BOSTON — A new report from Harvard University concludes that the long-struggling U.S. housing market has finally hit bottom. But it's still a long way back to the surface, even in Massachusetts, which has fared better than much of the country.
 
Chris Herbert of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said the report indicates the housing crisis may be at an end.
 
He acknowledged that experts have predicted recovery before — only to see the market fall back down.
 
"But this time is different," he said. "It's different because we’re seeing fundamentals improve in both demand, in terms of steady but moderate upticks in terms of sales, and in supply side, in that we’re seeing home inventories down to levels that are more normal in a market."
 
Nevertheless, Northeastern economist Barry Bluestone, who prepares annual housing report cards for the Greater Boston area, said it could still take many years for Massachusetts prices to return to their peak 6 years ago:
 
"A few years ago we did an analysis and we thought we would be back around 2014, 2015. But indeed the depressed prices have continued much longer than the last cycle. And now I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see those prices regaining their past levels until the end of this decade," he said.
 
So is now a good time to buy a house in Boston?
 
"This is a terrific time for people in the home buying market to buy," Bluestone said. "Housing prices are near the bottom and interest rates are lower than they’ll ever be in our lifetime."
 
Bluestone said homeowners who want to sell still should wait a little longer, if they can, for prices to rise a bit.
 

WALTHAM, Mass. — Cairo has its pyramids. Rome has its ruins. But it’s not necessary to go so far away to see history unearthed. In fact, one archeological dig is only a bus ride away from Boston.
 
On a warm and breezy June day, archeology students crowd around their outdoor classroom: two rectangular trenches on the historic Gore Estate in Waltham. Sweaty and covered in dirt, they methodically dig into the ground, paying attention to every bit of debris.
 
Archeologist Dave Landon teaches a summer course that gives UMass students hands-on experience unearthing historical remains.
 
“We love projects like this because it really does kind of go straight at this misconception that archeology is always far away,” Landon says.
 
This summer’s underground target: a greenhouse built by the seventh governor of Massachusetts, Christopher Gore. It’s part of an innovative agricultural movement that took place in New England in the early 1800s. Co-teacher Christa Beranek says the students are likely to find a variety of artifacts under layers of soil.
 
“Probably down there there’s greenhouse structure, there’s destruction debris from taking apart the building, lots of brick and stone and mortar and remnants of things from the greenhouse, lots and lots of glass, planting pots, nails,” she says.
 
Technology provides clues
 
In the month before the class started, Landon and his team spent days mapping out the area using electromagnetic radiation. It’s an off-the-shelf technology used in an innovative way. And it spared Landon’s students from the arduous hit-or-miss process of figuring out where to dig.
           
Just as planes navigate by radar, sending waves out into the atmosphere, the electromagnetic detection machine sends microwaves into the earth. When they hit a rock or a patch of clay, they bounce back.
 
Using historical maps as a general guide, the precision of this data helps target the exact location of hidden structures. But the archeologist’s goal is to form a cohesive narrative about the past, and that can’t occur until what’s underground is unearthed.
 
Today’s big find
 
While some students dig, others sift through dirt as if looking for gold. They mostly find pieces of ceramic and glass, but every so often, something unexpected turns up. The big find so far today? The base of a flat-bottomed drinking glass, which, it seems, was used as a tool. The broken edges have been chipped in the same way a flint stone is chipped into an arrowhead.
 
Volunteer Phil Cook says the process of digging and sifting can be a little mind-numbing, but it is totally worth it when you find something unexpected.
 
“You're out here for 8 hours a day, especially in the heat,” Cook says. “Your eyes kind of widen when you see it sticking out of the ground and you really don’t know what it is at first.”
 
An understanding of history gives context to the dig, but some artifacts — like the broken base of the tumbler — yield more questions than answers.
 
“Someone was here making a tool out of broken glass,” Landon explains. “Why would there be this handmade tool here when they really had the ability to buy any tools they wanted for this greenhouse?”
 
Landon says a lot of times artifacts like these found in New England are associated with Native and African Americans. “So who exactly is working here and what kind of skill set are they bringing?”
 
