James Webb Space Telescope

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch on December 18, is the $10-billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. When deployed, the new infrared Webb telescope will operate from a vantage point and solar orbit of nearly one million miles from Earth, compared to Hubble's perch and Earth orbit of 340 miles.

Described as the world's largest telescope, it will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble, with the ability to "peer back in time over 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang." 

At 21.4 feet, the Webb has the largest mirror of any telescope yet devised and will "see" in infrared light, enabling it so gather and assemble clearer data and images through dust and gases, as demonstrated by these visible and infrared light pictures of the Monkey Head Nebula recorded by Hubble.

It's going to be the show of shows.

Grand Slam at Fenway

An epic 452-foot, come-from-behind, and game-winning grand slam by Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton.

Over Fenway's Green Monster, the seats, the signs, and out to the streets of Boston below.  

Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Skyscape by Jeffrey Lovelace, shot at Death Valley in California's Mojave Desert, now on exhibit at the Royal Museum Greenwich.

Crime Wave

Moderna's Emergent Discovery Methodology

Harvard Business Review shines a light on the 10-year journey and "emergent discovery" business process that led to Moderna's mRNA technology and Covid-19 vaccine.

"The story of Moderna illuminates several salient aspects of the breakthrough process. First, breakthroughs emerge from the accumulation of numerous advances – some big and many small. There was no precise 'aha' moment then the mRNA breakthrough happened. In fact, there was no single mRNA breakthrough: The Moderna mRNA platform was built on a constellation of technologies, methods, techniques, and know-how that evolved over time. For instance, the team realized early on that because the immune system saw the injected mRNA as foreign and hostile, it attacked the molecules and shut down production of desired proteins. Solving this problem – which involved developing proprietary ways to package mRNA so that it could evade the immune systems and deliver it to the rights cells in the body – took years.

Second, breakthroughs do not require an initial focus on a specific problem or user need. Flagship's research started with speculation around a very broad use case: Could mRNA be used as a new drug modality? But there was no particular disease to be cured or user need to be addressed. Although Moderna is best known today for its Covid-19 vaccine, infectious-disease vaccines were not a major part of the company's early thinking; nor were cancer therapies or other types of vaccines, which now constitute another major thrust of the company. The search for practical applications coevolved with the deeper understanding of the technology.

Finally, breakthroughs originate with highly speculative, even seemingly unreasonable conjectures. The question 'What if messenger RNA could be a drug?' was purely hypothetical in 2010. (As late as the summer of 2020, many experts were skeptical that mRNA-based vaccines against Covid were feasible.) But that was the point. The sole purpose of the what-if question was to frame the exploration. It did not have to be right to be successful. In fact, many initial conjectures about mRNA were wrong, but other important insights were generated along the way. Although no one could predict where the exploration would lead, the process was neither random nor chaotic. The concept evolved and the solution emerged through a highly structured set of activities involving variance generation and selection pressure."

Never Forget

Food for Thought