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Samurai in Japan, then engineers at MIT
A new exhibit explores the Institute’s first Japanese students, who arrived as MIT was taking flight and their own country was opening up.
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A careful rethinking of the Iraq War
The term “fog of war” expresses the chaos and uncertainty of the battlefield. Often, it is only in hindsight that people can grasp what was unfolding around them. Now, additional clarity about the Iraq War has arrived in the form of a new book by MIT political scientist Roger Petersen, which dives into the war’s […]
Investigating and preserving Quechua
Soledad Chango, a native of Ecuador and a graduate student in MIT’s Indigenous Language Initiative, began preparations for her Quechua course with a clear idea about its purpose. “Our language matters,” she says. “It’s worth studying and spreading.” Quechua at MIT, a new two-week introductory class hosted by MIT Global Languages during the Institute’s Independent […]
3 Questions: The Climate Project at MIT
MIT is preparing a major campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems now impeding an effective global climate response. The Climate Project at MIT, as the new enterprise is known, includes new arrangements for promoting cross-Institute collaborations and new mechanisms for engaging with outside partners to speed […]
Illustrating India’s complex environmental crises
Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sarnath Banerjee (no relation), an MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) visiting artist share a similar background, but have very different ways of thinking. Both were raised for a time in Kolkata before leaving India to pursue divergent careers, Abhijit as […]
Screening of “Brief Tender Light” at MIT Museum
Brief Tender Light, a new documentary from Ghanaian filmmaker and MIT alumnus Arthur Musah that follows four African undergraduates through MIT will be screened at the MIT Museum on March 20 at 6 -8pm. A Q&A with the filmmaker and one of the film’s stars, Philip Abel Adama, will follow the screening. This free event […]
Projects investigating Swahili, global media win SHASS Humanities Awards
Two projects — the Global Mediations Lab led by Paul Roquet and the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative led by Per Urlaub — have won Humanities Awards from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The pilot program, launched in fall 2023, aims to support humanities-focused, collaborative projects that can have a broad impact within SHASS or […]
New fellowship to help advance science journalism in Africa and the Middle East
The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced a new one-semester fellowship — the Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East — that will start this year. The fellowship, developed through a generous gift from the global publishing company Springer Nature, was created in honor of the influential Egyptian science […]
Satellite-based method measures carbon in peat bogs
Peat bogs in the tropics store vast amounts of carbon, but logging, plantations, road building, and other activities have destroyed large swaths of these ecosystems in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. Peat formations are essentially permanently flooded forestland, where dead leaves and branches accumulate because the water table prevents their decomposition. The pileup of organic […]
Baran Mensah: Savoring college life in a new country
MIT senior Baran Mensah recalls taking apart his toys as a child, curious to see how every piece worked. When his mother explained to him what an engineer was, he knew that’s what he wanted to be. Mensah wasn’t particularly familiar with the culture of MIT while growing up in Ghana. But for the last […]
K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center will prioritize innovations for resource-constrained communities
Billions of people worldwide face threats to their livelihood, health, and well-being due to poverty. These problems persist because solutions offered in developed countries often do not meet the requirements — related to factors like price, performance, usability, robustness, and culture — of poor or developing countries. Academic labs frequently try to tackle these challenges, […]