Say WOW

Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Channeling creativity through art and engineering
Emily Satterfield likes to create. Whether she’s crocheting a dress she saw on TikTok, baking a cake, dancing at Cambridge’s Havana Club, or tinkering on a project, she fills her days with activities that channel her seemingly endless creativity.  “Being creative has always been a huge part of who I am. I get a new hobby every week. I just love anything that involves making things,” says Satterfield ’22, who recently graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical...

Read More

Celebrating “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” at MIT
Excited cheers and applause filled the 26-100 lecture hall on Nov. 20, as 77 Massachusetts Avenue — the main entrance to MIT — appeared on the big screen during a showing of Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” The several hundred MIT students in the audience had been waiting with eager anticipation for the first glimpse of their campus, which was used as a filming location in summer 2021.  “Knowing that they shot scenes on campus was really exciting,” said graduate...

Read More

Featured video: Creating a sense of feeling
“The human body is just engineered so beautifully,” says Shriya Srinivasan PhD ’20, a research affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and former doctoral student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Both a biomedical engineer and a dancer, Srinivasan is dedicated to investigating the body’s movements and sensations. As a PhD student she worked in Media Lab Professor Hugh Herr’s Biomechatronics Group...

Read More

 
New CRISPR-based tool inserts large DNA sequences...
Building on the CRISPR gene-editing system, MIT researchers have designed a new tool that can snip out faulty genes and replace them with new ones, in a safer and more efficient way. Using this system, the researchers showed that they could deliver genes as long as 36,000 DNA base pairs to several types of human cells, as well as to liver cells in mice. The new technique, known as PASTE, could hold promise for treating diseases that are caused...

Read More

Teresa Gao named 2024 Mitchell Scholar
MIT senior Teresa Gao has been named one of the 12 winners of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship’s Class of 2024. After graduating next spring with a double major in computer science and engineering as well as brain and cognitive sciences, she will study augmented and virtual reality at Trinity College Dublin. Gao is the fifth MIT student to be named a Mitchell Scholar. Mitchell Scholars are selected on the basis of academic achievement, leadership, and dedication to public...

Read More

A far-sighted approach to machine learning
Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works. Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and cooperate as effectively as humans remains a thorny problem. A key challenge is enabling AI agents to anticipate future behaviors of other agents when they are all learning simultaneously. Because of the complexity of this problem, current approaches tend...

Read More

 
International team observes innermost structure of quasar...
At the heart of nearly every galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. But not all supermassive black holes are alike: there are many types. Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects, are one of the brightest and most active types of supermassive black holes. An international group of scientists has published new observations of the first quasar ever identified, known as 3C 273 and located in the Virgo constellation, that show the innermost, deepest parts of the quasar’s prominent plasma jet.  Active...

Read More

Flocks of assembler robots show potential for...
Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wing and a functional racing car could be assembled from tiny identical lightweight pieces — and that robotic devices could be...

Read More

Celebrating diversity in student cultural and linguistic...
The room was abuzz with lively conversations as nearly 70 students came together to take part in the “Heritage Meets Heritage” event on Oct. 27, organized by MIT Global Languages and co-sponsored by the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and Hermanas Unidas.  Students participated in small group conversations on a variety of topics addressing diversity of cultural heritage (their favorite, traditions, holidays, music) and questions such as heritage language identity, multilingualism and multiculturalism, perceptions of words in different...

Read More

 
Scientists unveil the functional landscape of essential...
A team of scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has systematically evaluated the functions of over 5,000 essential human genes using a novel, pooled, imaged-based screening method. Their analysis harnesses CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out gene activity and forms a first-of-its-kind resource for understanding and visualizing gene function in a wide range of cellular processes with both spatial and temporal resolution. The team’s findings span over 31 million individual cells...

Read More

Machinery of the state
In Mai Hassan’s studies of Kenya, she documented the emergence of a sprawling administrative network officially billed as encouraging economic development, overseeing the population, and bolstering democracy. But Hassan’s field interviews and archival research revealed a more sinister purpose for the hundreds of administrative and security offices dotting the nation: “They were there to do the presidents’ bidding, which often involved coercing their own countrymen.” This research served as a catalyst for Hassan, who joined MIT as an associate...

Read More

Study: Automation drives income inequality
When you use self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drugstores, you are probably not — with all due respect — doing a better job of bagging your purchases than checkout clerks once did. Automation just makes bagging less expensive for large retail chains. “If you introduce self-checkout kiosks, it’s not going to change productivity all that much,” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. However, in terms of lost wages for employees, he adds, “It’s going to have fairly large distributional effects,...

Read More

 
Celebrating open data
The inaugural MIT Prize for Open Data, which included a $2,500 cash prize, was recently awarded to 10 individual and group research projects. Presented jointly by the School of Science and the MIT Libraries, the prize recognizes MIT-affiliated researchers who make their data openly accessible and reusable by others. The prize winners and 16 honorable mention recipients were honored at the Open Data @ MIT event held Oct. 28 at Hayden Library.  “By making data open, researchers create opportunities...

Read More

How “2D” materials expand
Two-dimensional materials, which consist of just a single layer of atoms, can be packed together more densely than conventional materials, so they could be used to make transistors, solar cells, LEDs, and other devices that run faster and perform better. One issue holding back these next-generation electronics is the heat they generate when in use. Conventional electronics typically reach about 80 degrees Celsius, but the materials in 2D devices are packed so densely in such a small area that...

Read More

From LGO to PhD
Many students in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program return to the workplace primed to tackle complex operational problems. But sometimes their research sparks deep scholarly interest, and they bring their LGO toolkit into an academic career instead. That was the case for Jimmy Smith SM ’18, MBA ’18, who’s currently pursuing a PhD in computational mathematics at Stanford University. He specializes in machine learning models for sequence data. Smith was ready to accelerate his career as a...

Read More