| Clearer Skies | | | | | | As Covid-19 brought travel and commerce to a halt, people worldwide noticed clearer skies. Mechanical engineers report that this lower air pollution led to an 8 percent increase in the power output from solar panels in Delhi, one of the world’s smoggiest cities. |
| Four unexpected findings about Covid-19 deaths |
New research from MIT Sloan explores the correlations of coronavirus death rates with common variables. |
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| Tackling the misinformation epidemic with “In Event of Moon Disaster” A new website from the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality rewrites an important moment in history to educate the public on the dangers of deepfakes. |  |
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| 3 Questions: Heather Hendershot on coverage of the pandemic |
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The professor of comparative media studies discusses the stark differences across U.S. media sources. |  |
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| A new way to control experimentation with dreams |
An MIT-developed device not only helps record dream reports, but also guides dreams toward particular themes. |  |
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| 3 Questions: Ibrahim Cissé on using physics to decipher biology |
A biophysicist employs super-resolution microscopy to peer inside living cells and witness never-before-seen phenomena. |  |
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| | | A team of engineers from MIT and Princeton University has developed a robotic system that can successfully localize and pick up any item, amid clutter, and move it to another location. This technology earned them a first place spot at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. |
| Commentary: The U.S. must not stop investing in scientific research // Chicago Tribune |
MIT President L. Rafael Reif and Indiana University President Michael McRobbie call for new U.S. investment in science and technology, and describe recently-introduced legislation to do so. “Even as America grapples with today’s urgent and interlocking crises, we must invest in our ability to innovate,” they write, adding that The Endless Frontier Act “is exactly the kind of approach needed to meet today’s challenges.” |
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| MIT and Harvard researchers recommend strategies for teaching this fall // The Boston Globe A new report outlines strategies for improving schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic, including focusing on core lessons, sparking joy, and strengthening bonds between teachers and students. |
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| Coronavirus and the dream of an American Eden // Financial Times Professor Sherry Turkle examines how the Covid-19 pandemic could offer an opportunity for change. “When the government no longer plays by the rules, people want more than a return to order,” she writes. “We are offered the chance of something genuinely new coming out of the crucible of our current disorder.” |
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| Mandatory mask use could have saved 40,000 lives, study says // Bloomberg Using statistical analysis, Professor Victor Chernozhukov found that “40,000 lives would have been saved in two months if a national mask mandate for employees of public-facing businesses had gone into effect on April 1 and had been strictly obeyed.” |
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How will K-12 schools operate this fall? That’s the subject of a recent episode of the TeachLab podcast, hosted by Justin Reich, assistant professor of comparative media studies and director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. Reich is joined by Neema Avashia, a civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools, and Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School Of Education in discussion of a recent report, “Imagining September,” co-authored by Reich and Mehta on values and priorities for reopening schools. “We have to get smarter about how we structure ourselves in ways that actually are in service of kids learning,” Avashia says.
Listen to the episode → |
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 | | | | I decided Scrabble could make for potentially interesting data, so I forced us to play six more rounds in which I recorded some data about each turn. ... I guess we’re both Scrabble gods? |
| | —Kathleen E., in a recent blog post, “Siblings, Scrabble, and boredom” |
| 400 | | Percent increase in users signing up for Cake, a startup co-founded by Suelin Chen ’03, SM ’07, PhD ’10 that facilitates end-of-life decisions, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic |
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