A review of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. By Robert Sapolsky. 304 pages. New York: Touchstone, 2002.

Acting nonchalant in front of a baboon is not an art many scientists have to contemplate while going about their jobs. Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist cum primatologist and long-time professor at Stanford, is faced with that very challenge on most days that he spends in the field with his tribe of baboons in Kenya. Sapolsky took over twelve years to assemble and write the stories that makes upA Primate’s Memoir, and what results is a riveting account of the decidedly unusual setting in which Sapolsky’s science takes place.

Baboons live in a complex and ever-shifting hierarchy. Females occupy a strict rank that’s passed from mother to daughter. They tend to remain in the same troop their whole lives, handing down acquired rivalries and friendships to newer generations. The males are a different story altogether. They develop a wanderlust around adolescence and change groups, ensuring the gene pool stays diverse. Their novelty makes their social position more flexible, and more tenuous. As confident as a high ranking male baboon may try to seem, beating up on lower males and having his way with the high ranking females, he always has to keep one eye open for potential challengers. Lower ranking males are in an even tougher spot, since the bigger, burlier males are always taking out their frustrations by pushing them around.

Sapolsky decided to take his laboratory neuroscience, limited to a safari of white coats and sterile equipment, out into the wild. He wanted to examine how these differently ranking males coped with stress, and whether the more intense stressors that came with being of a lower rank had negative impacts on their health. We know that long-term stress in humans can lead to myriad health problems, from elevated blood pressure to reduced immunity from disease. To learn about the role of stress in baboons, Sapolsky had to become a dual-natured scientist: carefully documenting the behaviors of the baboons to learn about the soap-opera-esque intricacies of their social interactions before taking samples of their blood and running chemical analyses.

Left pretty well alone to his own devices, Sapolsky finds himself inventing the tools that let him do the research he wants. He commandeers a Jeep and solicits air drops of dry ice to store his blood samples, which he sorts in a make-shift centrifuge. But more challenging than dealing with the samples is getting them in the first place. The samples all need to be taken around the same time of day. They can’t be taken if the baboon is sick, or has just been in a fight. And most challenging of all, the baboons can’t see the anesthetic dart coming, since the stress of it might skew the sample he needs—if they don’t run away first. Sapolsky tries to act casually, pretending his blow gun with the anesthetic dart is any old walking stick, waiting for that perfect moment. Nonchalance around baboons, he relates, is a lot harder than it looks.

Sapolsky’s penchant for giving the animals Old Testament names, along with his careful and sympathetic descriptions, make the baboons in his troop come to life. He paints Nebuchadnezzar as a gruesomely vicious leader, develops a crush on a silver-tailed beauty called Bathsheba, and relates sympathetically to Benjamin: a desperately awkward young male with strangely lop-sided hair. Sapolsky is utterly charmed by his baboons, and in turn, so are we.

But for all the time their descriptions occupy in the story, A Primate’s Memoir is not about the baboons. It is Sapolsky’s own coming of age story, both as a scientist and as a person. Sapolsky arrives in Kenya almost immediately after finishing his undergraduate degree at Harvard, having scarcely adventured outside his isolated Orthodox Jewish upbringing, let alone the laboratory. He is immediately confronted with some of the most agonizing growing pains. He is swindled three times in his first day in Nairobi: an indication of just how overly willing he is to trust the goodness of people. He puts himself in recklessly dangerous situations, including hitching to Uganda to witness the deposition of Idi Amin. He has to learn how to survive within the corrupt park reservation system, make friends with the Masai, negotiate among the various Kikuyu farming communities.

Not everything in Sapolsky’s African experience is bad. In between darting baboons and dodging controversies, he spends a great deal of time chatting with the locals. The Masai culture fascinates him, and though he can’t bring himself to personally appreciate the tradition of drinking cow’s blood, his interactions with the elders provide some interesting tales of cultural exchange. He teaches one elder how to read a map of the park, pointing out where the settlement is relative to the reserve’s mountains and rivers. When the old man finally understands what the map represents, he excitedly asks Sapolsky where his home is. Sapolsky remembers the feeling of being a young child in the planetarium, suddenly aware of how large the universe is compared to his tiny frame. He takes a few steps away from the map, naming that spot Nairobi, before walking clear across the field and shouting that this is where he lives. The Masai can only cluck in disbelief.

