Just before 9 p.m. on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. “Hi, everyone! This is crazy!” she began, urging viewers to make a plan for how they will vote with I Will Vote, an outreach program funded by the Democratic National Committee.  After a few technical difficulties, Ocasio-Cortez spent three and a half hours playing...

At 6:12 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finished a four-and-a-half-hour descent to the surface of asteroid Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Once there, it briefly made contact with the ground in an attempt to collect some rocky pebbles and dust before safely flying away. We won’t know if the sample collection was successful until later. Why do we want a...

As long as humans have built machines, we’ve feared the day they could destroy us. Stephen Hawking famously warned that AI could spell an end to civilization. But to many AI researchers, these conversations feel unmoored. It’s not that they don’t fear AI running amok—it’s that they see it already happening, just not in the ways most people would expect.  AI is now screening job...

There have been many conspiracy theories about the 2020 US election, from lies about vote-by-mail fraud to the discredited idea that millions of non-citizens get to vote. But just two weeks before Election Day, the most common disinformation claim is currently the idea that the vote is “rigged,” researchers say. The conspiracy theory is so all-encompassing that experts say it’s become...

In 2009, two farmers checked in to the Heartland hospital in Missouri within days of each other with fever, nausea, diarrhea, and rapidly declining white blood cell counts. Doctors sent their blood samples to the Centers for Disease Control, which discovered that both farmers had contracted a previously unknown virus from a tick bite. The CDC named it the Heartland virus. Five years later, a lab...

Within a few days of the covid-19 lockdown in Oxford, UK, the street where philosopher Roman Krznaric lives had transformed. An email chain quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group with over 100 neighbors. Parents traded homeschooling tips and compared bread recipes. Food packages, coordinated via cell phone, were delivered to the  most vulnerable, and when Krznaric wanted to teach his...

Catastrophic risks are events that threaten human livelihood on a, well, catastrophic scale. Most are interconnected, meaning that one event—such as a nuclear detonation—is likely to trigger others, like water and food crises, economic depression, and world war. The intricate interdependence of our physical, social, and political systems has left humans vulnerable, something that covid-19 has...

Karma Ura is a bespectacled, self-effacing man of many achievements—a scholar, writer, painter, and bureaucrat. He is also the president of the Centre for Bhutan & Gross National Happiness Studies, which he’s led since 1999. Gross national happiness has been around for a while. In 1972 the fourth king of Bhutan put forward the idea of ditching gross domestic product as the nation’s...

It’s dark. Vegetal decay hangs thick in the air, trapped beneath the rotting innards of a felled beech tree. You wedge the hard shell of your exoskeleton through softening pulp, legs clicking in rhythm with each other. Chemosensors on your antennae and mouthparts ping with a steady stream of information, and you toodle your little coleopteran body around to eat bits of dead tree that bring you a...

It has been five years since Katrina Spade composted her first human body. With her pushing and lobbying, Washington state is now the first in the US to legally offer an alternative to burial or cremation: “above-ground decomposition,” also known as “natural organic reduction.” Turing your corpse into soil, in other words. In 2017, Spade started Recompose, a Seattle-based human...

Cardinal and Gray Society members who would like to sign up for the Alumni Helping Alumni program, please click here. Class of 1999 members who want to sign up, click here. Those from other classes who would like help in starting a similar program started, please email...

The 2020 “Support Black Lives at MIT” petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students’ Union (BSU):http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020 The Tech’s article on student evaluation of the 2015 BSU/BGSA recommendations:https://thetech.com/2020/06/02/letter-bsa-bgsa-recommendations 2015 BSU...

The Department of Justice and attorney generals from 11 Republican-led states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, alleging that the company maintains an illegal monopoly on online search and advertising.  The lawsuit follows a 16-month investigation, and repeated promises from President Trump to hold big tech to account amid unproven allegations of anti-conservative bias....

Maria Zuber got the word on a Friday: Harvard had shut down its research labs. As vice president for research, Zuber consulted with lead researchers across campus over whether MIT should follow suit. “Don’t you dare,” she remembers them saying. “Don’t you dare be like those Harvard people.”  As covid-19 cases continued to rise across…

In 1892, Hannah Knox Luscomb took her five-year-old daughter, Florence, to hear Susan B. Anthony speak. The speech made such an impression on Florence that she always began her life story with this moment, which inspired her long career as an activist. She would begin as a college student, working in concert with a group of MIT alumnae who played key roles in the quest to earn women the right to...

Today, one in every six people on Earth lives in an informal urban or squatter settlement. United Nations analysts estimate that number will rise to one in three by 2050. “Traditionally, policymakers see these people as a problem,” says Janice Perlman, PhD ’71. “I believe they’re part of the solution.” Perlman’s landmark 1976 book The Myth of Marginality invited readers to look at...

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Frederick Goff, SM ’01, and his teammates from a machine-learning-based hedge fund decided to apply their technology to job search engines, for which there was widespread demand. In 2015, they created a new platform, Jobcase, to help people “manage their own future of work with a set of open tools.” The result: a social-media platform where strangers...

In 2004, Gloria Ro Kolb ’94 was leading her first startup, Fossa Medical, which developed therapies for kidney stones, when she learned a startling statistic: one in three women over 30 deals with urinary incontinence. However, it wasn’t until Kolb had three kids that she began to understand the scope of the problem—and the need for a better solution. “I looked into all the treatment...

Sally Yu became an MIT volunteer almost immediately after graduating. “It’s like I never left!” she says. “For the little volunteering I do, I gain so much in knowledge, friendships, and personal growth.” She and her spouse, Jeff Shen, recently continued their support of the Institute by creating the Yu Endowed Scholarship Fund for undergraduates as Yu’s 20th-reunion gift. ...

In 1996, Life magazine published a shocking exposé of child labor practices in South Asia. The lead photograph showed a 12-year-old boy in northern Pakistan, stitching soccer balls stamped with the Nike logo. It would take two years—and a collapse in profits—for the company’s cofounder and CEO, Phil Knight, to declare a commitment to social responsibility. In 2015, Nike was independently...

How is it possible the housing market is as strong as it is, given that the overall economy is as weak as it is? Confronting questions like these, Daryl Fairweather ’10, chief economist of the real estate website and brokerage Redfin, seeks explanations based in complex human motivations. “When people make the decision to buy a home, so many factors are involved beyond whether they can afford...