Author: Ms. R.

A team of scientists from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a quick test kit that can tell if a person has immunity against Covid-19 and its variants, based on the antibodies detected in a blood sample. Unlike ART test kits — which look for the presence of viral proteins produced during a Covid-19 infection to determine if a person is infected — this……

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Richard “Dick” Eckaus, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, emeritus, in the Department of Economics, died on Sept. 11 in Boston. He was 96 years old. Eckaus was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 30, 1926, the youngest of three children to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania. His father, Julius Eckaus, was a tailor, and his mother, Bessie (Finkelstein) Eckaus helped run the business. The family struggled to make ends meet financially but academic success offered Eckaus……

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Graduate student Jacob Jaffe wants to improve the administration of American elections. To do that, he is posing “questions in political science that we haven’t been asking enough,” he says, “and solving them with methods we haven’t been using enough.” Considerable research has been devoted to understanding “who votes, and what makes people vote or not vote,” says Jaffe. He is training his attention on questions of a different nature: Does providing practical information to voters about how to……

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To prepare fields for planting, farmers the world over often burn corn stalks, rice husks, hay, straw, and other waste left behind from the previous harvest. In many places, the practice creates huge seasonal clouds of smog, contributing to air pollution that kills 7 million people globally a year, according to the World Health Organization. Annually, $120 billion worth of crop and forest residues are burned in the open worldwide — a major waste of resources in an energy-starved……

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Since 2015, the MIT AgeLab has awarded scholarships to high school students who developed intergenerational programs — initiatives that bring together younger and older people for knowledge-sharing and social connection — in their communities. On Sept. 9, five $5,000 OMEGA scholarships were given to high school students across the United States, supported by the sponsorship of AlerisLife, a senior living and rehabilitation and wellness services company headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, and AARP. OMEGA, which stands for Opportunities for Multigenerational……

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MIT Professor Richard Hynes, a pioneer in studying cellular adhesion, has been named a recipient of the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Hynes, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, was honored for the discovery of integrins, proteins that are key to cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in the body. He will share the prize with Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys and Timothy Springer of……

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