The Tech reports and condemns e-mail from somebody claiming he will pay $50,000 to female students with certain Chinese surnames if they give up some of their eggs - about five times the going rate for them and without any mention of the potentially serious complications (like, oh, death) for women who get hormone shots to stimulate extra egg production for harvesting.
The New Haven Independent reports on what has become a national manhunt for Qinxuan Pan (shown right), who is considered armed and dangerous. Kevin Jiang was shot to death on Feb. 6.
Jiang was recently engaged to a woman who graduated from MIT before moving to New Haven to become a doctoral student herself at Yale.
Researchers at MIT report they've discovered that two sheets of graphene - an incredibly thin carbon hexagonal lattice - one layered atop the other, create an unusual "ferroelectric" property that could lead to "neuromorphic computing," which "could usher in new, faster information-processing paradigms." Read more.
Updated, Jan. 20, 2022: Government drops all charges.
Lawyers for Gang Chen, an MIT nanotechnology expert, today asked a federal judge to sanction local US Attorney Andrew Lelling for what they said was his attempt to gin up Chen's charges of failing to properly fill out grant applications by making it sound like the professor was somehow engaged in something far more nefarious. Read more.
Updated, Jan. 20, 2022: Government drops all charges.
An MIT professor who specializes in energy-related nanotechnology was arrested today to face federal charges that he hid contracts and grants awarded by Chinese universities and agencies from both the federal government and MIT. Read more.
MIT News reports on efforts at the Institute to study the human microbiome - all the zillions of microorganisms that cohabit in your body - to see if there are ways to improve human health. One example: Microorganisms living in the digestive tract have been linked to several diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, several cancers and Alzheimer's.
A scientist's curiosity about an odd RNA discovery at MIT in the 1970s led to him winning a Nobel Prize and laid the foundation for the work that led to today's Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for Covid-19. MIT News interviews Phillip Sharp about what happened after he read a report that one virus's RNA was longer inside the nucleus of a cell it had invaded than it was in the rest of the cell and he wondered why.
Update: Babson, too.
The MIT Tech reports campus health officials suspended in-person teaching for first-year MBA students at the Sloan School of Management Nov. 5 through Thanksgiving due to a rash of positive Covid-19 tests among them. Read more.
A number of local colleges and universities are posting daily or weekly Covid-19 testing results; to date, the numbers show much lower infection rates among students who have come to Boston even if that means taking classes in their dorm rooms and prohibitions against parties. Read more.
Government lawyers agreed today to drop an ICE policy that would have forced foreign students to leave the country if they were unwilling or unable to find a school that would teach their classes in person. Read more.
MIT and Harvard today asked a federal judge to block a new ICE ruling that would force foreign students already enrolled in college here to either find schools that would teach them in person or leave the country. Read more.
The MIT Tech reports. The news comes a day after Harvard announced only freshmen and some other students would be allowed back. Both schools, meanwhile, now have to figure out what to do about international students the government wants to kick out.
A team of MIT researchers is working on a system through which people's phones would send out a constant stream of Bluetooth "chirps" that would then be picked up and stored by other people's phones. Somebody who tests positive for coronavirus could then upload his or her chirps to a database that others could then check to see if they were close enough to that person to warrant their own trip to testing site or to self quarantine. Read more.
Lydia Bourouiba, an MIT professor and director of the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, writes that our current six-foot safety zone is based on decades-old work in a laboratory and that might be putting health-care providers at risk. Read more.
The MIT radio station announced it shut down at 2 p.m. today:
While this was a difficult decision for us to make, we are prioritising the health and safety of our members. We are continuing to work with MIT as a part of their response to COVID-19.
Science reports that a Chinese development company is giving a consortium of Boston-area researchers $115 million to investigate Covid-19 and figure out how to fight it. Read more.
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