Author: Ms. R.

MIT Institute Professor Emeritus John D.C. Little ’48, PhD ’55, an inventive scholar whose work significantly influenced operations research and marketing, died on Sept. 27, at age 96. Having entered MIT as an undergraduate in 1945, he was part of the Institute community over a span of nearly 80 years and served as a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management since 1962. Little’s career was characterized by innovative computing work, an interdisciplinary and expansive research agenda,……

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A recent award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) brings together researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Lehigh University (Lehigh) under the Multiobjective Engineering and Testing of Alloy Structures (METALS) program. The team will research novel design tools for the simultaneous optimization of shape and compositional gradients in multi-material structures that complement new high-throughput materials testing techniques, with particular attention paid to the bladed disk (blisk) geometry commonly found in……

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MIT researchers have some good environmental news: Mercury emissions from human activity have been declining over the past two decades, despite global emissions inventories that indicate otherwise. In a new study, the researchers analyzed measurements from all available monitoring stations in the Northern Hemisphere and found that atmospheric concentrations of mercury declined by about 10 percent between 2005 and 2020. They used two separate modeling methods to determine what is driving that trend. Both techniques pointed to a decline……

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Industrial electrochemical processes that use electrodes to produce fuels and chemical products are hampered by the formation of bubbles that block parts of the electrode surface, reducing the area available for the active reaction. Such blockage reduces the performance of the electrodes by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent. But new research reveals a decades-long misunderstanding about the extent of that interference. The findings show exactly how the blocking effect works and could lead to new ways of designing……

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Tomás Orellana, a 17-year-old high school student in Chile, had a vision: to create a kit of medicinal plants for Chilean school infirmaries. But first, he needed to understand the basic principles of pharmacology. That’s when Orellana turned to the internet and stumbled upon a gold mine of free educational resources and courses on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. Right away, Orellana completed class HST.151 (Principles of Pharmacology), learning about the mechanisms of drug action, dose-response relations, pharmacokinetics, drug delivery systems,……

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On Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth, killing all seven astronauts on board. The tragic incident compelled NASA to amp up their risk safety assessments and protocols. They knew whom to call: Curtis Smith PhD ’02, who is now the KEPCO Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. The nuclear community has always been a leader in probabilistic risk analysis and Smith’s work in risk-related research had made……

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MIT alumnus Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 and Gary Ruvkun, who did his postdoctoral training at MIT, will share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning in Stockholm. Ambros, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, were honored for their discovery of microRNA, a class of tiny RNA molecules that play a critical role……

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