Most of the time, though, Sapolsky finds himself grappling with uncomfortable or downright immoral situations, mostly involving deeply ingrained political corruption and trickery. His misadventures in hitchhiking nearly get him killed on at least three occasions, and he falls for the tricks of a scheming ex-poacher who wants any excuse to shoot baboons. Even back at home in the United States, Sapolsky’s advisor forgets about his very existence at a crucial moment, forcing him to resort to stealing just to have the money to call home to beg for the grant money to be sent. The chapters Sapolsky spends on the goings-on of his baboon tribe are noticeably more relaxed, and it is easy to see why he prefers the company of his troop to most people. In some ways, even when they are combative with one another, the baboons act more human than the humans.

Sapolsky’s stories are in turns humorous, sweet, terrifying and thought-provoking. He is a pleasing narrator, self-deprecating in his descriptions of his wide-eyed innocence. This is not Sapolsky’s first book, but its personal style makes it one of the strongest. Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers, an admittedly more science-y text, sometimes suffered from feeling like a textbook—a well-written textbook, but a textbook nonetheless. In part because this book skirts around directly addressing the results of his research (for that, readers can turn to another of his books about stress), A Primate’s Memoir never risks losing a less scientifically-minded audience. Sapolsky’s voice is clear and elegant, and it is a treat to hear his unique story told so compellingly.

This is not to say, however, that the composition is perfect. Some of his tales drift into an attempt to relate a few of the complex puzzle pieces that make up eastern African military history. These chapters have less grab than the others, feeling somewhat lopsided in their take. But given that Sapolsky is a scientist, not an historian, I am inclined to let this small fault slide. The strength of the rest of his storytelling more than makes up for it.

As with so many stories that take place around a nature preserve rife with conflict, Sapolsky’s story ends in tragedy. I will not spoil the details here—suffice to say it is an event we see coming miles away. But through the animal tragedy, we are given the satisfaction of watching a boy who wanted to grow up to be a mountain gorilla transform into a grown-up scientist. He returns to his baboon troop year after year, spending less time in Africa and more building his life at home. He graduates, finds a job, gets married. Though it is clear the baboons will remain forever dear to his heart, they are ultimately relegated to the status of childhood friends. Sad, yes, but only in the sense that growing up is always tinged with sadness. In all other ways, Sapolsky’s growth—and his story—is something to be remarked.

A supernova explodes with a violent shockwave, spewing streams of colorfully glowing stardust into empty space. Where there are now floating wisps of rainbow cloud only moments ago was an enormous red star. Though it began its life smaller and more blue-white, in its final gasps for breath the star has become bloated, forced to run on fumes that puff it up to an impossible size. When the star’s fuel has finally run dry, the center of the star succumbs to gravity, collapsing into itself. The shockwave created by the sudden collapse radiates outward, sending the outer remains of the star flying in all directions.

But buried in the fiery ashes of a supernova remains a relatively tiny ball of matter. A speck at the center of the explosion, the remnant is so incredibly small, by cosmic standards, that it could fit into the city limits of Chicago. This neutron star is the bright beacon of new life at the center of a star’s death.

The creation of a neutron star is an uncommon event. In our galaxy, a mere one in a thousand stars are neutron stars. It requires a fragile balance: too much mass in the dying stellar core and the star will collapse immediately into a black hole; too little and the core turns into a white dwarf star, emitting gentle light and cooling gradually until its energy is depleted.

But once created, the neutron star is a model of perfect efficiency. To our eyes and fingers, matter is deceptively solid. Atoms are composed of a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a buzzing field of electrons, whose borders are pretty expansive. If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a marble placed on top of the dome at MIT, the electrons’ range would span all the way to the edge of campus. Between nucleus and electrons: utter emptiness.

