By Karen Klinger

As a teenager, Jerome Friedman was a talented painter who turned down a scholarship to an art school against the advice of his teacher to study physics at the University of Chicago.

It proved to be the right choice.

Friedman, an emeritus professor at MIT, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics for research establishing the first solid evidence for the existence of quarks, building blocks for protons and neutrons--two main components of atoms.

In a talk at the MIT Museum during the Cambridge Science Festival, he reflected on his long career and his belief that with developments such as the recent completion of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, "I think we're coming into a new era of cosmology and particle physics and it's a very, very exciting time." read more...

By Karen Klinger

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle smiled as she recalled the conversation she had with a journalist for a leading science magazine who wanted to know why she opposed marriages between people and robots.

"He put me in the same camp as those who opposed marriage between lesbians or gay marriage," Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology, told those gathered at the MIT Museum to hear her and colleague Cynthia Breazeal discuss "sociable robots."

The man accused her of "species chauvinism," she said. "It made me feel sad."

The talk by Turkle and Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, was sponsored by the Cambridge Science Festival, a nine-day, citywide celebration of science and technology. read more...

By Karen Klinger

Dudley Herschbach has the air of a man who would never rest on his laurels, even if they are the laurels of a Nobel Prize.

"I tell my students prizes should be given to atoms, molecules and ideas," Herschbach told a gathering at the MIT Museum during a "Lunch with a Laureate" event, one of more than 100 activities that are part of the Cambridge Science Festival going on through May 4.

Herschbach, an emeritus professor of science at Harvard University, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. He entertained a crowd with anecdotes on subjects ranging from his high school algebra teacher to his undergraduate mentor at Stanford University and the secretary who mistakenly thought a caller wanted to talk to him about the Nobel Peace Prize.

But most of all, he wanted to express his view that the American education system is failing its students and the country by not seizing upon the natural curiosity of children to propel them into careers in science and mathematics. read more...

By Karen Klinger

If you'd like to have lunch with a Nobel laureate, walk an evolutionary time line along Massachusetts Avenue, learn about the science of beer brewing, spend your own "Night at the Museum" or take part in dozens of other activities, Cambridge is the place to be this week during the city's second annual science festival.

This first-in-the-nation citywide celebration of science and technology kicked off nine days of events with a science carnival at city hall on April 26 featuring dozens of exhibitors, science experiments for kids, animals, robots and a giant inflated duck on the front lawn, courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Estuary Association.

The science festival, which attracted more than 15,000 participants last year, is the brainchild of John Durant, the executive director of the MIT Museum, which will be opening a new multi-million dollar innovation gallery in September. This week, activities at the museum include daily brown bag bag lunches with Nobel Prize winners and "behind the scenes" looks at museum exhibits. read more...

By Karen Klinger

It was last fall when the battle was joined between developers and abutters over the future of bucolic Shady Hill Square in Cambridge's Agassiz neighborhood and it seems unlikely that anything will be settled before this summer, at the earliest.

In the meantime, the abutters can look out on an expanse of green free of any signs that a 5,000-square-foot building might go up in the middle of the park-like setting around which their homes are clustered.

In April, the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeal decided to continue a hearing on aspects of a building permit held by Stonehouse Holdings to put up what neighbors deride as a "McMansion" on the horseshoe-shaped square that has served as a common yard for a dozen semi-detached stucco houses since they were built in 1915.

For now, Stonehouse is prohibited from doing anything on the site by a "stop work" order issued last October by city building commissioner Ranjit Singanayagam after the abutters raised questions about the ownership of the property and the developers' legal access to it. He told Stonehouse's attorneys in February that he was not lifting the order until matters had been resolved. read more...