February 11, 2023
Greetings! Here’s a roundup of the latest from the MIT community.
 
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Committing to Struggle Against Racism
Collage of photos from the 2023 M.L.K. Celebration at M.I.T., including four speakers at a podium, a group of students standing and singing, and a group of attendees seated with their heads down in thoughtful reflection.
   
MIT’s 49th annual Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took place Wednesday and featured activist and author Angela Davis as its keynote speaker, as well as students and staff from the MIT community. The celebration luncheon was the lead event in a week of activities honoring the civil rights leader, and its theme was: “Let us uphold the flame for fairness and justice. There’s a certain kind of fire that must not be extinguished.”
Full story via MIT News →
Top Headlines
Study: Preschool gives a big boost to college attendance
Research using a Boston admissions lottery shows striking effects for children throughout their student lives.
Full story via MIT News →
 MIT Heat Island
Solving a machine-learning mystery
A new study shows how large language models like GPT-3 can learn a new task from just a few examples, without the need for any new training data.
Full story via MIT News →
 MIT Heat Island
Rescuing small plastics from the waste stream
PhD student Alexis Hocken is working with manufacturers to keep their products from (literally) falling through the cracks in the recycling process.
Full story via MIT News →
 MIT Heat Island
New polymers could enable better wearable devices
MIT engineers developed organic polymers that can efficiently convert signals from biological tissue into the electronic signals used in transistors.
Full story via MIT News →
 MIT Heat Island
3 Questions: Cullen Buie on a new era for cell therapies
The associate professor of MechE reflects on how his company, Kytopen, has grown and shifted focus in developing safer immunotherapies.
Full story via MIT News →
 MIT Heat Island
#ThisisMIT
Instagram photo of 17 people standing in a large studio around a large painting depicting a sunset image of MIT's Stata Center. Text via @artsatmit: Students in Scenic Painting, a special topic offered during MIT's four-week winter term, worked together to complete a collaborative large-scale painting of the Frank Ghery-designed Stata Center. The three-week intensive course introduced students to perspective drawing, trompe l’oeil, and faux texture techniques for wood, marble, and fabric. In addition to learning hands-on techniques, students learned about the history of scenic painting and the role of the scenic artist in theater-making today.
Follow @artsatmit on Instagram→
In the Media
Your native tongue holds a special place in your brain, even if you speak 10 languages // Science
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere studied the brains of individuals who speak multiple languages and uncovered how language-specific regions of the brain respond to different and familiar languages.
Full story via Science→
“Lovelace and Babbage” opera is a sincerely funny alternate history // The Boston Globe
“The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage” — an opera focused on computational innovators Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, with music by MIT lecturer Elena Ruehr and presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology; MIT Music and Theater Arts; and Guerilla Opera — “may be the rarest of rare birds in modern opera: an actual comedy!”
Full story via The Boston Globe →
Opinion: Tom Brady’s decisions tell us a lot about retirement planning // Forbes
MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin writes that Tom Brady’s second retirement from the NFL demonstrates how those planning for retirement “need to plan for longevity, not the one-and-done retirement we think of today.”
Full story via Forbes→
Air pollution causes chess players to make more mistakes, study finds // The Guardian
Visiting Assistant Professor Juan Palacios discusses how he and his colleagues have found that chess players perform worse when air quality is lower.
Full story via The Guardian→
Did You Know?
Wayne Turner, standing on the right, poses next to 2 photos of the Beanpot Championship in 1980.
MIT counts as one of its own a local ice hockey legend. Wayne Turner, the Institute’s director of human resources operations, even has a nickname to prove it: “Beanpot.” In February 1980, as a senior at nearby Northeastern University, Turner scored the tournament-winning goal in that year’s Beanpot Championship — which has pitted Division I men’s ice hockey teams in the Boston area against each other for the past 70 years. It was a storybook finish for a team that had come into the tournament as strong underdogs — with Turner (seen above, standing with photos from the day) as its hero. Turner finished his career with 51 goals and would be named to the Beanpot Hall of Fame. He joined the MIT staff shortly after earning his degrees in education and public administration and has been at the Institute ever since.
Learn more→
Scene at MIT
Three artworks stand on tripods in front of the windows of MIT's Lobby 10. Two of the works feature small white text on black cardboard paper. The third work is a painting of a face with dark skin in front of MIT's Great Dome, about a dozen photos of Black community members at MIT, and a cosmic starscape in blues and purples.
The MLK-Inspired Art and Performance Contest showcases artworks from the MIT community inspired by fairness, justice, or persistence and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. This year’s winning entries — from sophomore Kaelyn Dunnell, sophomore Victory Yinka-Banjo, and senior Kidist Adamu — were on display this week in Lobby 10.
Learn more via MIT ICEO→
This edition of the MIT Weekly was brought to you by a day in the life of an MIT Admissions blogger. 💻

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