The neutron star, however, does away with this empty space. The gravitational pull of the collapsed star center is so strong that the protons and electrons are smashed together, canceling out their charges and forming neutrons and tiny neutrinos. Though the neutrinos escape during the supernova explosion, the remaining neutrons are crushed by gravity, leaving virtually no space in between the particles. The resulting star is so dense that a teaspoon-full would have as much mass as the entire human population—obesity epidemic notwithstanding.

The neutrons that make up the star are held together by the same gravitational force that plants our feet firmly on the Earth’s surface. But without the pockets of empty space separating atoms from one another, keeping the density low, the gravity on the surface of a neutron star becomes hundreds of trillions times stronger than on Earth. In fact, gravity is so strong that it even tugs on the radiation that emits from the star. The bending is so forceful that light curls around the edges of the star, and facing it head-on, you can see not only the front of the star, but a distorted view of what lies around the side. This makes hiding behind a neutron star a decidedly more difficult task than keeping a low profile on the dark side of the moon.

These strange stars weren’t discovered until 1967. At that time, Jocelyn Bell was a graduate student at Cambridge University, sifting through the endless data collected by a radio telescope the size of four football fields. In the data, she noticed some suspiciously regular patterns. She showed the data to another scientist who immediately declared the signals to be manmade. But upon looking closer, Bell realized the signals were coming from outside our solar system—still within the galaxy, but much farther away than any manmade instrument could possibly be. Had she stumbled upon extraterrestrial intelligence?

Bell hadn’t found little green men, at least not this time, but was instead listening to a symphony of neutron stars. In its previous life, the gaseous star spun slowly and gently. But like a dancer who pulls in her arms to speed up her turns, the star spins faster as its matter is drawn deeper and deeper into its center. By the time the neutron star is finished collapsing into its tiny final size, it makes as many as a thousand rotations in just a second. Over time, it may slow down very slightly, perhaps tacking on an extra hundredth of a second to each spin after a million years or so.

Though the star emits constant radiation out of both its north and south poles, each time a pole points in our direction, we hear a tiny “blip” in its radiation. These pulsars, named for the pulsing chorus they create, send their signals clear across galaxies and all the way to Earth—a kind of Morse code that sings to scientists the song of the star that was, and the tiny spinning beacon that remains.

Researchers have been able to disable bacteria that cause ulcers by removing the bacteria’s ability to get close to the stomach wall.

This new knowledge about how the immune system responds toH. pylori infections could be used to screen for patients more susceptible to stomach ulcers and cancer, and perhaps to create more targeted therapies for those already affected.

In order to both survive and cause inflammation in the stomach, bacteria need to get to the side of the stomach “and set up shop there, living adjacent to your stomach cells, in a little kind of cozy home,” says Karen Ottemann, whose study was published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike the acidic middle of the stomach, “the pH is closer to neutral and there’s food coming out of the cells,” she notes.

Ottemann found that the bacteria’s ability to move away from an acidic environment and towards one with food, called chemotaxis, was crucial to causing inflammation in the stomach. “To live really cozy like that,” she explains, “they need to be able to swim, and they need to be able to know where they’re going to direct their swimming.”

By swimming close to host cells, the bacteria are normally able to send out proteins that cause the cells of the stomach wall to burst. This cell death, combined with the presence of the bacteria in the stomach, puts the body’s immune system on high alert.

But removing the gene that allows bacteria to do chemotaxis prevented them from being able to hover near their host cells in mouse stomachs. Instead, the bacteria swam aimlessly, unable to aim their destructive proteins at host cells.

The mere presence of H. pylori in the stomach is not enough to start a severe immune response, since the body could just be responding to dead floating bacteria. Without the second crucial component—cell death—the immune system will not trigger damaging inflammation. “Many bacteria have this ability to do chemotaxis,” says Ottemann, “but they had not been studied in very much detail in terms of how the ability to do chemotaxis was used inside of infected animals or humans.”

