A variety of researchers have highlighted the potential to leverage nature to combat climate change, by planting trees or growing crops to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But a bleak new report from the UN’s climate panel stresses that relying heavily on these approaches could present real risks as well. The nearly 4,000-page analysis, released on Monday, warns that more than 3...

Sercompe Business Technology provides essential cloud services to roughly 60 corporate clients, supporting a total of about 50,000 users. So, it’s crucial that the Joinville, Brazil, company’s underlying IT infrastructure deliver reliable service with predictably high performance. But with a complex IT environment that includes more than 2,000 virtual machines and 1 petabyte—equivalent to a...

The “most advanced piece of malware” that China-linked hackers have ever been known to use was revealed today. Dubbed Daxin, the stealthy back door was used in espionage operations against governments around the world for a decade before it was caught. But the newly discovered malware is no one-off. It’s yet another sign that a decade-long quest to become a cyber superpower is paying off...

Russia has stunned the world with the speed of its advance through Ukraine this week. Part of the reason it’s overwhelmed its neighbor so quickly, beyond the shock timing, is the vast imbalance between the two countries’ military resources. At $6 billion, Ukraine’s defense budget is just 10% of Russia’s, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.  Desperate...

The fast-paced online coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday followed a pattern that’s become familiar in other recent crises that have unfolded around the world. Photos, videos, and other information are posted and reshared across platforms much faster than they can be verified. The result is that falsehoods are mistaken for truth and amplified, even by well-intentioned...

The US Justice Department said Wednesday it is ending its controversial China Initiative and will pivot to a new strategy to counter threats from nation states. The program began under the Trump administration as an effort to root out economic espionage, but drew criticism for falling short of that stated goal while increasingly focusing on…

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine spooked energy markets this week, amid fears that the escalating conflict and ensuing sanctions could disrupt global fossil-fuel supplies. Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of petroleum, natural gas, and coal, so any actions that curtail exports could have global ripple effects, pushing up prices and...

How do you create a visual and messaging identity that not only reflects more than 150 years of MIT graduates but is also forward-thinking enough to represent the generations of alumni to come? That was the question the Alumni Association asked itself when beginning a rebranding process in 2019, aiming to deliver on one of the priorities named in the Association’s Strategic Plan:...

Tami Zhu grew up with a wandering blind eye, a rare condition known as amblyopia. Not only did she struggle with her vision, but she was teased by other children. “It hurt,” she says. But she adds that it shaped her character and helped her to persevere in the face of adversity and look beyond physical limitations. Zhu earned a bachelor’s in computer science from Peking University...

“Vivian, we might leave Taiwan and move back to the US next year,” my mom told me as she helped me get ready for the middle school candlelight dance.  I knew that my family would return to the US at some point; we were in Taiwan only because of my dad’s work with a pharmaceutical company. Our family had no compelling reason to stay, since we had no relatives there. Sure, I was...

Art and Sandy Reidel say the personal connections they have made at MIT inspire their ongoing support for the Institute, specifically for programs that instill leadership skills in students. “MIT is an incredible collection of wonderful individuals,” Art says. “We support MIT because we are confident it is a way to maximize the positive impact that we have on the world.”  Investing...

When she was approached by the MIT Press with a list of people being considered for a biography, Maia Weinstock says, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus stood out from the rest. “I felt I could really dig into her story, and I was very curious about what made her tick,” says Weinstock, a science writer and deputy editorial director in the MIT News Office. “I had heard legends of Millie...

n April 2020, with covid-19 infection rates surging across the northeastern United States, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont tapped Albert Ko ’81 to cochair the advisory group that would ultimately draft the state’s pandemic response. Ko, chair of the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health, had already served on pandemic committees at the World Health Organization and at...

Composer Nina C. Young felt the tug of music from a young age, listening to church bells outside her home in New York. She wrote letters to Santa begging for a synthesizer and later balanced violin lessons with listening to the rock band Radiohead. When she was 16, she recalls, an accompanist told her, “You’ve been bitten by the bug. And once you’ve been bitten, a life without music will...

After 27 years as an aviation officer in the US Army, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pedro Almeida believes that all we need to know about leadership can be learned in kindergarten. “Be kind, treat people with respect,” says Almeida, who retired as a colonel in 2015 and is now chief operations officer of School District 49 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “And be sure everyone in the...

Driving the gold-plated rivet into steel, Charles Hayden, Class of 1890, marked a new phase for New York City’s storied Waldorf Astoria hotel. It was the morning of Monday, March 24, 1930, just five months after the stock market crash of October 1929. The previous Waldorf had been razed to make room for the Empire State Building. A new company had bought the name for a dollar, and Hayden, one...

Although he originally wanted to be a physicist, a love for psychology and philosophy landed Joshua Sariñana in neuroscience. “I wanted to study consciousness at multiple levels: the behavioral, physiological, and the genetic,” explains Sariñana, now a writer and photographer. Professionally, Sariñana communicates neuroscience research to medical professionals to foster cross-...

January 1972 From “The Quest for Fusion Power”: In the case of fusion power, the potential long-term societal rewards are so enticing and the possibility of success so high that a major, truly international, research effort has developed over the last two decades. The United States has allocated over $400 million for research in controlled thermonuclear reactors to date and the USSR...

By the end of 2020, DeepMind, the UK-based artificial-intelligence lab, had already produced many impressive achievements in AI. Still, when the group’s program for predicting protein folding was released in November of that year, biologists were shocked by how well it worked.  Nearly everything your body does, it does with proteins. Understanding what individual proteins do is therefore...

In September, Climeworks flipped the switch on Orca, the largest plant to date that is designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air.  The facility, outside Reykjavik, Iceland, can capture 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. Large fans suck air through a filter, where materials bind with CO2 molecules. The company’s partner, Carbfix, then mixes the carbon dioxide with water...

Among all the nose swabs that have ever come up positive for covid-19 over the course of the pandemic, about two in a hundred have been sent for extra analysis in a gene sequencing machine. The objective: to create a fresh map of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genome—all 30,000 or so letters—and see what’s changed.   Such genetic surveillance has allowed scientists to quickly spot and warn...

For a few seconds on a sunny afternoon last April, renewables broke a record for California’s main electric grid, providing enough power to supply 94.5% of demand. The moment was hailed as a milestone on the path to decarbonization. But what happens when the sun sets and the breeze stops? Handling the fluctuating power production of renewables will require cheap storage for hours or even days...

The malaria parasite, a notoriously deadly foe, has evolved countless ways to evade immune detection and thrive in human hosts. Mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for roughly 95% of cases, malaria kills more than 600,000 people a year, a majority of them children younger than five years old.  Last October, after years of development, the World Health Organization...