Author: Ms. R.

Imagine that you are teaching a technical subject to children in a small village. They are eager to learn, but you face a problem: There are few resources to educate them in their mother tongue. This is a common experience in India, where the quality of textbooks written in many local languages pales in comparison to those written in English. To address educational inequality, the Indian government launched an initiative in 2020 that would improve the quality of these……

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With some careful twisting and stacking, MIT physicists have revealed a new and exotic property in “magic-angle” graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for neuromorphic devices — electronics designed to operate in a way similar to the rapid on/off firing of neurons in the human brain. Magic-angle graphene refers to a very particular stacking of graphene — an……

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Across the U.S., about three-quarters of people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans — a form of private insurance following the rules of Medicare — receive free gym memberships. Why is this? The answer, research has shown, is that it improves insurers’ client base: The promise of free workout time does not lure existing customers from the couch to the gym, but it does draw healthier-than-average new clients. For insurance firms, this matters. When their customers are healthier, insurers pay……

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Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution. That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter in the air. More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1……

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Before being awarded the Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science in her native Turkey, Bilge Yildiz was nervous. But it wasn’t standing in front of an audience of hundreds that stressed the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). It wasn’t having to do interviews with journalists. Rather, it was discussing her research in Turkish. “Two weeks before the award ceremony, I was learning Turkish……

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Health care has always been ripe for innovation. Whether it’s increasing safety in operating rooms, developing systems to reduce patient wait times, or improving drug delivery, there are endless opportunities to improve the efficacy and efficiency of health care. The Covid-19 pandemic made the need for these solutions all the more pressing. “There were a number of startups from MIT that addressed problems related to the pandemic,” says George Whitfield, entrepreneur in residence at the Martin Trust Center for……

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Student presentations tackled themes of identity, nation-building, racism, multiculturalism, and more, as reflected in the rich traditions of Brazilian music at “The Beat of Brazil” last month at the Lewis Music Library. The presentations were by students of Portuguese enrolled in class 21G.821 (The Beat of Brazil: Portuguese Language Through Brazilian Society), taught by Nilma Dominique. Three professional musicians were invited to perform as part of the event: Anna Borges and Bill Ward (from the duo Receita de Samba),……

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