More than half of people are infected with H. pylori, but over eighty percent of those infected never experience any negative symptoms. Patients who do have symptoms may be the victims of a “frustrated immune system” struggling to rid itself of H. pyloriwhile causing more damage to the body’s own cells than to the bacteria, according to immunologist Martha Zuniga at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz.

Vicki Auerbach Stone, who studies the immune system, says the research paints a fuller picture of all the necessary conditions for H. pylori to have its effect. While scientists mostly study the molecules that are the immediate cause of inflammation, there are other factors that have to be in place in order for the molecule to accomplish its goal. “And chemotaxis is an example of something like that,” she says. “It’s getting the bacteria to the right place to have an effect.”

Since only a small number of people with H. pylori infections have severe reactions, while most cases go unnoticed, researchers hope that this new knowledge about the specific kind of immune response H. pylori can generate will help them to single out people who are more likely to experience symptoms of infection.

Zuniga is interested in these different immune response profiles, asking, “What distinguishes people that can have an H. pylori infection and not even know it for their entire lives from the people who develop pathology—who get ulcers, or ultimately cancer?”

“My own personal prediction would be that it’s the severity of the immune response,” she explains, “and that genetic differences among different people would predispose you to give a very strong anti-inflammatory response that isn’t very effective at clearing bacteria, but that does cause pathology.”

Part of H. pylori’s effectiveness is in its ability to manipulate the immune system. The first stage of the immune response, called the innate response, detects both the presence of the bacteria in the stomach and the death of stomach wall cells. These two events combined set off a cascade of events resulting in the second adaptive response, which recruits cells that can target the infection more specifically.

But H. pylori is able to trick the innate immune system into setting off the wrong kind of adaptive response: one that does not target the bacteria very effectively, but that does cause intense inflammation. People who experience symptoms of a H. pyloriinfection have adaptive immune responses that send out more highly inflammatory immune cells, which cause rampant damage along the lining of the stomach. The bacteria thrive in inflamed areas, and the immune response ends up targeting the body’s cells rather than getting rid of the bacteria. This results in chronic inflammation.

But without chemotaxis, the bacteria were unable to trick the innate immune system. Even though the genetically altered bacteria continued to survive in the mouse’s stomachs, they did not cause damage. With this new knowledge about the behavior of ulcer-causing bacteria, researchers can begin to imagine how it might be applied to preventing ulcers and stomach cancer.

In addition to identifying people whose immune systems are more likely to have dramatic responses, bacteriologists like Daniel Kadouri, who works on developing therapies that use bacteria, speculate it might be possible to use probiotics to make the stomach a less hospitable environment for H. pylori by interfering with its ability to do chemotaxis.

Matt Traxler, a microbiologist at the Harvard Medical School, points out that developing therapies that target chemotaxis in H. pylori could also have more widespread applications. Chemotaxis is a common ability among bacteria, since most bacteria use whip-like tails called flagella to move around, and chemotaxis helps determine in which direction the bacteria should move.

If scientists devise a way to prevent H. pylori from doing chemotaxis in the stomach, Traxler imagines, they might be able to apply that knowledge to many other pathogens that also use chemotaxis to damage their hosts.

As evidence grows that having H. pylori in the stomach may lead to some health benefits, such as the prevention of esophageal cancer and asthma, these modified, less harmful bacteria are of interest to immunologists. However, Ottemann and others concede that using these modified bacteria purely as a treatment tool is a distant prospect that requires much more research into both effectiveness and safety.

“I think there’s a lot of interest in the idea that you might want to control your microbial flora so as to either promote a health state or to demote a disease state,” says Ottemann. But for the moment with H. pylori, “I just think we’re a little ways off from that.”

