Author: Ms. R.

For 50 years, MIT students have taken advantage of Independent Activities Period, a special mini-term, only four weeks long, tucked between the end of the fall and beginning of the spring semesters. This year, IAP looked a little different, as Covid-19 precautions led instructors to shift their classes online, but the term’s spirit of innovative, creative exploration remained. In keeping with that spirit, IAP offerings from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) ranged from the playful……

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The pursuit of fusion as a safe, carbon-free, always-on energy source has intensified in recent years, with a number of organizations pursuing aggressive timelines for technology demonstrations and power plant designs. New-generation superconducting magnets are a critical enabler for many of these programs, which creates growing need for sensors, controls, and other infrastructure that will allow the magnets to operate reliably in the harsh conditions of a commercial fusion power plant. A collaborative group led by Department of Nuclear……

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Former and first MIT Haystack Observatory Director Paul Brown Sebring died Jan. 3 at age 102 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Born in 1918 in Washington, Indiana, Sebring graduated from Purdue University in 1940 and joined the engineering department of Zenith Radio Corporation. During World War II, he was invited by Professor F. V. Hunt of Harvard University to join the Underwater Sound Laboratory, which developed anti-submarine devices and guided torpedoes for the U.S. Navy. He received the Naval Ordnance Development……

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MIT’s proposed redevelopment of the 14-acre Volpe parcel in Kendall Square is ready to start a new chapter in its review and approval process. With the Institute’s design and construction of the new John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center on four acres of the site underway, the Volpe team is now focusing on the remaining 10 acres of the parcel. This planned two-step process was anticipated in the Volpe zoning agreement with the city as the federal government……

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Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) allows scientists to produce high-resolution, three-dimensional images of tiny molecules such as proteins. This technique works best for imaging proteins that exist in only one conformation, but MIT researchers have now developed a machine-learning algorithm that helps them identify multiple possible structures that a protein can take. Unlike AI techniques that aim to predict protein structure from sequence data alone, protein structure can also be experimentally determined using cryo-EM, which produces hundreds of thousands, or even……

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Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer acclaimed for his work confronting bias against the poor and people of color in the U.S. justice system, will deliver the address at MIT’s 2021 Commencement exercises on Friday, June 4. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, which has won legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally……

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