Author: Ms. R.

As the MIT community adjusts to this unique period of separation and disruption, the Institute’s top leaders held an online “town hall” on Tuesday to answer some of the most frequent questions being asked by students, faculty, and staff. Roughly 7,000 members of the MIT community tuned in live for an update on adjustments and activities underway now, and on planning for the coming summer and fall, given the uncertainties as to how the Covid-19 pandemic may unfold. “These……

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Imagine you’ve been diagnosed as Covid-19 positive. Health officials begin contact tracing to contain infections, asking you to identify people with whom you’ve been in close contact. The obvious people come to mind — your family, your coworkers. But what about the woman ahead of you in line last week at the pharmacy, or the man bagging your groceries? Or any of the other strangers you may have come close to in the past 14 days? A team led……

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For decades researchers have envisioned a world where digital user interfaces are seamlessly integrated with the physical environment, until the two are virtually indistinguishable from one another.  This vision, though, is held up by a few boundaries. First, it’s difficult to integrate sensors and display elements into our tangible world due to various design constraints. Second, most methods to do so are limited to smaller scales, bound by the size of the fabricating device.  Recently, a group of researchers……

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“I’ll never forget the moment when I first saw new Cassini data come down from Titan’s surface,” says Samuel Birch. “I was in awe at witnessing this brand new, never-seen-before bit of our solar system.” Birch explores and models the evolution of the surfaces of planets, moons, and small bodies in the outer solar system, including Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — two very different, icy worlds investigated by the spacecraft Cassini and Rosetta. He joins……

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In light of the recent events surrounding Covid-19, learning for grades K-12 looks very different than it did a month ago. Parents and educators may be feeling overwhelmed about turning their homes into classrooms.  With that in mind, a team led by Media Lab Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal has launched aieducation.mit.edu to share a variety of online activities for K-12 students to learn about artificial intelligence, with a focus on how to design and use it responsibly. Learning resources provided……

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When an introductory computational science class, which is open to the general public, was repurposed to study the Covid-19 pandemic this spring, the instructors saw student registration rise from 20 students to nearly 300. Introduction to Computational Thinking (6.S083/18.S190), which applies data science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical models using the Julia programming language developed at MIT, was introduced in the fall as a pilot half-semester class. It was launched as part of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of……

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With all but a skeleton crew staying home from each lab to minimize the spread of Covid-19, scores of Picower Institute researchers are immersing themselves in the considerable amount of scientific work that can done away from the bench. With piles of data to analyze; plenty of manuscripts to write; new skills to acquire; and fresh ideas to conceive, share, and refine for the future, neuroscientists have full plates, even when they are away from their, well, plates. They……

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In an effort to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, industries across the globe are retooling their operations. Textile mills are making masks, automobile plants are making respirators, and perfume factories are making hand sanitizer to meet the needs of the United States and the world. Education is scrambling to retool, as well. According to Vijay Kumar, executive director of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) and associate dean of open learning, and Eric Klopfer, J-WEL’s faculty……

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When the Republic of North Macedonia joined a project supported by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program (SPS) in 2016, the country teamed up with MIT Lincoln Laboratory to adopt the laboratory’s Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS) as its official emergency-response platform. Now, this system is helping North Macedonian emergency agencies coordinate their national response to Covid-19. NICS is a web-based communications and collaboration platform. Personnel sign onto the platform and add details about an emergency response……

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One promising way to treat diabetes is with transplanted islet cells that produce insulin when blood sugar levels get too low. However, patients who receive such transplants must take drugs to prevent their immune systems from rejecting the transplanted cells, so the treatment is not often used. To help make this type of therapy more feasible, MIT researchers have now devised a way to encapsulate therapeutic cells in a flexible protective device that prevents immune rejection while still allowing……

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The Covid-19 pandemic is a public health crisis with enormous economic implications: As much of the U.S. reduces daily activity in spring 2020, unemployment is already surging and experts are forecasting major drops in GDP during the second quarter of the year. U.S. Congress has also just passed a $2 trillion aid package for individuals and businesses. To assess the current state of the economy, MIT News contacted Jonathan Parker, the Robert C. Merton Professor of Finance at the……

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The brain is one of our most vulnerable organs, as soft as the softest tofu. Brain implants, on the other hand, are typically made from metal and other rigid materials that over time can cause inflammation and the buildup of scar tissue. MIT engineers are working on developing soft, flexible neural implants that can gently conform to the brain’s contours and monitor activity over longer periods, without aggravating surrounding tissue. Such flexible electronics could be softer alternatives to existing……

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