In September 1943, a flurry of activity surrounded MIT’s biological engineering research labs. In the midst of battle in North Africa, twenty German prisoners had been taken by American forces. They were first shipped to a holding facility in Cameron, Virginia, and then to researchers in building 35 at MIT. Starting up spectrometers and microscopes, the scientists eagerly examined their captives: twenty samples of German rations—ingredients, main courses, and desserts—begging for a thorough analysis.

Just down the street from physics labs creating battle-winning radar technology and chemistry labs churning out isotopes for atomic bombs, a quieter wartime project was underway. From July 1942 to October 1945, the Office of the Quartermaster General in the U.S. War Department commissioned scientists at MIT to research and design rations for soldiers in the Second World War.

Many of the project titles from those three years, now stored in the MIT archives, conjure up stark images of the life of a World War II soldier. Researchers abandoned their teaching careers to throw themselves into inventing an all-purpose emergency food capable of sustaining an isolated individual for an indefinite period of time, a more condensed soda cracker, and a concentrated food product for mountain troops.

But perhaps surprisingly, this ultra-practical research made up only a small portion of their work. Early on, scientists came up with a new way to flash freeze entire meals, which allowed the diet of the American soldier overseas to not differ much from what his wife or mother would have served him: beef steak, beef stew, meat loaf, roast beef hash, creamed chicken, and apple brown betty. The easy familiarity of the recipes for these dishes, which read like just about any cookbook from the 1940s, is only disrupted in the final step of each recipe, which calls for running the finished meal through an industrial-strength freezer.

Familiar as they were, most of the foods the researchers sent overseas were driven by practicality. Scientists strove to maximize calories per gram of highly stable nourishment—the only real, tangible measure of their success. Their discussion of food is so overwhelmingly technical it is sometimes easy to forget that the outcomes of their experiments were meant to be eaten.

But among the more typical foods was something less expected. In 1944, the scientists decided to tackle canning apple pie—and not just any apple pie, but one that would give the real thing a run for its money.

Soggy crust was not an option. The researchers struggled to make a crust whose quality was not compromised by the harsh conditions required to preserve it. They attempted several crust arrangements within the can: first with crust only on the top and bottom, and then another version also lining the sides. They experimented with different lengths of time between the baking of the pie in the can and the processing period, to see if letting the crust set before preserving would help maintain the flakiness.

Underneath the researchers’ highly technical language and the discussions of albumin pH and molecular composition of crust, there is an unmistakable soft touch. They wanted to give soldiers something that reminded them of home, something their mothers would have fed them if they could. They spent months and sometimes years tinkering and experimenting and reevaluating in order to give a young man—cold, scared, and far from home—not just what his body needed, but what his homesick spirit craved. Soda crackers and scrapple, the staples of subsistence, were not good enough. But crisp, flaky-crusted canned apple pie: Now that was a wartime assignment worthy of pursuit.

Some bat species can dramatically change the size and shape of their ears faster than humans can blink an eye, researchers have shown.

Scientists already knew that bats could change the direction of their ears depending on where a sound was coming from, like shining a flashlight around a room. New data now show that bats can also reshape their outer ears, stretching their ears to pick up sound from a wide field and then focusing back to tiny targets very quickly.

Rapidly switching back and forth from one ear shape to another can help the bat simultaneously learn about its environment and chase down an insect for dinner. Rolf Mueller, a researcher atVirginia Tech whose study was recently published in Physical Review Letters, hopes that the finding can be used to create more sophisticated sonar technology.

Working closely with bats after receiving funding to build a robotic one, Mueller soon realized how little was known about the mechanics of bat ears. “Bats are pure physicists,” says Mueller. He wants to build sonar technology that is not merely loosely inspired by bats but that pays deep attention to how bats expertly collect sound.

Bats perform several crucial tasks during echolocation. In order to avoid obstacles, they first need to acoustically scan their environment to learn the location of both objects (such as trees) and targets (like insects). For these tasks, bats cast a wide net of echoes and also make their ears larger to hear more of the echoes coming back. Once they have a sense of their whereabouts, the bats then aim to identify what each of those objects are, which requires sending and receiving very focused echoes.

