Where there’s smoke, there is fire. But with climate change, larger and longer-burning wildfires are sending smoke farther from their source, often to places that are unaccustomed to the exposure. That’s been the case this week, as smoke continues to drift south from massive wildfires in Canada, prompting warnings of hazardous air quality, and poor […]
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Gabriela Sá Pessoa is a journalist passionate about the intersection of human rights and climate change. She came to MIT from The Washington Post, where she worked from her home country of Brazil as a news researcher reporting on the Amazon, human rights violations, and environmental crimes. Before that, she held roles at two of […]
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Theo St. Francis is an MIT senior majoring in aeronautics and astronautics. He is graduating this month with a concentration in Portuguese, and has visited Brazil with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives’ Global Teaching Labs. This year, St. Francis was the recipient of the Global Languages Margarita Ribas Groeger Distinguished Scholar award. In […]
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As the world struggles to meet internationally agreed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, methods of removing carbon dioxide such as reforestation of cleared areas have become an increasingly important strategy. But little attention has been paid to the potential for abandoned or marginal croplands to be restored to natural vegetation as an additional carbon […]
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Many of our body’s most important functions occur without our conscious knowledge, such as digestion, heartbeat, and breathing. These vital functions depend on the signals generated by the “interoceptive nervous system,” which enables the brain to monitor our internal organs and trigger responses that sometimes save our lives. One second you are breathing normally as […]
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Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine. A glimpse into a linguistic world, Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as an introductory […]
Read MoreNewsOne Featured Video Source: Universal History Archive / Getty Jonathan Eig, the bestselling author behind Ali and King, made a shocking discovery this week that could dispel the long-rumored rivalry between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. MORE: 20 Malcolm X Quotes Every Black Person Should Know As he was searching through the Duke University […]
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In July 2022, Professor Per Urlaub joined MIT as the new director of Global Languages. A prolific researcher in second-language studies and the role of technology in language and humanities education, he holds a teaching appointment in MIT’s literature section. He came to MIT after having served in a variety of faculty and leadership roles […]
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MIT and Harvard University are teaming up on a new online education initiative: Axim Collaborative, a venture designed to make learning more accessible, effective, and relevant so that learners can reach their full potential. Axim Collaborative is a nonprofit funded with the $700 million the two institutions received for the sale of edX, the online […]
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Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, commencing in February 2022, is continuing to cause immense upheaval and destruction, and Ukrainians continue to fight to defend their nation-state. Last fall, MIT launched its MIT-Ukraine program, an effort to find ways to leverage the Institute’s expertise and resources to help a country devastated by war. This has […]
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MIT announced today that in conjunction with the end of the federal and state public health emergency declarations, the Institute will retire its remaining Covid-era policies, including its vaccination requirement for members of the MIT community, effective May 11. MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis and Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian A. Waitz […]
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Launched this month, MIT’s new Bachelor of Science in climate system science and engineering is jointly offered by the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). As part of MIT’s commitment to aid the global response to climate change, the new degree program is designed to train the […]
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The far right in the past decade has been much savvier than the Birchers ever were in capitalizing on contemporary anxieties. M.D.: Today’s far right, as I try to show in the book, is much more sophisticated politically. Broadly speaking, the far right in the post–Cold War world has been much more attuned to Republican […]
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The Small Town and Rural Student College Network (STARS College Network) is a coalition of 16 colleges across the U.S. who are collaborating on efforts to engage, support, and build pathways to college for students from small-town and rural America, including Native American students, by providing them with access to a wide variety of precollege […]
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To secure a more sustainable and resilient future, we must take a careful look at the life cycle impacts of humanity’s most-produced building material: concrete. Carbon uptake, the process by which cement-based products sequester carbon dioxide, is key to this understanding. Hessam AzariJafari, the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub’s deputy director, is deeply invested in the […]
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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Code-named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by the George W. Bush administration, the goal was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, topple Saddam Hussein, and remake Iraq into a democracy. Two decades later, U.S. troops are still on Iraqi soil and that nation is ravaged […]
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In 2018, MIT convened its Task Force on the Work of the Future, which concluded in a 2020 report that while new technologies were not necessarily going to massively wipe out employment, smart practices and policies would be necessary to let automation complement good jobs. Today a successor group is continuing the task force’s effort: […]
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MIT’s new series “Dialogues Across Difference” will bring speakers to campus and create opportunities for community members to demonstrate practical ways to take on difficult subjects across differences of opinion, background, viewpoint, and life experience. A collaboration among the offices of the MIT president, provost, and chancellor, the program kicks off March 22 with John […]
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Rett syndrome is a devastating developmental disorder, principally occurring in girls, caused by mutations in the gene MECP2 that leads to severe cognitive, motor, and other symptoms. As such, the March 10 approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the first-ever treatment for the disorder, a drug called Trofinetide based on the natural […]
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The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]
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On Sept. 26, 2022, at precisely 6:14 p.m. ET, a box-shaped spacecraft no bigger than a loveseat smashed directly into an asteroid wider than a football field. The planned impact knocked the space rock off its orbit, showing for the first time that an asteroid can potentially be deflected away from Earth. The spacecraft […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can not only engage in human-like conversation, but also provide accurate answers to questions in a wide range of knowledge domains. The chatbot, created by the firm OpenAI, is based on a family of “large language models” — algorithms that can recognize, predict, and generate text […]
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Genetic engineering and personalized cell therapies could transform health care. In recent years, stem cells and gene-editing tools like CRISPR have been making headlines for the possibilities they offer to treat diseases, including cancer. But engineering cells is a slow, labor-intensive process, making it difficult to produce personalized therapies at scale. The startup Kytopen, co-founded […]
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Levels of respiratory illness are rising in the Boston area and elsewhere. Here, MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis provides recommendations for keeping yourself and others healthy during the winter months. Q: Rates of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses are back on the rise. Should I be concerned? A: While everyone should take additional precautions, people […]
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