At 11:23 a.m. local time Thursday at Wenchang, Hainan Island, China launched Tianhe-1, the first module of a new orbital space station. It’s scheduled to be operational by the end of 2022. The launch, which went flawlessly, sets China up for a very busy next two years as it seeks to build upon the decade’s successes and follow through with one of its most ambitious space projects yet. ...

Kian Kelley-Chung was wearing a black T-shirt with the logo of his documentary and art collective on the day last summer when he found himself filming the Washington, DC, police during a protest. It was August 13, 2020, and Kelley-Chung had been recording Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city for a couple of months.…

Developing the capacity to annotate massive volumes of data while maintaining quality is a function of the model development lifecycle that enterprises often underestimate. It’s resource intensive and requires specialized expertise. At the heart of any successful machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) initiative is a commitment to high-quality training data and a pathway to...

By any measure, 2021 corporate planning isn’t business as usual. As the coronavirus pandemic grinds on, financial services institutions are coming out of crisis mode— addressing immediate cash management and operational challenges—with a renewed readiness for business growth. Fortunately, most businesses across industries are doing a good job of navigating the pandemic and its economic...

Tens of millions of people in the United States have now been fully vaccinated against covid-19. These people are seeing friends, eating out, and—in rare cases—getting infected. But we shouldn’t panic: these kinds of “breakthrough infections” are entirely expected with any mass vaccine rollout.  According to new figures released by the Centers for Disease...

Last week US regulators recommended resuming use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, after deciding that a side effect involving blood clots was too rare to justify continuing the brief suspension they had imposed: there were just 15 reported instances out of 8 million doses. But even though the pause lasted just 11 days, it raised new concerns about whether Americans will trust vaccinations....

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high. But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts. Beyond the crest of…

Today’s voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines we’ve been musing about for decades. And it’s because that technology is actually the combination of three different skills: speech recognition, natural language processing and voice generation. Each of these skills already presents huge challenges. In order to master just the natural…

Teresa Mosqueda used to spend her days asking people to run for office. A union leader and third-generation Mexican-American from Seattle, she figured the most effective way to address working families’ issues was to encourage people who had once experienced them to enter politics. But when people would ask her to run, Mosqueda would decline, citing an obstacle faced by most Americans: she...

Power outages are a way of life in Africa’s most industrialized country. Over the last decade, South Africa’s electricity grid has come apart at the seams and failed to deliver dependable power. As renewable energy gets cheaper, South African cities such as Cape Town have demanded the right to find their own sources.  The primary culprit in South Africa’s power woes is the aging...

They drilled a hole in my skull on the 43rd floor of an empty skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. One of those towers where they told people to go and work from home and they never came back. Floor-to-ceiling windows, beige and white walls, spaces that felt impossibly big now that the cubicle dividers have vanished.…

In 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. As the world grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate change. In the coming decades, cities will be engines of economic growth. But they must also play a key role in confronting climate change; the world’s 100 most populous...

Construction workers in New York’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood were breaking ground for a new federal building back in 1991 when they unearthed hundreds of coffins. The more they dug, the more they found—eventually uncovering nearly 500 individuals, many buried with personal items such as buttons, shells, and jewelry. Further investigation revealed that the remains were all between 200 and...

Science fiction is full of cities imagined from the ground up, but an author who writes about a real place has to engage with real cultures and real histories. It takes a special kind of world-building skill to develop a city when its origins are already known. The Membranes, a fascinating new book out in June by Chi Ta-wei, meets this challenge. It presents metropolitan Taiwan in 2100 as...

Finding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela, one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since the 19th century. More than 5% of the country’s...

Fourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I, too, can show off.”  Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped brick and tin structures line...

Urban technology projects have long sought to manage the city—to organize its ambiguities, mitigate its uncertainties, and predict or direct its growth and decline. The latest, “smart city” projects, have much in common with previous iterations. Again and again, these initiatives promise novel “solutions” to urban “problems.”  The hype is based partly on a belief…

The coronavirus pandemic presents a cruel irony for urban dwellers. What good are cities if the very quality that makes them so dynamic—the ease of connecting with people and gathering in large groups for everything from a baseball game to an opera—now renders them more dangerous than before? That question lies at the heart of concerns over the future of cities in a post-covid world. Social...

When she started her junior year after a corporate internship that left her feeling unfulfilled, Jodie Wu ’09 was questioning her path as an engineer. Participating in a D-Lab class project in Tanzania revealed a way to use her passion for engineering to help serve emerging markets in Africa while also having an impact.  Wu recalls being naïve the first time she traveled to Africa:...

Growing up in Chile, where her family owned a minimarket, Rocio Fonseca, SM ’14, was taught to expect a life limited by her family’s social class. In her early professional years, as the first in her family to have gone to college, she often ran into the cultural barriers of her country’s traditional business environment. Potential bosses wanted to know who her parents were, or expected her...

Emerson Yearwood, who has spent most of his career as an attorney in the communications sector, is dedicated to supporting students of color at MIT through his giving and volunteerism. His current focus is the Black Alumni of MIT Community Advancement Program and Fund (BCAP), which supports student proposals for public service projects that address the needs of underserved communities of color on...

Most amputations sever the muscle pairs that control joints such as the elbow or ankle, disrupting the sensory feedback about the limb’s position in space that would help patients control a prosthesis. But a surgical technique developed by MIT researchers appears to leave amputees with both greater control and less pain than people who have had conventional amputations. In agonist-antagonist...

New Vassar, MIT’s new undergrad dorm, opened in January across the street from the Henry Steinbrenner Stadium and Track with the goal of promoting a healthy, well-balanced lifestyle. The 450-bed residence emphasizes four core values chosen by its founders’ group: well-being, inclusiveness, adventure, and kindness. Dining options will eventually include a cooking pod program that will let...

One morning at the start of the spring semester, I was surprised by a most welcome sound outside: the voices of students! I could not resist going to the window. Even bundled up against the cold, the students were obviously excited to be back on campus—or in the case of first-years, to be on campus for the first time. It gave me a tremendous lift. And it also led me to contemplate what MIT...