“Sensitivity is just like money,” according to Mueller. “You can spend it only once. So if you know the [target] direction, you put it all there. If you don’t, you spread it out.”

But since the bat cannot both cast a wide net and do focused identification at the same time, they have to do one right after the other. And because bats echolocate in the midst of flying and hunting, the change between one function and the other needs to happen as quickly as possible. The bats can change from one ear shape to another in about 100 milliseconds: half the time it takes a human to blink an eye.

Rigid movements of the bats’ entire ear—the flashlight-style sweeps—have been documented by scientists for years, but Mueller’s is the first work to quantify not just the change in direction of the ear but also its change in shape. Mueller is now working with a few graduate students to improve sonar technology by mimicking the bat behaviors he observed. They are experimenting with making sonar dishes in softer materials that can respond and change the same way bat ears do.

Ellen Covey, a neurobiologist who studies bat hearing at the University of Washington, describes the bats’ ear movements as a shift from “echolocation tunnel-vision” to a wider, more lateral field where the bats can capture varied echoes. “It’s a way of changing focus,” she says.

But she also points out that there is a great deal more happening during bat echolocation than just adjustments to ear shape. Bats have to parse out many different kinds of echoes coming from different places that hit their ears at the same time. Since bats usually fly in “cluttered spaces” filled with trees and leaves, they receive a near constant stream of environmental echoes they need to wade through in order to find moving insects. Additionally, bats need to contend with the fact that the echoes they send out interfere with the sound waves of the echoes coming back towards them.

Covey has found that bats actually process echolocation sounds in ways very similar to how human brains process language.

For now, Mueller and his team are focusing on making sonar dishes that mimic the ear movements of the bats. In addition to the size changes, they observed that the bats’ ears are in constant motion during the entire length of the echo—something our microphones and satellites do not yet do.

Scientists have cracked the genetic code of a “vampire bacterium” that survives by sucking the nutrients out of other living bacteria. This new information could someday be harnessed to fight infections in combination with traditional antibiotic therapies.

Micavibrio aeruginosavorus belongs to a small class of predatory bacteria that get their nutrients from other living bacteria rather than from the environment. This particular bacterium attaches to the outside of a host cell, penetrates its outer membranes, and extracts the nutrients it needs to survive, earning it its ghoulish title.

The vampire bacterium’s genes, recently sequenced and published in BioMed Central Genomics, show that it lacks an enzyme required to transport some amino acids from the environment into its cell. This means it has to seek out these nutrients from other bacteria instead. Because predator bacteria kill their prey in the process of extracting nutrients, researchers hope that predators could someday be used to help fight bacterial infections by eating and destroying pathogens.

Public recognition of bacteria’s benefits has grown in recent years, along with sales of probiotic yogurts and supplements. “We need to work with nature,” according to Daniel Kadouri, who contributed the microbiology research to the study. For years, he says, scientists attempted to hijack nature with harsh antibiotics which become obsolete after only a few years of use. Bacteria may prove to be a valuable weapon in controlling increasingly antibiotic-resistant infections. Among the vampire bacterium’s natural prey are Pseudomonas aeruginosa: the bacteria that cause lung infection in cystic fibrosis patients.

Scientists have known about predatory bacteria for years, but they are difficult to study because culturing them requires growing them along with their prey. This makes the predator bacteria difficult to isolate from their food later on. In cases like these, studying the genes is one of the most straightforward ways to learn about a bacterium’s biology.

Predator bacteria have several qualities that make them promising as treatment tools. First, they are very specific about the kinds of prey they target, so unlike many antibiotics, they can be used to treat infections without causing more widespread damage.

Predator bacteria are also skilled at cutting through biofilms: groups of bacteria that adhere with a dense slime, greatly increasing their antibiotic resistance. While drugs are relatively ineffective at penetrating biofilms, predator bacteria actually seem to prefer eating through biofilms since they are a concentrated source of prey.