The dig's next phase
 
The answers to the past will not come quickly. This portion of the excavation will round up at the end of June. Then the UMass team will spend a few months analyzing the artifacts before beginning the next phase of excavation at the same site in October.
 
“We’re going to use every bit of evidence we can get — any kind of historical evidence, or artifactual evidence, or archeological evidence — to try and understand, try and imagine the greenhouse when it was in use and people were moving in and out of it,” says Landon.
 
The story promises to slowly unfold. And right here in New England an archeological adventure is underway.
 

"More riders would normally be a good news story," she said. "The problem is that the MBTA has serious financial problems and so the investments the T needs to make in order to accommodate those riders, they can't afford."
 
The MBTA shoulders the biggest debt burden of any transit agency in the nation.

In order to afford new cars to accommodate the increase in ridership, the researchers said Massachusetts has to provide help.
 
"We're talking about a billion-dollar investment just for the Red Line and the Orange Line cars. So we need to find resources that the Commonwealth would provide in order to let the T start the process of buying those new cars," Pollack said.
 
She added that replacing cars dating to the 1960s and power systems a century old is about more than safety and aesthetics: The Orange Line has trouble keeping enough balky cars in service to meet demand while the Green Line’s electrical system and fleet cannot support the number of three-car trolleys that ridership otherwise dictates.

 
BOSTON — A national survey of governors' budgets released on June 12 shows Massachusetts tax revenues are finally projected to hit pre-recession levels in the fiscal year that starts in July. But Gov. Deval Patrick is still taking a tight-fisted approach to budgeting.
 
The Fiscal Survey of States is published twice annually by the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO) and the National Governors Association. It shows that Massachusetts is one of 25 states in which, despite more robust revenue growth, the executive branch isn't ramping up spending to match. Tax revenues are expected to go up by 3.1 percent in Massachusetts next year but Patrick is only proposed raising spending by 2.9 percent.
 
Scott Pattison of NASBO said Patrick seems to be taking a conservative approach to budgeting because of uncertainty in the European and U.S. economies. Pattison said that's in keeping with the national trend: "Governors have been very cautious fiscally, and I believe prudent, to be providing a cushion and prepared for a rather tepid growth."
 
Even though the economy is improving in Massachusetts, the survey authors said big challenges still loom. The federal government is scheduled to make another round of deep budget cuts in January 2013. If those cuts go forward, they would directly hit the state budget in the form of reductions in grant programs.
 
And even though there’s some revenue growth and some spending growth, the rate is very slow. At the same time, there’s no political appetite for tax hikes. So, the study concludes, state revenue improvement since the recession hasn’t been enough to meet the rise in demand for state services and spending over the past 2 years.
 

May 17, 2012
 
BOSTON — The Massachusetts unemployment rate dipped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.5 percent in March. It's the lowest level since October 2008.
 
While the state added 2,500 jobs last month, there's a renewed call for a major investment in higher education to create more jobs. A new study has found that an $800 million investment in higher education in the state would essentially pay for itself.
 
Co-author Michael Ash, head of economics at UMass Amherst, said that investment would produce an extra 11,200 graduates, 7,000-8,000 new jobs and $740 million in new income tax revenue. It's a better payoff, Ash said, than cutting taxes or putting the same dollars into casinos. In fact, he claimed that cutting taxes produces the worst results.
 

> > READ: "Economic Impact of Investment in Public Higher Education in Massachusetts: Short-Run Employment Stimulus, Long-Run Public Returns"
 

 
BOSTON — There's been a hopeful development in the fight against one form of cancer. Sarcoma is rare in adults but rather prevalent in children. For the first time in 30 years, a drug to treat soft-tissue sarcoma has been approved by the FDA. The news coincides with a fundraiser this Saturday in Hudson to raise money for the Jennifer Hunter Yates Sarcoma Foundation. WGBH News' Jordan Weinstein talked with Dr. Edwin Choy from Massachusetts General Hospital to see how fundraisers like these generate awareness and money. Choy said the foundation led the way.

