Say WOW

Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
STEAM power on the runway
Science Surfaces, a capsule collection of body coverings and accessories, serve as canvases for digital prints of ideas inspired by award-winning biomedical images produced by life science research labs at MIT. The exhibition, now on display in the Koch Institute Public Galleries, is the result of the inaugural Peers + Pros Project, a Boston Fashion Week creative learning initiative catalyzed by the Cambridge Science Festival and sponsored in part by MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Fiona Shine...

Read More

3 Questions: Daniel Auguste on why “successful...
A lack of access to critical resources has prevented many middle- and low-income entrepreneurs from starting successful businesses, economic sociologist Daniel Auguste told an MIT audience in a Feb. 9 presentation on barriers to entrepreneurship in under-resourced communities of America. That’s a fundamental problem because entrepreneurship is one of society’s most significant pathways to economic security and building intergenerational wealth, according to Auguste, who is an MLK Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management for the...

Read More

Hari Balakrishnan awarded Marconi Prize
The 2023 Marconi Prize has been awarded to Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The Marconi Prize, widely considered to be the top honor within the field of communications technology, is given annually to “innovators who have made significant contributions to increasing digital inclusivity through the advancement of information and communications technology.” “Hari’s unique contributions have...

Read More

 
Report: CHIPS Act just the first step...
When Liu He, a Chinese economist, politician, and “chip czar,” was tapped to lead the charge in a chipmaking arms race with the United States, his message lingered in the air, leaving behind a dewy glaze of tension: “For our country, technology is not just for growth… it is a matter of survival.” Once upon a time, the United States’ early technological prowess positioned the nation to outpace foreign rivals and cultivate a competitive advantage for domestic businesses. Yet,...

Read More

New purification method could make protein drugs...
One of the most expensive steps in manufacturing protein drugs such as antibodies or insulin is the purification step: isolating the protein from the bioreactor used to produce it. This step can account for up to half of the total cost of manufacturing a protein. In an effort to help reduce those costs, MIT engineers have devised a new way to perform this kind of purification. Their approach, which uses specialized nanoparticles to rapidly crystallize proteins, could help to...

Read More

Phiala Shanahan is seeking fundamental answers about...
In 2010, Phiala Shanahan was an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide, wrapping up a degree in computational physics, when she heard of an unexpected discovery in particle physics. The news had nothing to do with any of the rare, exotic particles that physicists were searching for at the time. Rather, the revelation revolved around the mundane, ubiquitous proton. That year, scientists had measured the proton’s radius and discovered that the particle was ever so slightly smaller than what...

Read More

 
MIT-Takeda Program heads into fourth year with...
In 2020, the School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company launched the MIT-Takeda Program, which aims to leverage the experience of both entities to solve problems at the intersection of health care, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Since the program began, teams have devised mechanisms to reduce manufacturing time for certain pharmaceutical products, submitted a patent application, and streamlined literature reviews enough to save eight months of time and cost.   Now, the program is headed into its fourth year,...

Read More

Q&A: Tod Machover on “Overstory Overture,” his...
Composers find inspiration from many sources. For renowned MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover, reading the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory” instantly made him want to adapt it as an operatic composition. This might not seem an obvious choice to some: “The Overstory” is about a group of people, including a wrongly maligned scientist, who band together to save a forest from destruction. But Machover’s resulting work, “Overstory Overture,” a 35-minute piece commissioned and performed by the chamber ensemble...

Read More

Augmented reality headset enables users to see...
MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with...

Read More

 
Illuminating the successes and struggles of MIT...
When Victor Ransom ’42 arrived at MIT from New York City in 1941, he discovered a campus electrified by the war effort. People scurried between what he described as MIT’s “massive, unsympathetic buildings” as the campus underwent a transformation that took on new urgency after the attacks on Pearl Harbor that December. During his sophomore year, Ransom took leave from MIT and joined the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of Black pilots who later earned accolades for their performance in...

Read More

3 Questions: The power of music in...
It Must Be Now! is an initiative created in response to the racial reckoning of 2020. Multiple events for the MIT community were held throughout 2021 and 2022, leading to an historic multidisciplinary concert in Kresge Auditorium in May 2022, featuring new works by composers Terri Lyne Carrington, Braxton Cook, and Sean Jones, whose creations touched on the themes of racial justice. Some 150 student musicians and guest artists including turntablists, vocalists, spoken word artists, a dancer, and the...

Read More

Jupneet Singh: Finding purpose through service
As a first-year U.S. Air Force cadet in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), Jupneet Singh never imagined she would rise to the rank of wing commander by the end of her MIT career. She approached her first year as a trial period without many expectations, but the close-knit community and inspiring leadership compelled her to continue in the program.   As commander, Singh is the highest-ranked cadet in Detachment 365, which includes students from MIT, Harvard University, Wellesley...

Read More

 
Comedy meets mathematics in a new opera...
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...

Read More

MIT wins 83rd Putnam Mathematical Competition, sweeps...
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...

Read More

Student-led conference charts the future of micro-...
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...

Read More