| A Home for Black History | | | | | Ken Granderson ’85 is the founder of BlackFacts.com, a platform for information about Black history and culture. “We want to become the Black Wikipedia … and to empower the Black community to take control of its own narrative so we can tell our own stories,” he says. |
| MIT is developing a framework for Covid-19 vaccinations on campus The Commonwealth of Massachusetts grants approval for the Institute to help in vaccinating approximately 50,000 students, employees, affiliates, and dependents. |  |
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| Update on 2021 Commencement and Tech Reunions In a letter to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif shared plans for this year’s Commencement and Tech Reunions. |
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| Bryan Stevenson to deliver MIT’s 2021 Commencement address The public interest lawyer and social justice activist will address the Class of 2021 on June 4. |  |
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| Searching the heavens for a reflection of ourselves In a new memoir, MIT Professor Sara Seager shares her personal story of finding herself widowed at 40, while explaining the science of her search for other worlds. |  |
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| Physicists create tunable superconductivity in twisted graphene “nanosandwich” Structure may reveal conditions needed for high-temperature superconductivity. |  |
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| An art lover dreams of space Senior Alana Sanchez combines her interests in visual arts and space research to fulfill a childhood curiosity about the cosmos. |  |
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| Opinion: GameStop signals a new, destabilizing collision between social media and the real world // The Washington Post “The past week’s events exposed several potential sources of economic instability,” writes Professor Sinan Aral. “If the social media crowd’s opinion alone drives market value, the market goes where the herd takes it, without the constraints of economic reality.” |
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| Applaud the culture // The Real Tiera Fletcher ’17, a structural design engineer working on building NASA’s Space Launch System, and her husband, Myron Fletcher, speak with the hosts of The Real about what inspired them to pursue careers in aerospace engineering and about their organization, Rocket with the Fletchers, which is aimed at introducing underprivileged youth to the field of aerodynamics. |
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| Balancing homework and A.P. classes, these high schoolers discovered four exoplanets // Smithsonian Magazine Two high school students and their mentor, MIT postdoc Tansu Daylan, have discovered four new exoplanets located about 200 light-years from Earth. |
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| Lois Lilley Howe pioneered as female architect, and her homes are still found throughout city // Cambridge Day Marieke Van Damme, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society, explores the life and work of Lois Lilley Howe, a member of the MIT Class of 1890. |
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| | | The caption on a black-and-white photo reads, in part: “In 1951, high school graduate Joe Thompson, 18, was trained as one of the first two computer operators. The computer was the Whirlwind, the prototype for the SAGE air defense system.” (Thompson is seen seated above, while Jack Gilmore stands.) MIT’s Whirlwind was one of the earliest high-speed digital computers, and Thompson played a key role in its operation at the start of his decades-long career in computing. David Brock of the Computer History Museum recently caught up with Thompson to learn more about his time with Whirlwind at MIT and his subsequent years as a leader in the computing industry. |
 | | | | Really, the glimmer of hope right now is the vaccine. | | —Stephanie Brenman ’09 in a recent post on her experience as a emergency medicine physician in the Los Angeles area |
| | | 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. Seen here is a conceptual rendering of the proposed community center in the heart of the development. |
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