News

Spoken-word collaboration shows off the MIT community’s musical talents

November 13, 2023

What do you get when you cross MIT student and alumni raps with other community members’ electronic dance music, rhythmic riddles, and heartfelt love songs? You get MITverses, a new spoken-word musical collaboration sponsored by the MIT Music Production Collaborative. Community members from across the Institute were invited to record their singing, vocal loops, and […]

Meet the 2023 tenured professors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

November 9, 2023

In 2023, 11 faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Isaiah Andrews PhD ’14 is a professor in the Department of Economics. He is an econometrician who develops reliable and broadly applicable methods of statistical inference to address key challenges in economics, social science, and medicine. He is […]

Explained: Generative AI

November 9, 2023

A quick scan of the headlines makes it seem like generative artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. In fact, some of those headlines may actually have been written by generative AI, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot that has demonstrated an uncanny ability to produce text that seems to have been written by a human. But […]

The Beaver visits Father Sky: Meet MIT’s First Nations Launch team

November 8, 2023

Earlier this year, MIT’s First Nations Launch team participated in the 2023 First Nations Launch, an international NASA-Artemis Student Challenge hosted by the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium that focuses on Indigenous representation and science in aerospace engineering through rocketry. It was the first time MIT has ever competed in this challenge, now in its 15th […]

GlycoMIT Symposium celebrates advancements in glycobiology

November 7, 2023

On Oct. 5, the Department of Chemistry, funded by a generous donation from Frank Laukien ’94, hosted the GlycoMIT Symposium, an interdepartmental celebration of advancements in glycobiology research. Defined broadly by the National Institutes of Health, glycobiology is “the study of the structure, biosynthesis, biology, and evolution of saccharides (also called carbohydrates, sugar chains, or […]

Centering feminism

November 7, 2023

There’s a black-and-white photo from a 1920s beauty pageant in a gilt frame hanging above the desk in MIT Professor Lerna Ekmekcioglu’s office. The Jazz Age image features white flapper girls in white dresses. There’s an unsettling commonality among the women in the photo. “I found this at a garage sale,” Ekmekcioglu recalls, “and thought […]

Three from MIT named American Physical Society Fellows for 2023

November 7, 2023

Three members of the MIT faculty have been elected fellows of the American Physical Society (APS) for 2023. The APS Fellowship Program was created in 1921 for those in the physics community to recognize peers who have contributed to advances in physics through original research, innovative applications, teaching, and leadership. According to the APS, each year no […]

Panel examines Israel-Hamas conflict

November 7, 2023

As the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas unfolds, observers and news reports depict the prospect of a near-term halt in warfare as being unlikely. A panel of experts at an MIT public event on Nov. 1 evaluated the dynamics of the conflict, and discussed the elements that could be necessary for longer-term stability — […]

MIT D-Lab works to empower artisanal women miners in Colombia

November 6, 2023

In Colombia, approximately 60 percent of gold extraction originates from an informal sector known as artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Among them are “las chatarreras,” women who arrive early in the morning at the mines to scavenge and collect rocks or tailings discarded by male miners. Through a project launched in 2020, MIT D-Lab is […]

How to decarbonize the world, at scale

November 3, 2023

The world in recent years has largely been moving on from debates about the need to curb carbon emissions and focusing more on action — the development, implementation, and deployment of the technological, economic, and policy measures to spur the scale of reductions needed by mid-century. That was the message Robert Stoner, the interim director […]