Here’s a roundup of interesting Boston-related tidbits I found throughout the week:

Marc Abrahams, the editor and co-founder of the Cambridge-based Annals of Improbable Research and the organizer of the famed Ig Nobels, was interviewed in Wired. AIR finally became accessible online last month. He talks about his favorite Ig winners, why it took so long to get online, and which countries have fielded the most Ig winners.

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Boston science has been a major beneficiary of philanthropists: people who made their millions/billions in other industries are now using their money to create and fund new research centers around town. Just go to the corner of Main and Vassar streets on the MIT campus to see the names of donors emblazoned on the gleaming new buildings they financed. These sources of funding will become more attractive has government funding decreases.

All this money raises questions about how much power philanthropists yield over these institutes and their research. We did a story on this issue last year and so I was glad to see that Nature has followed up this week with a special series of articles looking at the impact of all this money and the tensions that can arise between scientists and philanthropists demanding results.

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Researchers from Children’s Hospital published a paper this week the first results from a study scanning the brains of 450 children, age six to 18, using MRI and measuring certain cognitive and behavioral parameters. They found differences in cognitive function between boys and girls, but they were smaller than what previous studies had noted. And cognitive abilities seemed to increase from the age of 6, but then leveled off by the teen years. The researchers cautioned though that this leveling off needed to be confirmed by following the children as they grow up.

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And MIT researchers have come up with a small NMR probe that promises to shrink the size of current large NMR machines (used to determine the structure of proteins and other molecules) and enable the analysis of smaller samples (see MIT’s press release).