| Recyclable Electronics | | | | | | “Electronic waste is an ongoing global crisis,” says Thomas Wallin, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. His team has developed a new degradable material for flexible electronics that could allow the recycling of parts from many single-use and wearable devices. |
| Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone Knowing where to look for this signal will help researchers identify specific sources of the potent greenhouse gas. |  |
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| MIT School of Science launches Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy The new center taps Institute-wide expertise to improve understanding of, and responses to, sustainability challenges. |  |
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| New transistor’s superlative properties could have broad electronics applications Ultrathin material whose properties “already meet or exceed industry standards” enables superfast switching, extreme durability. |  |
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| The study and practice of being human Professor Joshua Bennett’s scholarship, poetry, and teaching help students address core questions about values and meaning in life. |  |
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| The state of elections Professor Charles Stewart III explores the way Americans vote, in all its extraordinary complexity. |  |
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| An All-America Hall of Fame inductee and her superpower MIT’s only four-time Academic All-America honoree, Louise Jandura ’84, SM ’86 has been hitting it out of the park at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 35 years. |  |
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| “Sensational” proof delivers new insights into prime numbers // Quanta Magazine Professor Larry Guth and his colleagues have discovered a new proof for the Riemann hypothesis, which “automatically leads to better approximations of how many primes exist in short intervals on the number line, and stands to offer many other insights into how primes behave.” |
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| A Greek-Indian friendship driven by innovation // Kathimerini Dean Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and Pavlos-Petros Sotiriadis PhD ’02 sit down with Tassoula Eptakili of Kathimerini to discuss MIT’s unique approach to entrepreneurship, the future of AI, and the importance of mentorship. |
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| A new spray application technology for precision agriculture // Forbes Professor Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 founded AgZen, a company aimed at reducing pesticide use by employing a feedback-optimized spraying system. |
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| Skate parks are growing up // Bloomberg With skateboarding the sixth fastest-growing sport in the U.S. from 2019 to 2023, Bloomberg’s Alexandra Lange highlights how Alexis Sablone MA ’16, coach of the 2024 Olympic Women’s U.S. Skateboarding Team, a three-time X-Games gold medalist, and graduate of MIT’s Department of Architecture, recently “designed a set of sculptural skate elements for a former tennis court, formalizing and aestheticizing what had been an informal spot” at a park in Montclair, New Jersey. |
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| | | In this installment of the “World at MIT” video series, Professor Daniela Rus, who grew up in Romania, recounts how an early interest in learning and working in a factory for a school requirement paved the way for her to study robotics. As the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Rus works on “bringing together the world of science and math together with the world of making things” at the Institute and values what she’s learned from her students and colleagues. |
| | | Professor Richard Binzel was recently on hand to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the falling of a meteorite in Johnstown, Colorado, where it was swiftly picked up and studied, ultimately linking it and other meteorites to the asteroid Vesta. In 1996, Binzel and colleagues imaged Vesta with the Hubble Space Telescope and discovered a 285-mile-wide, 8-mile-deep impact basin. They estimated some 1 percent of Vesta had been blown off by the impact that created it — “a volume sufficient to account for the family of small Vesta-like asteroids that extends to dynamical source regions for meteorites,” they later reported. The meteorite directly led to NASA’s Dawn mission, which sent a spacecraft to Vesta in 2011. “To me ... it’s the scientific link that makes it so incredibly special,” says Binzel. “And then the fascinating history of it, the story of its fall, is the icing on the cake.” |
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