| MIT on Juneteenth | | | | | Juneteenth marks the first known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. Students examine MIT’s historical ties in the ongoing MIT and Slavery project. “We have to revisit these events — no matter how painful that process might be — to challenge the entrenched and embedded inequities of our system,” historian Craig Steven Wilder says. |
| Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown Signal from 500 million light years away is the first periodic pattern of radio bursts detected. |  |
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| Letter regarding MIT’s initial decisions about the fall |
President L. Rafael Reif presents a first round of decisions about the undergraduate experience this fall and sketches out general plans for all community members returning to campus. |
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| Study sheds light on a classic visual illusion Neuroscientists delve into how background brightness influences our perception of an object. |  |
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| From delayed deceleration to Zooming Jacqueline Thomas PhD ’20 recounts her final academic year at MIT, from once-in-a-lifetime field work to a virtual thesis defense. |  |
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| Study finds path for addressing Alzheimer’s blood-brain barrier impairment MIT researchers pinpoint a mechanism and demonstrate that drugs could help. |  |
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| Grocery stores and universities should reopen first, research suggests // CNN A study by MIT researchers provides a “cost benefit analysis of 26 different location types to determine what the tradeoff would be between someone’s relative risk of getting infected during a visit and the importance of that establishment.” |
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| To understand who’s dying of Covid-19, look to social factors like race more than preexisting diseases // STAT A study by MIT researchers finds “race may be as important as age in gauging a person’s likelihood of dying from the disease.” Professor Christopher Knittel explains that “if I were a public official, I’d be looking at differences in the quality of insurance, conditions such as chronic stress, and systemic discrimination.” |
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| Inventing tomorrow 2: Digitizing campus // CNN Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning, discusses the future of online learning and opportunities for optimizing in-person engagement. |
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| Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year // Verge |
“Much of the foundational work showing the flaws of modern facial recognition tech with regard to racial bias is thanks to Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, and Timnit Gebru, a member at Microsoft Research.” |
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| | | For Pride Month, the MIT Libraries has curated a collection of recommended books, art, poetry, and podcasts from Black LGBTQ+ creators. “We are enthusiastically dedicated to celebrating, highlighting, supporting, and hearing these marginalized voices not only during the month of June, but throughout the year.” Image: Daniel Quasar |
 | | | | Black communities have been disenfranchised, excluded, and robbed for the past century by the states and cities they’ve called home. What’s happening now is a fight for the redistribution of wealth, without which there can be no racial justice. And the protests have only just begun. |
| | —Alula Hunsen, rising MIT senior, in a recent essay, “Our Country, ‘Tis A Thief” |
| | “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Photographer Almond Butterscotch captured a serene MIT campus as the sun set on the longest day of the year in 2010. “The tallest thing within 100 yards ... were old willows and sycamores instead of buildings and streetlights,” they wrote of that night. “The sounds were of laughter, merriment, serenity.”
Summer arrives in the Northern Hemisphere tonight at 5:43 p.m. ET. |
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