According to a survey released April 11 by the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Bay State residents made more than 7.1 million visits and spent nearly $909 million in Connecticut's resort casinos and at slot parlors in Rhode Island and Maine.

The study also shows that for the first time, people from Massachusetts visited and spent more at Rhode Island’s two slot parlors than Rhode Island’s own residents. Bay State residents made 2 million visits to Twin River Casino and Newport Grand Slots, spending an estimated $284 million, which is a 7 percent increase over 2010 spending levels.

Clyde Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis, said two factors are behind this surprise finding.

“I think the dominant factors are that Twin River has consciously marketed themselves to Massachusetts residents in central and southeastern Massachusetts and were successful," he said. “And the second factor is that I think more people are stopping at Twin River because of higher gas prices and they’re staying closer to home.”

Barrow also said that with unemployment continuing to decline, private payrolls growing, and home prices stabilizing, it is likely that 2012 will mark the beginning of a recovery in the region’s gaming market. That bodes well for casinos being considered in Massachusetts.
 
“The fact that we’re seeing Massachusetts residents again increase their spending, I think, suggests that by the time we open gaming venues in this state, they’ll be opening right into the thrust of the economic recovery in the next couple of years,” he said.
 
Since the center began publishing its annual New England Casino Gaming Update in 2004, Massachusetts residents have spent over $8.7 billion at the region's casinos and slot parlors and directly generated over $2 billion in tax revenues to Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine state governments. 
 
> > READ: The complete survey findings (pdf)
 

 
BOSTON — Massachusetts residents do a better job than residents of most states when it comes to taking medications as prescribed, but there's still room for improvement. That's according to new studies released Tuesday by CVS Caremark, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard University.
 
Tom Hubbard of the Cambridge-based health policy think tank NEHI said people who don’t follow their prescriptions get sicker, end up in the emergency room and rack up big medical bills.
 
“If people don’t take their medications as prescribed, they’re not only not getting better but it’s a tremendous source of sort of futile effort in the health care system and wasted money,” he said.
 
Nationwide nearly half the people who are taking a drug to treat a chronic condition like high blood pressure or high cholesterol will stop taking their medication within the first year. In Massachusetts, about one-third of such people trail off.
 
Hubbard's heard many excuses, ranging from "the pills are too expensive" to "I feel better so I can stop taking them." He said there’s not one clear solution for improving medication compliance rates. But Massachusetts might have scored better than other states because drugs are more affordable here, he said: "We’re better covered in Massachusetts than almost anyplace else in the country. More people have health insurance."
 
According to the study, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation when it came to use of cheaper generic drugs to treat diabetes, depression, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
 
But the study also found that Massachusetts ranks near the bottom of states whose residents take advantage of mail-order prescriptions, coming in 44th. Research shows that if people don’t have to make repeated trips to the drugstore for refills, they’re more likely to stay on their medications. The study suggests that doctors, insurers, pharmacists and lawmakers find ways to encourage more patients to use mail-order prescriptions.
 

BOSTON — The indictment of former treasurer Tim Cahill on corruption charges was just another reminder of the long history of political misdeeds in Massachusetts. On March 19, WGBH News released the State Integrity Index, a report card compiled through a nationwide investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. That report gave Mass. a C on corruption risk. We asked you to grade Massachusetts on how corrupt it actually is. 

So ... what do you think?

Your Mass. Corruption Report Card

As of March 26, these were the results:

Some comments and examples ...

F: "Speaker of the House x 3. Leading by example." (Swansea)
F: "Nepotism rules ... rather than meritocracy." (Chelmsford)
D: "Allowing retired public employees to get new jobs on the same public payroll, the Big Dig fiasco, House speakers under indictment... Need I go on?" (Shirley)
D: "The leaders of the Legislature met in private to discuss bills. Why?" (Braintree)

We'll be checking back through August with more stories on the topic. Further thoughts on the matter? Comment here or on Facebook, or tweet with the hashtag #corruptionrisk.

