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The Bottleneck in Cloning: Can it be Overcome?

  As a kid the topic of cloning always fascinated me, largely due to a number of cartoon characters who possessed the ability. One character in particular would walk into a machine the size of a telephone booth and press a button that activated with an onset of noise, light, and colored smoke. Following the commotion, a perfect clone of the character would emerge, fully clothed and developed. Immediately, my imagination would flicker with notions of all the potential benefits of having a clone at my disposal. Ironically, I did not know that cloning processes had been successfully carried out with complex, sexually reproducing organisms until I was in high school. As I was conducting my research for this topic I would ask peers, friends and/or family if they were familiar with cloning success stories such as Dolly the Sheep and many were completely unaware of the matter. In reality, the primary cloning method, Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) is not an effortless or high succes...
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Rules of the race

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           Walk down any busy city street in the 1950s and you’d likely see a myriad of cars, all in a different   make, model, and color. Each displaying a unique attribute, whether it be a new color, shape, interior, tech, etc. However, a majority of modern cars are often devoid of these unique attributes not just on the outside, but the inside as well. Of course, there are exceptions, but a majority of the population doesn’t own a Cybertruck or some super fancy sports car. Also, these are the cars that play a huge part in overall sales [1] . In the figure below, similar make and models of the best-selling cars are shown below. All of them are in   the most popular car color to date: white [2] .  So why do modern cars look the same?  Like many things in life, the problem stems from multiple sources including globalization (making designs appeal to a broad audience), consumer preferences, regulations (in fuel efficiency, emissions, a...
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We Can Only Build Walls so High: We Must Consider Nature in Efforts to Protect Urban Environments

Faye Gilbert  For those of us in the New York Metropolitan area, flooding is no small feat, nor is it a new one. Think back to one of the most prominent tropical storms in this area’s history: Hurricane Sandy. For those alive during the storm, especially residents of the New York Metropolitan area, the effects were devastating. In the days following the storm, there were forty-three deaths, six-thousand patients rushed out of hospitals and nursing homes, over a million children out of school for a week, and close to two million residents with lost power in New York City alone [1]. No one went unaffected, and given the sheer monstrosity and unique nature of the storm, it’s no surprise why.  Not long after Sandy first touched eastern United States ground on October 29, 2012, 51 square miles of New York City— 17% of its landmass— was flooded.  In coastal areas like the Coney Island and Tottenville Peninsulas, flooding was as high as 11 to 14 feet [1]. In the case of the...
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Palm Oil-Based Fuels are Not the Answer: Putting Our Eggs in the Wrong Basket

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     Have you ever experienced a loss of innocence, the feeling of growing to understand the world around you and the resulting change in your mentality that comes along with it? It is a common experience, especially for those reaching adolescence. This loss of innocence is rooted in the inherent ignorance we possess as children. Children simply don't understand the complex reality of the world, and the evil it can possess. This ignorance is shed as they encounter harsh realities, personal betrayal, moral complexity, and a loss of idealized beliefs. By the time I became a college student, I thoroughly believed I had fully experienced my own loss of innocence. However, I once again encountered that old familiar feeling during my senior year of college in the most unexpected place.      I was first approached by my friend Aaron during my junior year, who asked if I wanted to do a research project with him during our senior year. The project in question relate...
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I Know What You're Thinking...

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Jack Caputo 2 May 2026 HST401 I pledge my Honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System I Know What You're Thinking... Regular folks have been harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), mostly in the form of large-language models (LLMs), since it took over the world a few years ago. People are being fired and replaced with AI, students are outsourcing all their work to it, and AI slop has flowed into every crevice of the Internet. People have formed an idea of what AI can do, or perhaps all it can do. Of course, machine learning algorithms were implemented years before the all-powerful LLMs that have come to dominate the market and cultural consciousness. Smaller machine learning models were created to be able to pick out patterns in data more reliably than humans or traditional data analysis methods, or perhaps patterns they couldn’t see at all. The field has matured at astounding rates – but what’s next? Well, what if I told you that this same underlying technol...
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