Never say dieMat Honan
Hi. How are you? I have some news. You’re going to die. We’re all going to die. I’ve been thinking about this not only because we’ve been putting this issue, the Mortality issue, together but also because I’ve hit one of those arbitrary milestones in life. Which is to say I turn 50 this month. This is mostly pretty cool. Beats the alternative, as they say. But one decidedly uncool thing about being almost 50 is that my “bad” LDL cholesterol is too high. The obvious solution here is to improve my diet and get more exercise. But if that […]
The bilingual brainGrace van Deelen, SM ’22
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine you know two languages. For any noun you can think of—object, feeling, place—two words exist where a monolingual brain comes up with only one. When speaking, reading, or writing, your brain must decide which of those words to use—an added task on top of the language processing you’re already doing. Scientists suspect that sorting through those extra words—and switching between them—gives bilingual people more practice with cognitive control. But whether bilingual brains are neurologically different from monolingual ones is still unknown. Saima Malik-Moraleda, a fifth-year PhD student in the Harvard/MIT Program in […]
Portraits of Black life in the SouthThe Editors
When Baldwin Lee ’72 was five years old, his father told him he’d be going to MIT. The oldest male child in a Chinese immigrant family, he did as he was told, becoming valedictorian of Brooklyn Tech and enrolling at the Institute in 1968. The intense focus on science and technology felt suffocating, however, and as a sophomore he found refuge in a photography class taught by Minor White. His father sent him a Leica, and after graduating from MIT, Lee earned an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art. In 1983 he began a series of road […]
The perks of being MIT alumniThe Editors
Your MIT alumni benefits One of the most important MIT benefits alumni can access is the MITAA’s Infinite Connection (IC) web portal. With an IC account, you can search MIT’s online alumni directory and connect with alumni from your region, industry, course, living group, and more. You can also stay connected to other alumni by keeping your personal and professional information up-to-date on a secure platform. The IC is your go-to for setting your contact preferences, including email for life—a service for MIT alumni that provides the benefits of email forwarding as well as access to a personal mailbox for […]
How to see inside a tornadoJulie Fox
Tornadoes form in 10 seconds or less. So Howie Bluestein ’70, SM ’72, PhD ’76, a storm chaser for 40-plus years, is working with colleagues to build a new radar system that can scan nearly all of a storm’s volume in 15 seconds—and help forecasters quickly determine its potential to spawn life-threatening conditions. “This is going to allow us to see things perhaps we’ve never seen before,” explains Bluestein, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. “We’re going to be able to watch tornadoes and see how they evolve within the storm. We’re also going to be able to use […]
Building tomorrow’s world in wordsStephanie M. McPherson, SM ’11
On the surface, writing and engineering don’t seem to have much in common. But the link between the two is more than apparent to Suzanne Lane ’85, who’s been director of MIT’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program since 2013. “I made our program’s motto ‘Building tomorrow’s world in words,’” she says. “Writing and communicating is invention, and it shapes our relationships. It shapes our material world. Almost everything that happens in the world is first a plan that then has to get articulated.” WRAP, part of Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W), improves students’ communication skills through four communications-intensive undergraduate […]
A search engine for shapesKen Shulman
Imagine you’re an automobile manufacturer. You have warehouse after warehouse full of parts. You’d like to use some of those parts in a new model and save on design and production costs. But you can’t find those parts through a text search. You don’t know what they’re called. Often the only record of them is tucked away in a database of 2D drawings or 3D models. “Our search engine finds files by shape,” says Jianmin “Jamie” Tan PhD, ’90, the cofounder and CEO of Imaginestics, whose flagship software is called VizSeek. “It’s a visual search engine, based on geometry, that […]
Ten to One founder aims to change people’s perception of rumJulie Fox
When you think of rum, what comes to mind? A strawberry daiquiri? A piña colada with a cocktail umbrella? Marc-Kwesi Farrell ’03 thinks there is a lot more to rum than that, and he’s on a mission to reinvent the spirit as a versatile, top-shelf drink. “If you look at rum today, it is saddled with this overly narrow, somewhat caricatured view of what the spirit is meant to represent,” explains Farrell, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who launched Ten to One Rum in New York City in 2019. “There is this perception of rum as a lower-end spirit […]
Building the next version of the internetJulie Fox
Kirin Sinha ’14 remembers the first time she worked with augmented reality (AR) as a student at MIT. With a friend and fellow engineer, she built the Ironman desk—a computer system and AI technology that uses holographic projections controlled by hand movements and voice commands. Today, she is the founder and CEO of Illumix, a technology and media company that develops immersive AR experiences for mobile phones, websites, and social platforms. Sinha’s vision for the company is expansive—“to build a platform that would enable infinite experiences to exist,” she says. “We think it is going to be the next version […]
Dynamic duoMIT News Staff
Robert Downey Jr. got to wear Iron Man’s suit playing fictional MIT alum Tony Stark on the big screen. But he marveled at what he called “real-world technology miracles” when he met up with Professor Hugh Herr, who coleads MIT’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, in July. Downey serves on the center’s executive advisory board. Robert Downey Jr. got to wear Iron Man’s suit playing fictional MIT alum Tony Stark on the big screen. But he marveled at what he called “real-world technology miracles” when he met up with Professor Hugh Herr, who coleads MIT’s K. Lisa Yang Center […]