 
BOSTON — Not one but two new reports from Massachusetts think tanks confirm that Occupy Boston's chief grievance — growing income inequality — is a growing problem in the region.

A very different 30 years
 
Despite the state's technology, medical and educational centers, incomes are now distributed less equitably in greater Boston than in 85 percent of the metro areas in the U.S., Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) executive director Marc Draisin said on “The Emily Rooney Show” on Dec. 13. And the gulf between the haves and have-nots is growing wider.

“In 1979, a person in the top 20 percent earned about 6 or 7 times what a person in the bottom 20 percent earned. Today, they earn about 10 times as much,” Draisin said. “The bottom 80 percent, their income in inflation-adjusted dollars has remained about the same — in some cases even gone down. The top 20 percent, they’ve had a great 30 years! Their incomes have been going up and up.”
 
The poorest fifth of the region’s population currently earns a median income of roughly $20,000 while the richest fifth earn about $212,000 per year, according to the MAPC report.

The last, lost decade

The MassINC report, released on Dec. 14, focuses on the last 10 years, which it calls a "lost decade."

That report also found rising income inequality, coupled with growing underemployment. That, MassINC research director Ben Forman told WGBH News' Jordan Weinstein, is of particular concern.

"A lot of people with college degrees aren't in jobs that require college degrees," Forman said. Overall, about one in four workers in Massachusetts is un- or underemployed. That's in spite of the fact that academic achievement keeps rising, a paradox Forman called "stunning."

"We have the nation's most educated workforce," Forman said — for instance, the number of people in the state with master's degrees doubled in the last decade — but in that time, "only six states had slower job growth than we had."  

That's led to increasing pessimism in the state about the "American Dream," an issue WGBH News explored this November in its "Where We Live" series.

Some other key findings

- Massachusetts’ poorest families pay more than twice as much of their income on taxes as do the state’s richest families. (MAPC)
- Half the region’s renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. (MAPC)
- The number of employed residents under age 55 has dropped by 12 percent. (MassINC)
- Over one-third of the state's teens (age 16–19) and over one-quarter of young adults (age 20–24) were un- or underemployed in 2010. (MassINC)
 
Further reading

- MAPC report: State of Equity in Greater Boston
- MassINC report: Meeting the Challenges of the Bay State's Lost Decade

BOSTON — In the November installment of our series “Where We Live,” WGBH News reporters have gone to cities and towns around the Commonwealth to share stories of people — from those who have given up on the American Dream to those who have embraced it and managed to survive and even prosper in a bleak economy.
 
But these mostly positive stories have been told against a backdrop of mostly negative economic data derived from the 2010 US Census.
 
The independent think tank MassINC has titled its analysis: “Meeting the Challenges of the Bay State’s Lost Decade.” It tells the tale of a middle class hit hard by the loss of 150,000 jobs since 2000.

What's happening with the American Dream in Mass.?

Ben Forman, research director for MassINC, elaborated on the findings.

“For the first time in decades median household income has declined in Massachusetts by about 6 percent. And median family income — that was just about stagnant over the last decade. That hasn’t happened before,” he said.
 
And the economic effects are evident in how people reported feeling to MassINC researchers.
 
“When we asked people over the last 10 years ‘Has it become easier or more difficult to live the kind of life your family wants to live?’ 54 percent said more difficult. Only 11 percent said easier,” he said. “When we asked, looking ahead, if the next generation will be financially better off or worse off, 48 percent said worse off. Only 17 percent said better off.”
 
Forman said that while we’ve been losing middle-income jobs it’s been difficult to attract new businesses here that have those jobs.

The state’s high cost of living, he said, “makes it very difficult for businesses to locate here, especially businesses that are employing middle-income workers, because middle-income workers feel those costs most intensely — and so they’d rather be in a place like North Carolina or Arizona or somewhere where the costs are lower.”

This recession has hit younger people very hard, especially college graduates, Forman said: “Over the last decade we created about 240,000 jobs for people over age 55 and we lost about 220,000 jobs for people between ages 25 and 44.”
 
