MIT’s graduate student orientation is historically ameasured,months-long affair,ramping up in the summer with informational webinars and gatherings hosted by alumni around the world,and continuing in the fall with dozens of on-campus events.This is anything but atypical year,of course.For example,many of the nearly 1,700 incoming graduate students have never set foot on campus;the annual spring visiting week,which allows them to get to know MIT—and particularly their department—was canceled when the Institute closed in mid-March,in response to Covid-19.Fortunately,incoming students are in good hands.The Graduate Student Council(GSC)Orientation Committee(OC)has been diligently adapting 2020 Grad Orientation ever since then,to welcome,inform,and connect students,wherever they are.As OC committee co-chair Shashank Agarwal wrote in arecent grad blog,“the responsibility of the orientation team towards incoming students is higher than ever.”Building avirtual community 查看详细>>

Associate professor of literature Sandy Alexandre’s research spans late-19th century to present-day black American literature and culture.In 2019,Alexandre was awarded aprestigious Bose Research Grant,which supports her study of the under-explored phenomenon of ideas that first appear in speculative fiction becoming technological and social reality.SHASS Communications spoke to Alexandre recently about her project to illuminate the literary,humanistic sources of many technological innovations and advancements. 查看详细>>

Supratim Das’s quest for the perfect battery began in the dark.Growing up in Kolkata,India,Das saw that aready supply of electric power was aluxury his family didn’t have.“I wanted to do something about it,”Das says.Now afourth-year PhD candidate in MIT chemical engineering who‘s months away from defending his thesis,he’s been investigating what causes the batteries that power the world’s mobile phones and electric cars to deteriorate over time.Lithium-ion batteries,so-named for the movement of lithium ions that make them work,power most rechargeable devices today.The element lithium has properties that allow lithium-ion batteries to be both portable and powerful;the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists who helped develop them in the late 1970s.But despite their widespread use,lithium-ion batteries,essentially ablack box during operation,harbor mysteries that prevent scientists from unlocking their full potential.Das is determined to demystify them,by first understanding their flaws.In principle,rechargeable batteries shouldn’t expire.In practice,however,they can only be recharged afinite number of times before they lose their ability to hold acharge.An ordinary battery eventually stops working when the terminals of the battery—called electrodes—are permanently altered by the ions passing from one terminal of the battery to the other.In arechargeable battery,the electrodes recover when an external charger sends those ions back where they came from. 查看详细>>

A team of researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT,the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,the Ragon Institute,and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute(HHMI)has developed anew diagnostics platform called STOP(SHERLOCK Testing in One Pot).The test can be run in an hour as asingle-step reaction with minimal handling,advancing the CRISPR-based SHERLOCK diagnostic technology closer to apoint-of-care or at-home testing tool.The test has not been reviewed or approved by the FDA and is currently for research purposes only.The team began developing tests for COVID-19 in January after learning about the emergence of anew virus which has challenged the health care system in China.The first version of the team’s SHERLOCK-based Covid-19 diagnostics system is already being used in hospitals in Thailand to help screen patients for Covid-19 infection.The new test is named“STOPCovid”and is based on the STOP platform.In research,it has been shown to enable rapid,accurate,and highly sensitive detection of the Covid-19 virus SARS-CoV-2,with asimple protocol that requires minimal training and uses simple,readily available equipment,such as test tubes and water baths.STOPCovid has been validated in research settings using nasopharyngeal swabs from patients diagnosed with Covid-19.It has also been tested successfully in saliva samples to which SARS-CoV-2 RNA has been added as aproof of principle. 查看详细>>

“Learning about ethics isn’t like avaccine—where you take one or two philosophy classes and you’re set for life—but more like eating your vegetables every day to stay healthy,”says Kate Trimble,senior associate dean and director of the Office of Experiential Learning.“It’s amuscle that you develop over time,with repeated exposure,in different contexts,and by talking to people who have different perspectives and experiences than you do.”Now,MIT undergraduates have anew way to build those muscles:a three-credit course being piloted this summer,24.133(Experiential Ethics).The course is the result of apartnership between the Office of Experiential Education and the philosophy section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.The Experiential Ethics course is the latest addition to recent efforts to incorporate ethics into technology education,such as the New Engineering Education Transformation(NEET)initative and the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program(GEL).“We envision this as acomplement to existing philosophy courses and programs like GEL and NEET,as well as the new curricular approaches to ethics and social responsibility being planned in the college of computing,”Trimble says.The 10-week course,which begins next month,was originally designed for students taking part in experiential learning programs this summer,like the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program,industry and social impact internships,and MISTI.That changed in the wake of Covid-19,as some students’summer plans were put on hold. 查看详细>>

