Author: Ms. R.

As part of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future’s new series of research briefs, MIT Professor Frank Levy teamed with Wellesley College undergraduate Arshia Mehta to examine the future of logistics, especially in light of changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The brief explores how technology is changing the warehousing and trucking industries and the resulting impacts on employment. Levy is a professor emeritus of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an advisory……

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The School of Science has awarded chaired appointments to 12 faculty members. These faculty, who are members of the departments of Biology; Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Chemistry; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; and Physics, receive additional support to pursue their research and develop their careers. Kristin Bergmann, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has been named a D. Reid Weedon, Jr. ’41 Career Development Professor. This is a three-year professorship. Bergmann’s research integrates……

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MIT researchers have developed a wireless, private way to monitor a person’s sleep postures — whether snoozing on their back, stomach, or sides — using reflected radio signals from a small device mounted on a bedroom wall. The device, called BodyCompass, is the first home-ready, radio-frequency-based system to provide accurate sleep data without cameras or sensors attached to the body, according to Shichao Yue, who will introduce the system in a presentation at the UbiComp 2020 conference on Sept…….

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To produce your thoughts and actions, your brain processes information in a hierarchy of regions along its surface, or cortex, ranging from “lower” areas that do basic parsing of incoming sensations to “higher” executive regions that formulate your plans for employing that newfound knowledge. In a new study, MIT neuroscientists seeking to explain how this organization emerges report two broad trends: In each of three distinct regions, information encoding or its inhibition was associated with a similar tug of……

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On a moonless night on Aug. 28, 1859, the sky began to bleed. The phenomenon behind the northern lights had gone global: an aurora stretching luminous, rainbow fingers across time zones and continents illuminated the night sky with an undulating backdrop of crimson. From New England to Australia, people stood in the streets looking up with admiration, inspiration, and fear as the night sky shimmered in Technicolor. But the beautiful display came with a cost. The global telegraph system……

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As the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe, bringing everyday life to a screeching halt, researchers at MIT and its affiliates ramped down much of their lab work and stopped teaching classes in person, but refused to come to a standstill. Instead, they changed tacks and took action investigating the many unknowns of Covid-19 and the virus that causes it (SARS-CoV-2), organizing pandemic responses, and communicating with the public and each other about what they knew. One result of……

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