Making the situation worse for recent graduates is the fact that Massachusetts has a grayer-than-average workforce. Since 2000 there has been a 44 percent increase in the number of workers age 55 and older, with many hanging onto their jobs because of concerns about their own financial futures.
 
But what about our many high-tech and life sciences firms — aren’t they creating jobs? Not enough, Forman said.
 
“We gained jobs and outperform the country in life sciences and some small niche sectors but those certainly aren’t enough to replace the middle-income, middle class jobs that we’ve been losing,” he said. “The industries we’re been creating here, often there’s three people in the world who can do the job the company is looking for. So no matter how hard we try, we’re not always going to fill those [jobs] with homegrown talent.”
 
Forman said the challenge is not so much incubating companies but keeping them here after they hatch, because often what they make can be produced anywhere and by a much smaller workforce than the industries of old.
 
Possibilities and pitfalls

MassINC researchers said things we could do to improve the situation include boosting tax credits for lower-income earners to help them meet the high cost of living and promoting the development of affordable housing especially in urban areas.
 
And, Forman said, there are some things we should not do, such as abandoning the state’s commitment to K-12 education or not maintaining our transportation infrastructure

Read the MassINC overview of what's happening with the American Dream in Mass.

“The reason those companies are going to be successful is because of the MBTA and because they can get to Kendall Square, the innovation district and the Seaport, to the new Northpoint area that’s being developed or the new life sciences center that Harvard is going to build in Allston,” he said. “If we let the MBTA fail it would be a huge economic development loss for us. We have the most talented people on earth and they get treated like cattle every day on their way to work. And I think there we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to lose those people? Where are they going to go?”
 
Although many think Massachusetts is well poised, with its intellectual capital, to take advantage of any economic recovery, the road to prosperity is fraught with danger — including the expected cuts in federal spending on defense and health that would be felt here more severely than anywhere else. Experts have also been concerned about the economic health of the countries that Massachusetts is counting on to buy our high-tech products and technology.
 
So is there hope?
 
“I think anyone would be crazy to doubt America and Massachusetts in particular,” Forman said. “Sometimes it takes us a while but we figure it out.”
 
The word “reinvention” is heard throughout the WGBH News “Where We Live” series. It’s something we New Englanders are proud of: our ingenuity and ability to adapt and change course. Those talents have led to some success during this recession — and they will be needed to meet the challenges ahead.

 
BOSTON — It's harder than ever to find an affordable place to live in greater Boston — and a research institute chalks it up partly to growing income inequality.

The Dukakis Center’s ninth annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card, released October 25, confirmed what many locals already thought: Rents are the highest they’ve ever been. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Boston area in 2010 was $1,583. 
 
It’s classic supply and demand, study co-author Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University said in an interview. The number of renters has gone up: graduate students flocked to the area, many young people are continuing to rent instead of buying and foreclosed owners are back in the rental market.
 
At the same time, housing production has slowed to a crawl. According to the report, greater Boston has been on a six-year path toward ever-lower production levels. If rates continue, developers will pull permits for fewer than 4,500 new units of housing in 2011. That would be the lowest number in two decades.

Compounding the affordability issue, the limited housing growth that does exist has occurred “primarily among luxury units,” Bluestone said.

Anyone who’s checked the real estate ads has seen plentiful loft-style condos, brand-new kitchens, cathedral ceilings and other fancy features — for a premium. In 2010 this reporter walked into a house for sale to see the owner installing a new marble kitchen countertop in the hopes, he said, that it would increase the sale price.
 
Somerville’s Maxwell’s Green development, for instance, is creating 184 new rental apartments in a complex that will include a yoga studio, theater room, wireless workspace and a club suite with chef’s kitchen. In a January 2011 presentation, the developer said rents would start at $1500 for a studio.
 
Bluestone attributed the trend towards high-end housing to “the dramatic increase in income and wealth inequality.” He pointed to a new Congressional Budget Office report that found the upper economic echelons controlled a larger share of the country’s wealth in 2007 than in 1979.
 
