| Committing to Struggle Against Racism | | | | | | MIT’s 49th annual Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took place Wednesday and featured activist and author Angela Davis as its keynote speaker, as well as students and staff from the MIT community. The celebration luncheon was the lead event in a week of activities honoring the civil rights leader, and its theme was: “Let us uphold the flame for fairness and justice. There’s a certain kind of fire that must not be extinguished.” Full story via MIT News → |
| Study: Preschool gives a big boost to college attendance Research using a Boston admissions lottery shows striking effects for children throughout their student lives. Full story via MIT News → | |
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| Solving a machine-learning mystery A new study shows how large language models like GPT-3 can learn a new task from just a few examples, without the need for any new training data. Full story via MIT News → | |
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| Rescuing small plastics from the waste stream PhD student Alexis Hocken is working with manufacturers to keep their products from (literally) falling through the cracks in the recycling process. Full story via MIT News → | |
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| New polymers could enable better wearable devices MIT engineers developed organic polymers that can efficiently convert signals from biological tissue into the electronic signals used in transistors. Full story via MIT News → | |
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| 3 Questions: Cullen Buie on a new era for cell therapies The associate professor of MechE reflects on how his company, Kytopen, has grown and shifted focus in developing safer immunotherapies. Full story via MIT News → | |
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| Your native tongue holds a special place in your brain, even if you speak 10 languages // Science Researchers from MIT and elsewhere studied the brains of individuals who speak multiple languages and uncovered how language-specific regions of the brain respond to different and familiar languages. Full story via Science→ |
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| “Lovelace and Babbage” opera is a sincerely funny alternate history // The Boston Globe “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage” — an opera focused on computational innovators Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, with music by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr and presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology; MIT Music and Theater Arts; and Guerilla Opera — “may be the rarest of rare birds in modern opera: an actual comedy!” Full story via The Boston Globe → |
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| Opinion: Tom Brady’s decisions tell us a lot about retirement planning // Forbes MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin writes that Tom Brady’s second retirement from the NFL demonstrates how those planning for retirement “need to plan for longevity, not the one-and-done retirement we think of today.” Full story via Forbes→ |
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| Air pollution causes chess players to make more mistakes, study finds // The Guardian Visiting Assistant Professor Juan Palacios discusses how he and his colleagues have found that chess players perform worse when air quality is lower. Full story via The Guardian→ |
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| | | MIT counts as one of its own a local ice hockey legend. Wayne Turner, the Institute’s director of human resources operations, even has a nickname to prove it: “Beanpot.” In February 1980, as a senior at nearby Northeastern University, Turner scored the tournament-winning goal in that year’s Beanpot Championship — which has pitted Division I men’s ice hockey teams in the Boston area against each other for the past 70 years. It was a storybook finish for a team that had come into the tournament as strong underdogs — with Turner (seen above, standing with photos from the day) as its hero. Turner finished his career with 51 goals and would be named to the Beanpot Hall of Fame. He joined the MIT staff shortly after earning his degrees in education and public administration and has been at the Institute ever since. Learn more→ |
| | | The MLK-Inspired Art and Performance Contest showcases artworks from the MIT community inspired by fairness, justice, or persistence and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. This year’s winning entries — from sophomore Kaelyn Dunnell, sophomore Victory Yinka-Banjo, and senior Kidist Adamu — were on display this week in Lobby 10. Learn more via MIT ICEO→ |
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