Set design teaches students about architecture, engineering — and self. For junior Sam Seaman, lighting design led to “my realizing that I’m not a scientist, I’m an engineer.” Junior Daniel Landez learned “how I fit into the puzzle that is MIT.”
set the scene/stage(ALSOthe scene/stage is set) used to mean that conditions have been made advantageous for something to happen, or that something is likely to happen: This weekend's talks between the two leaders have set the scene for a peace agreement to be reached. The stage looks set for a repeat of last year's final.
Nearly 2600 years ago, a man was beheaded near modern-day York, U.K.—for what reasons, we still don’t know—and his head was quickly buried in the clay-rich mud. When researchers found his skull in 2008, they were startled to find that his brain tissue, which normally rots rapidly after death, had survived for millennia—even maintaining features such as folds and grooves (above).
Now, researchers think they know why. Using several molecular techniques to examine the remaining tissue, the researchers figured out that two structural proteins—which act as the “skeletons” of neurons and astrocytes—were more tightly packed in the ancient brain. In a yearlong experiment, they found that these aggregated proteins were also more stable than those in modern-day brains. In fact, the ancient protein clumps may have helped preserve the structure of the soft tissue for ages, the researchers report today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
