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.

 
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to speak at MIT’s 2022...
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and former finance minister of Nigeria, will deliver the address at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 27. An expert in global finance, economics, and international development, Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. Known as a skilled negotiator and consensus builder, she has devoted her career to helping developing countries achieve robust economic growth and sustainable development. Okonjo-Iweala twice...

Read More

A life-changing fertilizer for rural farmers in...
Most commercial fertilizer travels a long way before it reaches rural farmers in Kenya. Transportation costs force many farmers to rely on cheap, synthetic fertilizers, which can lead to the acidification and degradation of their soil over time. The situation amounts to a multigenerational crisis as elders have watched their crop yields dwindle over the course of decades. Now Safi Organics is using a technology honed at MIT’s D-Lab to make organic fertilizer that can help restore such farmlands....

Read More

3 Questions: The future of international education
Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa in the MIT Department of Political Science. He conducts research in the field of comparative politics, with a focus on development and ethnic conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. He directs the Global Diversity Lab (GDL) and was recently named faculty director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), MIT’s global experiential learning program. Here, Lieberman describes international education and its import for solving global problems. Q:...

Read More

 
Seven from MIT named 2022 Sloan Research...
Seven members of the MIT faculty are among 118 early-career researchers recently named recipients of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Representing the departments of Chemistry, Economics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, the honorees will each receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to advance their research. Including this year’s recipients, a total of 309 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since the first fellowships were awarded in 1955. “Today’s Sloan Research Fellows represent...

Read More

Eddie Glaude Jr.: “We must run toward...
At this year’s annual MIT celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr, keynote speaker Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. Donnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, invoked King’s memory in an impassioned appeal for confronting the realities of the United States’ history and the country’s racist beliefs and actions, in order to achieve a more just and equitable nation. Glaude, a prominent political commentator and author of books including “Democracy in Black: How...

Read More

Nurturing human communities and natural ecosystems
When she was in 7th grade, Heidi Li and the five other members of the Oyster Gardening Club cultivated hundreds of oysters to help repopulate the Chesapeake Bay. On the day they released the oysters into the bay, the event attracted TV journalists and local officials, including the governor. The attention opened the young Li’s eyes to the ways that a seemingly small effort in her local community could have a real-world impact. “I got to see firsthand how...

Read More

 
Mathematician George Lusztig receives Wolf Prize
George Lusztig, the Abdun-Nur Professor of Mathematics at MIT, has been awarded the prestigious 2022 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his work on geometric representation theory and algebraic groups. The Israel-based Wolf Foundation cited the American-Romanian mathematician “for groundbreaking contributions to representation theory and related areas.” Lusztig is known for his work on representation theory, in particular for the objects closely related to algebraic groups, such as finite reductive groups, Hecke algebras, p-adic groups, quantum groups, and Weyl groups.  ...

Read More

Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive...
An estimated two-thirds of humanity is affected by shortages of water, and many such areas in the developing world also face a lack of dependable electricity. Widespread research efforts have thus focused on ways to desalinate seawater or brackish water using just solar heat. Many such efforts have run into problems with fouling of equipment caused by salt buildup, however, which often adds complexity and expense. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in China has come up...

Read More

A new atlas of cells that carry...
While neurons and glial cells are by far the most numerous cells in the brain, many other types of cells play important roles. Among those are cerebrovascular cells, which form the blood vessels that deliver oxygen and other nutrients to the brain. Those cells, which comprise only 0.3 percent of the brain’s cells, also make up the blood-brain barrier, a critical interface that prevents pathogens and toxins from entering the brain, while allowing critical nutrients and signals through. Researchers...

Read More

 
Student-led MIT course provides an inside look...
Jeana Choi and Lisa Yoo had already bonded over their appreciation for Korean music when they decided to organize a K-pop course at MIT during the Institute’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this January. Both graduating fifth-year master’s students in electrical engineering and computer science, Choi and Yoo became friends in class 21M.294 (Popular Musics of the World), where they collaborated on a podcast-style interview with a producer of Korean R&B.  Choi, who had previously run an IAP course about...

Read More

Adopting a holistic approach to problem-solving in...
“Price discounting is one of my pet peeves,” says Sharmila Chatterjee. No, the academic head for the Enterprise Management (EM) Track of MIT Sloan School of Management’s MBA program doesn’t have it out for customers looking for a deal. Rather, this is a stitch in a running thread of conversation about bigger-picture thinking honed from years of research. Chatterjee is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing expert and an award-winning case writer who examines issues in the domains of channels of...

Read More

ClassPass makes health and fitness more accessible
Are you a Pilates person or a cycling person? Maybe you’re a HIIT person who’s convinced themselves they’re only interested in dance. Maybe you like to mix it up throughout the week. Maybe you simply don’t know yet. It’s hard to predict what kind of workout or wellness class will work best for you on any given day. Many conventional memberships or studios also require commitments that can be daunting if you’re still figuring out what your ideal fitness...

Read More

 
“Traveling” nature of brain waves may help...
After more than a century of study, the significance of brain waves — the coordinated, rhythmic electrical activity of groups of brain cells — is still not fully known. An especially underappreciated aspect of the phenomenon is that waves spatially propagate, or “travel,” through brain regions over time. A new study by researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT measured how waves travel in the brain’s prefrontal cortex during working memory to investigate the functional...

Read More

The MIT Press and Brown University Library...
Together, the MIT Press and the Brown University Library recently announced the launch of “On Seeing,” an experiment in multimodal publishing that will shape new conversations about how we see, comprehend, and participate in visual culture. Uniting the press’s global publishing experience and the library’s digital publication expertise, the series will examine understudied questions at the intersection of visual culture and subjects such as race, care, decolonization, privilege, and precarity.  While the visual environment has always been central to...

Read More

President Reif writes to the community about...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, When the Executive Committee of the Corporation met last week, I shared with them my intention to step down as president at the end of 2022. I write now to share that decision with you – and to announce MIT’s new provost, who will be crucial to ensuring continuity and focus through the coming transition. Working with...

Read More