In the greater Boston housing world, that means the wealthy are “about the only folks who have the wherewithal to consume, and they’re buying bigger units, more luxurious units with more amenities, “ Bluestone said. “And developers of course are responding to that demand.”
 
To help stabilize rental prices, the Northeastern researchers recommend creating multi-unit housing “villages” for graduate students and turning bank-owned foreclosed units into rental housing, among other suggestions. 

Check out the Greater Boston Housing Report Card buzz on social media.

BOSTON — Remember LSD, that infamous mind-expanding drug of the 1960s? Some young researchers at Harvard Medical School have cracked open the door to the LSD vault, which had pretty much been locked for more than 40 years.

Jake Wintermute is one of those researchers. He's a metabolic engineer researching pathways to new drugs from those long blacklisted compounds, LSD and especially lysergic acid. "I recently finished my Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School in the department of systems biology. I'm a metabolic engineer and what we do is genetically modify micro-organisms to try to get them to produce molecules, compounds, that are either interesting or valuable," Wintermute explained.

LSD turns out to be both interesting and valuable. But LSD and its close cousin lysergic acid have been under lock and key for decades. They're controlled substances, strictly regulated by both federal and state laws.

"There's real agents in suits with guns and when we get it, we have to sign it out, and there is a two-key mechanism to open the cabinet that has the lysergic acid. They don't mess around," Wintermute said.

Those old enough to remember the 1960s may know why those drugs ended up behind bars.

Here is a quote from Dr. Timothy Leary, in a 1967 debate about LSD from the WGBH archives:

"Now the message I have is an old one. It's the simplest and most classic message ever passed on in the world's history. It's those six words: 'Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in," Leary said.

Before Leary, researchers in the 1950s were exploring the medical potential of LSD as a possible cure for everything from alcoholism to anxiety and depression.

Leary saw it as a way to reach a deeper level of thinking and inspiration. He became the messiah of LSD. He wanted to turn on the whole world — and on that night in 1967, students packed into Kresge Auditorium at MIT.

"If you take science seriously, and you take the history of science seriously, you'll realize that every great scientist wasn't in it for the commercial pay-off. He was in it to find out what it's all about, what's the nature of energy, what are the many levels of energy, what are the levels of consciousness, how can we map them out and how can we use them," Leary argued.

"And, as he got to know more and more, and to penetrate deeper and deeper into the mysteries of energy around us, he began to...flip out. He began to flip out. Look at Einstein: Einstein did it without LSD," Leary said.

Leary's opponent in the debate was MIT professor Jerome Lettvin. He warned against the loss of judgment that came with LSD, and the risk of "return trips," the repeated episodes that sometimes followed a single dose of LSD.

"Suddenly the colors whirl around, suddenly smells have color, suddenly colors have sounds, and then you're back in the normal world. And what does this smell like clinically, Tim? What does this smell like to you? As a clinician, what is this? If you saw a patient who complained of this, what is it that he would have? What would you diagnose him as?" Lettvin pressed Leary.

Leary: "A visionary mystic."

Lettvin: "[Expletive]! You would diagnose him as a temporal lobe epileptic with an aura. And you know that goddam well!"

Lettvin's sobering message seemed to carry the day in that long-ago debate. Leary was eventually discredited, and the drug locked up by governments around the world. Forgotten was the work of Leary's predecessors, those researchers of the '50s with their hopes for the medical potential of LSD. That's the trail that Jake Wintermute picked up.

His main interest is actually in a close chemical relative to LSD, lysergic acid. Which, he said, can be made both cheaply and quickly using new bioengineering methods.

"But more importantly, a lot of these compounds, they haven't really been developed since the 1950s," Wintermute said. "There are a lot of exciting new drugs that are being developed thanks to these new bioengineering technologies and no one yet has taken up lysergic acid as a kind of promising new precursor and I think a lot of that is because there is this kind of stigma, taboo, when you are working on something that is so illegal or so close to illegal. We presented this work recently at a conference and it was a little bit hard to get people to take it seriously because of the LSD connection."

Wintermute makes it clear that he's not talking about the acid that Timothy Leary dropped.

