Miriam Roure is a Research Fellow at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, an institute that studies how digital technologies are changing the way in which cities are studied and understood. Miriam, whose background is in architecture, has been working at the Lab for over a year and has also collaborated with the World Bank and the Area Metropolitana de Barcelona. During her studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design she co-founded Harvard xDesign Conference, which it’s now on it’s third year. I caught up with Miriam at Flour Bakery outside of Kendall Square Cambridge.

To understand Edward Miracco you have to first get a grasp on the work he's been doing for the last five years in telomerase research.  

Here's the woefully simplified version. The cells in our body divide throughout our lives, but not endlessly. There's a timer called a "telomere" that's running and sets how many times they can divide.

As Edward explains it on his research funding site, "You can think of it like the little plastic tip that seals the end of your shoelace. This little tip, known as an aglet, prevents the shoelace from fraying; a telomere is the DNA "tip" that prevents a chromosome from fraying." Once the telomere runs out, the cell is unable to divide anymore and "retires." Now, here's where the study of teleomeres intersects with cancer. Whereas most cells have a limit to the number of times they divide and replicate, cancer cells have a little machine—an enzyme called telomerase—that elongates the telomere (timer). So they can divide forever and take over. Stop the telomerase and you could stop the slow spread of cancer.  

What is nanotechnology?

So your hair is about 100 microns thick.

There's a meter, then there's a millimeter, then there's a micrometer. As you know, a millimeter is one-thousandth of a meter. A micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter. So your hair is 100 of those. Now a nanometer is a hundred thousand times smaller than that. Basically, it's the relationship between a meter and a strand of your hair, but even less. 

Zhanina Boyadzhieva is a Bulgarian-born architectural designer who now studies and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  A graduate of Harvard School of Design, she recently self-published Collective Individuality: Reconstructing the Public Realm, a thesis that Zhanina calls, "a year-long fascination" with the comparison of socialist and post-socialist cities with a focus on Eastern Europe. I caught up with Zhanina just as she returned from giving a TedX talk in Sofia, Bulgaria on the topic. 

Is architecture art or science?

My initial definition of architecture has expanded tremendously especially with my thesis project to include politics, culture, social practices and I'm getting more and more interested in this. The link between architecture and urbanism, so cities, and different social practices within them.