MIT students gathered to take part in the annual Baker House Piano Drop, a 50-year tradition where a nonworking, donated, and irreparable piano is pushed off the roof of the Baker House on campus to mark the last day MIT students can drop classes for the spring semester, reports Heather Alterisio for Boston.com.
MIT students gathered to take part in the Baker House Piano Drop, during which students drop a donated, nonworking, and irreparable piano off the roof of Baker House to mark “Drop Day”, reports Sabrina Silva for WHDH. “This year’s piano drop was made all the more special for students now that they’re back face-to-face enjoying their life on campus once again,” reports Silva.
A new study by MIT researchers examines how different spaces such as cafeterias can help foster collaboration on academic campuses, reports Paul Basken for Times Higher Ed. “The method affirms expectations that colleagues working physically nearer to each other are more likely to find each other, and that the odds of connection are higher between locations with indoor pathways,” writes Basken.
Nature Physics senior editor Silvia Milana spotlights “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus” a new book written by MIT News Deputy Editorial Director Maia Weinstock. “Carbon Queen does not only capture the journey into the personal and professional life of an outstanding figure in carbon science, it is a careful account of the evolution of societal attitudes towards women from the 1950s to today” writes Milana.
Boston Globe reporter Nina MacLaughlin spotlights how the MIT Press, MIT Press Bookstore and the MIT Libraries have launched a new reading series called authors@mit. The series will kick off with Maia Weinstock, deputy editorial director at MIT News, and her new book, “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus.”
Ariana Remmel spotlights “Carbon Queen,” a new book written by MIT News Deputy Editorial Director Maia Weinstock, which highlights the career of Institute Professor Mildred S. Dresselhaus. “Weinstock navigates the complexities of theoretical physics and research bureaucracy deftly,” writes Remmel. “She describes of carbon – from diamond to graphite – and their properties with sleek diagrams and colourful analogies that unpack basic principles and broader implications.”
Science writer Maia Weinstock, deputy editorial director at MIT News, has written a new book titled “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus,” which highlights the career of Institute Professor Mildred S. Dresselhaus, reports Vijaysree Venkatraman for Science. “In “Carbon Queen,” Weinstock has pieced together Dresselhaus’s story using decades of profiles, print interviews, oral histories conducted with the scientists herself, and new interviews with her contemporaries,” writes Venkatraman.
Physics World reporter Jesse Wade spotlights “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus,” a new book by Maia Weinstock, deputy editorial director at MIT News. “With Carbon Queen, Weinstock does more than tell the story of a brilliant scientist’s life,” writes Wade. “She transports you into a world of curiosity and wonder, driven by enthusiasm and persistence.”
Boston Globe correspondent Rose Pecci spotlights Joseph Applegate, a linguist who was the first appointed Black faculty member at MIT. Applegate “had a 60-year career in languages. By the end of his career, he knew 13 of them and was considered an expert on the Berber tongues of North Africa.”
The MIT Haystack Observatory honored the work of Herbert Weiss, a trailblazing engineer and former researcher at MIT Lincoln Lab who helped establish Haystack, which operates a radio telescope whose work “is the stuff of scientific legend,” writes Thomas Farragher for The Boston Globe. “This place wouldn’t exist if he had not had the leadership and the vision and the drive to make it happen,” says Colin J. Lonsdale, director of Haystack.
Oliver “Ollie” Smoot ’62 speaks with Rob Michaelson of NBC Boston about the origin and history of the Smoot, a unit of measurement created when Smoot and his friends used the length of his body to measure the bridge that brings Massachusetts Avenue from Cambridge to Boston.
A coalition of students, faculty and alumni have come together to raise the funds necessary to replace the radome that sits atop the Building 54, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Once the overhaul is complete, MIT’s radio buffs, astronomers, and satellite researchers will have a tool that will serve them for decades,” writes Bray. “And they’ll have also preserved one of the school’s most famous landmarks.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal about a new book, “The Secret History of Home Economics,” Barbara Spindel spotlights alumna Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend MIT and the institute’s first female instructor. The book’s author, Danielle Dreilinger writes that Richards “believed fervently in the power of science to free women from ‘drudgery.’”
Writing for Cambridge Day, Marieke Van Damme, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society, explores the life and work of alumna Lois Lilley Howe, a member of the Class of 1890. Howe was “a trailblazer, one of the first women to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s architectural program, the organizer of the only all-woman architectural firm in Boston in the early 20th century and the first woman elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Architects,” writes Van Damme.
Popular Mechanics reporter Mike Darling spotlights a math problem from an 1876 MIT entrance exam. The prompt read as follows: “A father said to his son, Two years ago I was three times as old as you; but in fourteen years I shall be only twice as old as you. What were the ages of each?’”