MIT engineers have devised away to speed up the development of new drugs by rapidly testing how well they are absorbed in the small intestine.This approach could also be used to find new ways to improve the absorption of existing drugs so that they can be taken orally.Developing drugs that can be easily absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract is aparticular challenge for treating neglected tropical diseases,tuberculosis,and malaria,says Giovanni Traverso,an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and agastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.“Many of the drugs that are being developed today for neglected tropical diseases are insoluble and poorly permeable,”Traverso says.“We can potentially identify better formulations much faster using this new system.”With their new method,based on pig intestinal tissue grown in the lab,the researchers can test thousands of different versions of adrug in just hours.In apaper appearing today in Nature Biomedical Engineering,the researchers used this approach to identify aformulation of the hormone oxytocin that can accumulate in the blood at concentrations about10 times higher than regular oxytocin.Traverso and Robert Langer,the David H.Koch Institute Professor at MIT and amember of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research,are the senior authors of the paper.The lead author is former MIT postdoc Thomas von Erlach. 查看详细>>

You have two weeks in acity that is 8,000 miles away from everything familiar to you.Alongside you are 34 of the best minds selected from both MIT and Hong Kong universities.There is one goal:build products that will transform an underserved district.This objective was set by the staff of the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node,who believed that by putting theory into practice,they could design aprogram that grounded action learning to local inquiry—they call it the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator(MEMSI).This program is featured in Kowloon East,a unique area of Hong Kong with sponsors who have avested interest in its prospects for revitalization.Professor Charles Sodini,the Clarence J.LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering and faculty director of the Innovation Node,says the location provides“a terrific experience for students to discover opportunities against abackdrop of socio-economic and environmental challenges.”Product ideas and proposed startups are avaluable resource to both the sponsors and the community.In response to these challenges,students form interdisciplinary teams to examine wide-ranging themes across smart mobility,sustainability,and wellness.Participants experience the chaos and excitement of entrepreneurship:making critical early decisions,building relationships with stakeholders and prospective customers,and using insights to converge ideas into tangible solutions.By the end of the program,the MEMSI teams build proof-of-concept prototypes and pitch their business plans to over 100 attendees at ashowcase held in Hong Kong. 查看详细>>

When the Covid-19 crisis hit the United States this March,MIT neuroscientist Jill Crittenden wanted to help.One of her greatest concerns was the shortage of face masks,which are akey weapon for health care providers,frontline service workers,and the public to protect against respiratory transmission of Covid-19.For those caring for Covid-19 patients,face masks that provide anear-100 percent seal are essential.These critical pieces of equipment,called N95 masks,are now scarce,and health-care workers are now faced with reusing potentially contaminated masks.To address this,Crittenden joined ateam of 60 scientists and engineers,students,and clinicians drawn from universities and the private sector to synthesize the scientific literature about mask decontamination and create aset of best practices for bad times.The group has now unveiled awebsite,N95decon.org,which provides asummary of this critical information.“I first heard about the group from Larissa Little,a Harvard graduate student with John Doyle,”explains Crittenden,who is aresearch scientist in Ann Graybiel‘s lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.“The three of us began communicating because we are all also members of the Boston-based MGB Covid-19 Innovation Center,and we agreed that helping to assess the flood of information on N95 decontamination would be an important contribution.” 查看详细>>

In 2015,the world began to realize astark reality—the unprecedented wealth and prosperity ushered in by the digital age was not being shared equally across society.Research indicated that income inequality was rising,and the headlines reflected agrowing public fear of unemployment driven by automation.MIT Sloan School of Management‘s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee,co-directors of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy(IDE)and co-authors of“The Second Machine Age,”recognized this reality as achallenge that could be solved if the right resources were brought to bear.IDE’s response was the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge(IIC),a global tournament for entrepreneurs harnessing technology to ensure amore equitable future.Since the IIC was launched at the first MIT Solve in 2015,IDE has identified 160 organizations from around the world,awarding atotal of$5 million in prizes to accelerate their missions.In three years,those IIC winners have collectively generated over$170 million in revenue,raised over$1 billion in capital,created more than 7,000 jobs,and served 350 million people. 查看详细>>

In the early 20th century,just as electric grids were starting to transform daily life,an unlikely advocate for renewable energy voiced his concerns about burning fossil fuels.Thomas Edison expressed dismay over using combustion instead of renewable resources in a1910 interview for Elbert Hubbard’s anthology,“Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great.”“This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of—it is so wasteful,”Edison said.“You see,we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power.Sunshine is aform of energy,and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.Do we use them?Oh,no!We burn up wood and coal,as renters burn up the front fence for fuel.”Over acentury later,roughly 80 percent of global energy consumption still comes from burning fossil fuels.As the impact of climate change on the environment becomes increasingly drastic,there is amounting sense of urgency for researchers and engineers to develop scalable renewable energy solutions.“Even 100 years ago,Edison understood that we cannot replace combustion with asingle alternative,”adds Reshma Rao PhD‘19,a postdoc in MIT’s Electrochemical Energy Lab who included Edison’s quote in her doctoral thesis.“We must look to different solutions that might vary temporally and geographically depending on resource availability.” 查看详细>>