Kadouri acknowledges the public squeamishness about using bacteria—presumably the enemy—as a medical treatment. He says that bacteria therapies are just one tool in the arsenal of fighting bacterial infection. “The idea is to keep your infection at bay so you can come in later with antibiotics in a low dose. Or your immune system can have a fighting chance.” Ultimately, he says, fighting infections with bacteria is no more frightening than blasting our systems with potent drugs.

Predator bacteria are most likely to be effective in localized infections, so Kadouri imagines they could be used to treat topical infections in wounds, such as those caused by shrapnel. Since the predator bacteria are much more specialized than any antibiotic we know of, they could treat the infection without also destroying the “good” bacteria that populate our bodies.

Kadouri and others recognize that more research is needed to ensure the predator bacteria targets are as specific as they seem to be. But Kadouri is optimistic that predator bacteria, combined with traditional antibiotics, could yield safer and more effective treatments than those currently available.

Matt Traxler, a microbiologist at the Harvard Medical School, shares that optimism. He points to the increasing public acceptance of bacteria—especially probiotics—as a force for health. “There’s definitely a hurdle in the public mind that needs to be crossed. But I think we’re approaching that every day.”

Vampire bacteria are just one species of predator bacteria. Others, like Bdellovibrio, which Kadouri’s lab is also studying for its therapeutic potential, target prey by entering their cell walls and eating them from the inside out. Bdellovibrio also has a different prey population than the vampire bacteria, widening the number of infections that could potentially be treated with bacteria-based therapies.

There are, indeed, moments in time when the heavens touch the earth, and the results are truly awesome: Natural glass, formed when sandy soil is melted by lightning and then quickly cooled, is wild in texture, color and shape, an eerie reflection of the stormy sky in which it was born.

Of course, there are simpler ways to make glass than to wait for perfect cosmic conditions. For thousands of years, humans have been making glass, which can be blown and molded to create myriad shapes. The MIT Glass Lab is responsible for an impressive number of these fantastical glass creations that push the limits of what we can create in this temperamental and delicate medium. At the MIT 150 exhibit at the MIT Museum, there are examples of glass formed into everything from pumpkins to abstract vases to musical instruments.

Though each of these sculptures has its own virtues, the glass oboe in particular highlights part of what makes glass so special. Even in its hardened state, glass lacks the crystallized structure of a solid material. It continues to flow like a liquid. Both dense and flexible, glass vibrates more easily than such materials as wood and metal. An oboe re-imagined in glass creates beautiful sounds that are almost impossibly clear in tone. But the resonant power of glass is perhaps nowhere better represented than in what Ben Franklin once called his most satisfying invention: the glass armonica.

Invented in 1761, the glass armonica consists of stacked and tuned globes of glass on a spindle. A musician pumps with her foot to make the glass spin and touches wet fingers to the glass to produce notes. The instrument operates on the same principles that make crystal wine glasses sing. A wet finger sliding along the rim of a glass—or a globe on the armonica—creates just enough friction to vibrate the glass. The vibrations are then transmitted to the air, where they create sound. Variations in the size of the glass or the amount of water inside change the frequency in the vibration, producing different notes.

Mozart was so deeply captivated by Franklin’s glass armonica that he composed two pieces specifically for it. Even the briefest listen to an adagio performed on glass is enough to understand why. The sound is spine-tingling. A perfect reflection of its origins, glass music is hauntingly ethereal, angelic, and unnerving—so artfully suspended in the air that it feels as though it is coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Since metals like gold and platinum should have been pulled into the earth’s iron core as it cooled over four billion years ago, their presence on the surface is a mystery. Scientists have wondered for decades if an ancient meteor shower was responsible, but testing this theory seemed impossible.

That is, until now. To sleuth out whether gold once rained down from the heavens, scientists recently turned to a less glamorous metal: tungsten. That’s because metals tend to travel in groups. The same meteors that may have delivered gold to earth would also have delivered tungsten. Though less glamorous than gold, tungsten is valuable as a clue. Depending on whether it originated on earth or in a meteor, tungsten has a slightly different mass—a trait that reveals its source.