"These are the kind of drugs, they'll ease your Parkinson's symptoms, they'll cure your migraines, but they won't necessarily get you high, at least in the sort of clinical doses. Particularly the elder dementia treatment, is the one that gets us up in the morning. That's the big market with the aging population," Wintermute said.

It seems like LSD traditionally takes people out of reality and this research is actually about achieving the reverse. Wintermute said the actual mechanism by which the compound works is still somewhat mysterious and has something to do with it acting as a "vasodilator."

He explained the term, "It sort of opens up the blood vessels of the brain, improves the circulation in the brain; the sort of enhanced clarity that people on these drugs can sometimes benefit from comes from that."

New drugs could come from an LSD-related compound — drugs that open up the brain — but not in the manner of Timothy Leary. It's been 40 years but finally we'll have a chance, thanks to Jake Wintermute and others, to see if the hopes of those long-ago researchers of the 1950s will be fulfilled.

On a related note, it turns out that Jake Wintermute's mother was a psychiatric nurse who signed up for an LSD trial back in the early 1960s.

"She tried it. And she liked it. She had the Leary-style experience but she worked in psych wards and she saw the down-side too and she eventually did come to a more Lettvin kind of position about it," Wintermute said.

What does Wintermute's mother think of his research now?

He said, "I think she's proud. I get the occasional wink from Mom."

You can watch the whole mind-blowing Leary-Lettvin LSD debate on WGBH's open vault.

The MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. (Phillip Martin/WGBH)

The MIT Nuclear Research Laboratory is a building in Cambridge with a blue-domed cylinder. It’s the second-largest of the country’s 26 university-based research reactors, but many passersby aren’t familiar with it.
 
“I’ve never noticed that. That’s scary,” said Patrick Jean Baptiste, as he walks home from work.
 
He’s one of several people walking through Kendall Square who don’t know about the reactor. But some of them aren’t the least concerned after learning what it is, like a tall, lanky man named David.
 
“What I’ve heard is that MIT does a pretty good job of keeping a close eye on it and using it for certain types of experiments that aren’t so threatening,” David said. 
 
The reactor is a tank-type reactor. Cooled by light water, it uses heavy water as a reflector. It should not be compared with the Fukushima reactor in Japan. It’s considerably smaller and has a fuel inventory about 1,000 times less than that of a commercial nuclear power plant.
 
The facility was the subject of an ABC News investigation in 2005. At that time, reporter Brian Ross concluded that because there are no metal detectors or searches or significant guard presence, the facility is vulnerable.
 
The director of the lab, Dr. David Moncton, says that should not be a safety concern.
 
“Workers at this facility wear badges to detect radiation levels. The fact that outside this building, there is no visible armed guard presence should not concern anyone,” Moncton said.
 
Moncton said he wasn’t comfortable detailing exactly how the laboratory is safe-guarded.
 
“It’s not a good idea to advertise the ways in which you’re secure. We don’t have armed guards but we’ve got a lot of guards close by if we need them,” Moncton said.
 
He said the facility is secured in other ways, too.
 
“Whether it’s a truck bomb or an airplane that falls out of the sky and hits our containment shell, we’ve studied all of those potential calamities, we’re pretty comfortable, and the nuclear regulators commission is comfortable that this is a safe operation and presents no risk,” Moncton said.
 
The MIT nuclear reactor is closely associated with Cambridge's emergency planning authorities, including fire and police departments. And the Cambridge City Council periodically looks at the safety measures surrounding the MIT reactor.

Dr. David Moncton, the director of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, says he's confident the facility is secure. (Phillip Martin/WGBH)

Still, Cambridge City Councilor Sam Siedel, a staunch defender of the city’s academic institutions, is concerned about the lab’s presence in a full, urban area.
 
“It’s obviously a wonderful opportunity from the academic perspective about things you can do in terms of learning and studying,” Siedel said. “But the idea that these things exist right in the middle of a very dense population here in Cambridge and of course, right across the river is Boston, you know, I think we really ought to look at that,” Siedel said.
 
