Author: Ms. R.

With the Covid-19 pandemic squelching a lot of typical summer research activities for MIT students in 2020, three undergraduates joined forces for a different kind project: researching and writing a theatrical script about the lives of pioneering MIT students. Sponsored by visiting professor Jeffrey Toney as part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the script was a collaboration between junior Rose Bielak, a physics student; junior Valerie Chen, a political science major; and sophomore Jovita Li, an applied……

Read More

Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez ’87 has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced today by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. She shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel, “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.” The other half of the prize was awarded to Roger Penrose, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” Ghez received a BS……

Read More

While ride-sharing services like Grab, Uber, and Gojek have become a pervasive part of life, many countries in the Asia Pacific region are still unconvinced when it comes to micro-mobilities such as bike and scooter sharing. While the convenience offered by these is great, especially in this Covid-19 era when people may remain wary of crowding in buses and metro trains, there is a need for in-depth knowledge of these new transportation options to help guide policy and regulation…….

Read More

Although we can’t see it in action, the Earth is constantly churning out new land. This takes place at subduction zones, where tectonic plates crush against each other and in the process plow up chains of volcanos that magma can rise through. Some of this magma does not spew out, but instead mixes and morphs just below the surface. It then crystallizes as new continental crust, in the form of a mountain range. Scientists have thought that the Earth’s……

Read More

With support from the National Institute on Aging, J-PAL North America, a research center in the MIT Department of Economics, recently launched the MIT Roybal Center for Translational Research to Improve Health Care for the Aging. The center will support randomized evaluations of low-cost, high-impact behavioral interventions to improve health-care delivery and health outcomes for older adults in the United States. According to the National Council on Aging, more than 25 million Americans over the age of 60 are……

Read More

The Phi Beta Kappa Society (PBK), the nation’s oldest academic honor society, held its MIT induction ceremony this year admitting 115 graduating seniors into the MIT chapter, Xi of Massachusetts. PBK, founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary, honors the nation’s most outstanding undergraduate students for excellence in the liberal arts, which includes the humanities and the natural and social science fields. In addition to extraordinary students with liberal arts majors, PBK honors engineering students who have……

Read More

Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic properties, dialing them from insulating, through semiconducting, all the way to highly conductive, or metallic. This can be induced dynamically and reversed at will, with no degradation of the diamond material. The research, though still at an early proof-of-concept stage, may……

Read More