companies employ 1.1 million people and have annual world sales of $232 billion." At the time of the report, about 150 new MIT-related companies were being founded annually. HP, Raytheon and Texas Instruments are but a few of the companies that were begun by MIT graduates.
To gain perspective on how MIT manages to produce such results, one can visit their Museum at the Cambridge campus daily from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. They've currently got an exhibition called "Mind and Hand: The Making of MIT Scientists and Engineers," which provides insight into the student experience from their own perspective and from the mid-1800's forward (details of this and other museum exhibitions can be found online at http://web.mit.edu/museum/).
A recent technological breakthrough by a team of researchers from Boston College and MIT appears promising, as it finds a way of harnessing thermoelectric power using nanotechnology that far surpasses anything conceived in the last fifty years. It could ultimately mean cleaner running air conditioners and car exhaust systems. Prior experiments have led others to frustration as thermoelectric power - used, for example, by NASA to power remote spacecraft - often generates too much heat to be efficient. The team has discovered a lower cost, ecologically friendly way of applying nanotechnology to bismuth antimony telluride, and in so doing have managed to block the heat flow while keeping the electricity moving. Their findings were publishing in "Science" magazine's online version in March.
Technological advances coming out of Massachusetts even touch the world of tattoo art, as a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, Brown and Duke universities have developed an ink that can be safely removed much more painlessly than traditional tattoo art uses. The ink is actually a dye that lives in microscopic beads, or polymer microspheres. If one wants their body art removed via laser, one treatment will make the beads pop and they will then be expelled by the body's lymphatic system. This is not only healthier, as the ink won't be absorbed into the bloodstream as it passes through the body, but it will also be cheaper and far less painful than current removal processes that normally take repeated laser treatments. Perhaps we'll start seeing body art on the science crowd next.

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