Siedel says he will pursue a Council resolution directing the Cambridge City manager “to confer with the universities to get a full report on all the activities and the safety precautions and measures they have in place to deal with all types of unintended outcomes that might happen around a nuclear reactor,” Siedel said.
 
On the streets of Cambridge, local designer Enrita Siegal is happy to hear that. “With everything going on in Japan, I have been more concerned about nuclear power and hoping that everything is being well taken care of here,” Siegal said.
 
But the MIT reactor should be put into perspective, counters Christine Jesstrup, a masseuse passing through Central Square.
 
“I know that MIT has a reactor. I mean, they’ve got nuclear physicists over there. I think the track record on nuclear is not that bad. And I wonder if paper cuts by a thousand coal plants and oil is maybe worse,” Jesstrup said.
 
Among other advances, the MIT facility has a track record of helping to develop methods of fighting brain cancer with radiation. But some Cambridge residents, like Baptiste, remain skeptical.
 
“You can’t trust these people. They tell you you’re safe.  But you can’t believe what they’re saying. You know, anything can happen,” Baptiste said.
 
All parties concerned hope that a new safety audit by the Cambridge City Council might help assuage doubts and fears about the nuclear facility in their midst.

SOMERVILLE — Wikileaks has dominated news headlines by releasing thousands of confidential government documents online. In Massachusetts, a new website is going about government transparency in an entirely different way. It's helping users cut through bureaucratic labyrinths to obtain government documents legally through the Freedom of Information Act.

Inside a third-floor apartment in Somerville, Michael Morisy types away at his dinning room table. There are vacation photos on his walls, journalism books on some shelves and a sparsely decorated Christmas tree. All in all, it's a rather innocuous place to engage the government for increased transparency.
 
But that's exactly what Morisy is doing. The Cornell graduate is the co-founder of Muckrock, a website that makes it easy to file requests under the Freedom of Information act.
 
“Muckrock comes from the old term Muckraker which is the old, sort of derivative term for an investigative journalist who is down in the muck digging up stories," Morisy said. "And that's kind of where we see ourselves."

Morisy says his organization doesn't have its own specific agenda. "But we are digging though the muck. We are digging through the raw government data. And we're letting other people do the same thing,” Morisy said.

Muckrock uses a series of questions to help users quickly locate agencies where specific government documents are found. Once the user finds what they want, they click “submit” and Muckrock automatically drafts a letter for the request. This letter gets sent to the government agency. And when the government completes the request, the documents are sent to the user via email, and are later posted on Muckrock’s homepage.

That means the filing process takes only a few minutes of a user's time when, normally, the process of filing a FOIA request takes hours. “Really, we're trying to make the process easier and open to everyone. We work with journalists. We work with think tanks. We work with researchers. We work with activists who are trying to get information about their communities," Morisy said.

Unlike Wikileaks, which many believe is trying to push a radical political agenda, Muckrock, says Morisy, transcends politics.  

"We have members of the Tea Party using our site. We have members of socialist groups using our site," Morisy said. "People have a common base where we can start discussions."

That, says Morisy, is where he thinks Muckrock's value lies. "You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. And I think we've created a great place to come and see those facts, so you can make those opinions.”

Justin Ellis, assistant editor at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, says Muckrock can be a valuable journalistic tool because Freedom of Information Act requests are complicated and time-consuming.

"You have to track the steps and make sure they find the right agencies. And something like this could be useful because it allows journalists to a take a few steps, make the requests, and be able to work on other things while this is being done… sorta on a parallel track through Muckrock,” Ellis said.

"At a time where we are seeing some contraction and reduction in the size of newsrooms and some journalism organizations, speaking mostly of newspapers, this is something that could be real time saver and a helpful tool to newsrooms," Ellis said.

To date, Muckrock has filed 289 FOIA requests. Michael Morisy estimates that about 80% of those requests are for federal documents. And while the government has completed only 35 of the requests, more than 4,708 pages of documents have been made available.

Currently, Muckrock provides both national and a limited number of document requests for specific communities in Massachusetts.
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