Author: Ms. R.

Eddies are often seen as the weather of the ocean. Like large-scale circulations in the atmosphere, eddies swirl through the ocean as slow-moving sea cyclones, sweeping up nutrients and heat, and transporting them around the world. In most oceans, eddies are observed at every depth and are stronger at the surface. But since the 1970s, researchers have observed a peculiar pattern in the Arctic: In the summer, Arctic eddies resemble their counterparts in other oceans, popping up throughout the……

Read More

Warehouses, manufacturing floors, offices, schools — organizations of all kinds have had to change their operations to adapt to life in a pandemic. By now, there is confidence in some ways to help mitigate Covid-19 spread: contact tracing, distancing and quarantining, ventilation, mask wearing. And there is one scientific tool that can play a critical role: testing. Implementing testing within an organization raises a number of questions. Who should be tested? How often? How do other mitigation efforts impact……

Read More

In a classic experiment on human social intelligence by psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, an 18-month old toddler watches a man carry a stack of books towards an unopened cabinet. When the man reaches the cabinet, he clumsily bangs the books against the door of the cabinet several times, then makes a puzzled noise.  Something remarkable happens next: the toddler offers to help. Having inferred the man’s goal, the toddler walks up to the cabinet and opens its……

Read More

The ability to culture cerebral organoids, or “minibrains,” using stem cells derived from people has given scientists experimentally manipulable models of human neurological development and disease, but not without confounding challenges. No two organoids are alike and none of them resemble actual brains. This “snowflake” problem has held back the science by making scientifically meaningful quantitative comparisons difficult to achieve. To help researchers overcome those limitations, MIT neuroscientists and engineers have developed a new pipeline for clearing, labeling, 3D……

Read More

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Nasir Almasri heard so many discussions about the political struggles of Palestinians that by the time he was 7, he thought he’d heard enough to last a lifetime. He was wrong. Decades later, Almasri is now in his fourth year in the MIT political science PhD program pursuing answers to thorny political questions around authoritarian regimes and opposition groups — scholarship with deep roots in the dinner-table conversations of his childhood. In……

Read More

Holly Jackson doesn’t think of herself as an astronomer, but her work has contributed to some of the most startling and original research in the field this century. A junior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, Jackson has become a valued member of Professor Paula Jofré’s research team in the astronomy department at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile. As a participant in MISTI, MIT’s international internship program, Jackson traveled to Santiago in 2019, well before the Covid-19……

Read More