Learning and listening in Amazonia
We had just sat down to lunch with Dona Dada, an Indigenous Brazilian artisan, at her family farm in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. It was April of 2022, and my research colleagues and I were visiting to learn how she collects and processes plant fibers for use in her crafts. Before us were traditional foods that I was familiar with, including tambaqui fish and beiju de tapioca, a large, crunchy tapioca crepe cooked in a traditional clay oven. But I was intrigued by a bowl of what appeared to be a dark-brown lumpy sauce and asked what it was. “Saúvas,” […]
Brothers in arms
William Warin Bainbridge Jr., Class of 1922, and Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, Class of 1926, grew up on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, the eldest of three sons of an upwardly mobile stationer who dabbled in real estate. Both went to MIT. And both would play important roles in World War II—one on the front lines at Normandy and at the Battle of the Bulge, the other with J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos. William Warin Bainbridge Jr., Class of 1922 COURTESY OF DAVID BAINBRIDGE Before making their way to MIT, the brothers attended the Horace Mann School, where they participated in athletics […]
Tapping into MIT’s strengths
As our alumni and friends know better than anyone, the intellectual excellence and bold ingenuity of the people of MIT are the Institute’s greatest strength. While IAP supplied its welcome respite, the first part of the year also offered inspiring reminders of MIT’s ability to make a powerful, positive difference in the world. Here are just two examples. The MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative In January, we engaged the MIT community with a day of fascinating panel discussions to launch the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. Participants from government, industry, and academia explored questions like What […]
Divine economics
Allison V. Thompkins, PhD ’11, used to spend her days steeped in statistical analysis, digging into economic data to understand how the world works. These days, you’re more likely to find her writing about how to modify prayer or meditation practices to make them more accessible for people with disabilities. From the outside, the shift from economic policy research to a career writing and teaching about spirituality might seem like a substantial one. But for Thompkins, the instincts behind both pursuits flow from the same place. “From my perspective, the main connecting thread of economics and spirituality is their power […]
I’m a beaver. You’re a beaver. We are beavers all.
For more than 20 million years, beavers have been, well, busy. They’ve been felling trees for that long, and building dams and lodges for at least the last few million years, earning a well-deserved reputation for industriousness and ingenuity. It seemed only fitting, then, that MIT saw fit to claim the beaver as its mascot in 1914. By 1921, The Tech reported that gray beaver hats had become “the distinguishing mark of an Institute man” at college gatherings. The toothy, mainly nocturnal rodent has appeared on every rendition of the MIT class ring—now lovingly called the brass rat—since it was […]
Puzzle corner
Puzzle corner is currently on hiatus. To view back issues of Puzzle Corner, visit the Puzzle Corner website at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr. Puzzle corner is currently on hiatus. To view back issues of Puzzle Corner, visit the Puzzle Corner website at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr.
Why Chinese apps chose to film super-short soap operas in Southeast Asia
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. TikTok has become an essential part of the digital landscape. Whether or not it’s ultimately banned in the United States (my bet is it won’t be), these short videos have transformed large parts of our lives, from how music is consumed to how political messages are communicated. Some Chinese companies believe short videos can disrupt the movie and TV industry, too. Today, I published a story on how a batch of Chinese apps are trying to introduce […]
Why hydrogen is losing the race to power cleaner cars
Imagine a car that doesn’t emit any planet-warming gases—or any pollution at all, for that matter. Unlike the EVs on the roads today, it doesn’t take an hour or more to charge—just fuel up and go. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s the reality of vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And almost nobody wants one. Don’t get me wrong: hydrogen vehicles are sold around the world. But they appear to be lurching toward something of a dead end, with fuel prices going up, vehicle sales stagnating, and fueling stations shutting down. Hydrogen fuel cells work by […]
Is there anything more fascinating than a hidden world?
A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can’t see it or reach it. Something about this tantalizing proximity has fascinated us throughout history. The blank spaces on the map that Joseph Conrad referred to in Heart of Darkness were, to Europeans, hidden worlds. The moon was (and is again) perhaps the best example of a hidden world—extremely visible to us, but inaccessible and mysterious. Hidden worlds exist in the great depths of the ocean and high above us in the planets of the night sky. But they are also […]
The world’s most famous concert pianos got a major tech upgrade
At a showroom in a Boston suburb, Patrick Elisha sat down and began to play the opening measures of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 to demonstrate why Steinway & Sons grand pianos are celebrated in concert halls around the world. Steinways are meticulously crafted instruments: it takes around 250 workers a year to assemble each grand piano’s 12,000 individual parts. Everything, from the hand-bent rims (made of more than a dozen layers of rock maple, each heated and shaped to form a grand piano’s classic curves) to the small felt rollers in the piano’s action (which help dictate how much pressure […]