The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Nearly 60% of Americans have had covid at least onceBut that doesn’t mean it can’t be contracted again (and again.) (Bloomberg $)+ Vaccines for under-fives have been delayed by incomplete data. (NYT $)+ Millions of Beijing residents are being […]

But seeing the code behind an algorithm doesn’t necessarily tell you how it works, and certainly doesn’t give the average person much insight into the business structures and processes that go into its creation. “It’s a bit like trying to understand ancient creatures with genetic material alone,” says Jonathan Gray, a senior lecturer in critical […]

Perron’s research group at MIT discovered that a competition between two erosional mechanisms—the gradual movement of soil down slopes and the carving of valleys by rivers as they flow through a landscape over eons—creates these identifiable patterns. In a 2012 paper in Nature, they described the “erosional mechanics” at work, presenting a mathematical model that […]

Middle school biochemist From a young age, Sikes looked at the world with an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. She collected and observed everything from rocks to snakes. “I drove my elementary school teachers crazy,” she says. In middle school, she was already designing experiments to measure the chemical reactions in nature, including a […]

And we found a way to turn pandemic restrictions to our advantage: we quickly realized that having fewer people at MIT would make it that much easier to revitalize our physical campus with minimal disruption. We transformed Kendall Square with open spaces and a brand-new Welcome Center. We set about revitalizing the west campus, with […]

When Manuel Moreu, SM ’78, was a child, his father was an officer in the Spanish navy, and Moreu wanted nothing more than to be an officer himself. At age five, however, side effects of antibiotics left him deaf in one ear, which meant that the navy would never take him. “Rather than operate the […]

Then the movie An Inconvenient Truth inspired Banks to move into environmental work. In 2007, she founded Planet Rewards, an online platform designed to encourage eco-friendly behaviors.  Officially, Banks retired in 2012, but she is as busy as ever leading Quiet Communities. In 2020, she became chair of the Noise & Health Committee of the […]