Panning for miniscule quantities of tungsten in ancient rocks, though, is an enormous challenge. To carry out this detective work, Matthias Willbold at the University of Bristol in England exercised the most virtuous of scientific traits: patience. He ground up ancient rocks and painstakingly sorted the components. And he didn’t just sort twenty times more samples than previous researchers had tackled; he also ran his experiment five separate times. The process took over two years. “It comes down to detective work, like a CSI thing,” he says. “You get carried away.”

The result of Willbold’s investigation is the first evidence that ancient and modern rocks have different ratios of tungsten masses, suggesting that the precious metals we find in the earth’s oldest crust had a meteoric origin. Science—and the heavens—reward patience indeed.

In a surprising finding, researchers have found that the Milky Way may have gotten its spiral arms in a collision with a much smaller galaxy.

The team from the University of California, Irvine, and theUniversity of Pittsburgh spent a year creating a supercomputer model to simulate the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius colliding with the Milky Way, but unlike previous models, they included the dark matter that would have surrounded the smaller galaxy.

“In the past, people have always thought of the Milky Way as the big bad guy—it’s so massive it’s going to tear this little galaxy apart,” says UC/Irvine astrophysicist James Bullock, whose group published the results of their simulation this month in Nature. “But people hadn’t thought about it from the other direction.”

Scientists have long known that galaxy collisions take place all over the universe but have largely dismissed the importance the smaller galaxy has in shaping the larger one, since the small galaxy is usually destroyed during the collision. The Milky Way is over ten times as many light-years across as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and contains billions more stars.

“In the past,” according to Bullock, “when people thought about the Sagittarius interaction, people thought it was way too minor. Sagittarius was way too small to make anything interesting happen.”

The reason Sagittarius was underestimated in the past was because previous models did not include the dark matter that likely surrounded the galaxy before it collided with the Milky Way. Dark matter is invisible, but exerts the same gravitational power as visible matter.

Smaller galaxies like Sagittarius could be surrounded by a hundred times as much dark matter as visible matter. Bullock and his team studied isolated galaxies of similar size to Sagittarius to estimate how much dark matter surrounded the galaxy pre-collision.

Bullock’s simulation was run on a cluster of 48 computer processors for around five days at a time—totaling over 10,000 hours of computing time, which would take over a year on a single computer. The simulation produced coordinates for 30 million particles at various points in time, which was then visualized as a film.

Including the dark matter turned out to be crucial to the effect Sagittarius had on the Milky Way in the simulation. After setting initial conditions and letting the model run, Bullock’s group found that the simulation produced a galaxy that looked eerily similar to how the Milky Way appears today.

For Bullock, “it was a little bit of a surprise” that the simulation produced a model that so closely resembled our home galaxy. With the dwarf galaxy’s dark matter, it appeared that the Sagittarius collision could be largely responsible for the overall current structure of the Milky Way.

But Bullock is not ready to say that the Sagittarius collision was single-handedly responsible for the spiral arms of the Milky Way. He says it is more likely that it was one of several factors, including other collisions and the gravitational pull of stars and clusters already in the Milky Way.

Sergey Mashchenko, a cosmologist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, agrees that though the model is impressively detailed, it only considers one factor—the Sagittarius galaxy—when there could be an interaction of many factors. “There is no definite answer that spiral arms form only this way or that way,” he explains. “In reality, I think it is a mixture of all kinds of things. Maybe there is no single answer.”

“But as this paper suggests,” Mashchenko continues, “it might very well have been either this specific satellite, or maybe another one, or maybe a combination over the past several billion years which turned our galaxy into a spiral galaxy.”

About 80 to 90 percent of the dark matter in Sagittarius was ripped off in the first of its two collisions with the Milky Way, so the second collision had a much smaller impact. These two collisions occurred in the past two billion years. With so little dark matter remaining, Sagittarius’ third collision with the Milky Way, estimated to take place about 10 million years from now, will essentially be a non-event.