Author: Ms. R.

Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds. She has, for example, set poems by Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes to music. Her latest project, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” recently premiered at MIT and marks another stylistic turn. And as with many artistic projects, the initial spark was serendipitous. Victorian scientific mavens Ruehr, a senior lecturer in MIT Music and Theater Arts and……

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The MIT math dynasty continues to break records for its performance in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. For the third year in a row, MIT students corralled all five of the top Putnam Fellow spots, and for the fourth time in as many years, won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize for the top-scoring woman. In total, a striking 70 out of this year’s top 100 test-takers were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25. In its……

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Snowshoeing and microelectronics are not often mentioned together in the same sentence, but at the Microsystems Annual Research Conference (MARC), winter activities, technical talks, and poster sessions all combine for a two-day flurry of research celebrations. Returning to the Omni Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire on Jan. 24-25 for the first time since before the pandemic, MARC gathered over 240 MIT students, faculty, staff, and industry partners to chart the future of microsystems and nanotechnology. Now in its……

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No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function. MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and……

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A hummingbird mid-flight, a bullet piercing an apple, and a drop of milk forming a crown-like splash, are all images never seen by the human eye until the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton captured them. Having transformed the stroboscope from a laboratory instrument into an everyday device, he is considered the father of modern high-speed photography — affectionately known by his students and staff as “Doc,” and as “Papa Flash” by Jacques Cousteau and the crew of their……

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Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account. Like all information sent over the internet, those communications could be corrupted by noise that inserts errors into the data. To overcome this problem, senders encode data before they are transmitted, and then a receiver uses a decoding algorithm to correct errors and recover the original message. In some instances, data are received with reliability information that helps the decoder figure out which parts of a transmission……

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Almost 2.8 million lane-miles, or about 4.6 million lane-kilometers, of the United States are paved. Roads and streets form the backbone of our built environment. They take us to work or school, take goods to their destinations, and much more. However, a new study by MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) researchers shows that the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of all construction materials used in the U.S. pavement network are 11.9 to 13.3 megatons. This is equivalent to the……

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E.G. (a pseudonym) is an accomplished woman in her early 60s: She is a college graduate and has an advanced professional degree. She has a stellar vocabulary — in the 98th percentile, according to tests — and has mastered a foreign language (Russian) to the point that she sometimes dreams in it. She also has, likely since birth, been missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain known to be critical for language. In 2016, E.G. contacted……

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