MIT News reports an MIT-designed device, known as the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been generating oxygen on Mars since April, 2021, about two months after it landed there with the Perseverance rover.

Researchers intrigued by the way fireflies signal each other at night have built robotic analogs the weight of paperclips, MIT News reports.

The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots’ wings emit colored light during flight.

This electroluminescence could enable the robots to communicate with each other. If sent on a search-and-rescue mission into a collapsed building, for instance, a robot that finds survivors could use lights to signal others and call for help.

MIT News reports researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have developed a tiny fuel cell that could convert glucose in a person's body into electricity - just the thing for powering various medical implants. Read more.

Ian Cheeseman recounts the story of MIT's Banana Lounge, which has been providing free bananas to the MIT community since 2018.

Thus far, 284,000 bananas have been consumed for the 2021/22 academic year. They get bananas delivered every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with ~48 crates each time.

The US Attorney's office today dropped wire-fraud and other charges against an MIT professor who had been facing up to 20 years in prison in a case brought in the waning days of the Trump administration and its efforts to go after China. Read more.

Update: The frat brothers have taken their giant snow penis down.

A concerned citizen recovers with the help of some smelling salts and files a 311 complaint about the giant male genitals the brothers of MIT's Theta Tau fraternity erected outside their frat house at 526 Beacon St., near Charlesgate, today. Read more.

The Harvard Crimson reports Harvard had 195 new Covid-19 cases over the past week, the highest number of the pandemic so far. Read more.

The Crimson reports a pair of MIT students set up an alleged Harvard dating site to see just how stupid Harvard students are.

In an emailed statement, Kronman wrote that he created the matchmaking service as an amusing experiment to see how many Harvard students he could dupe. ...

Though some Harvard students said they were initially resigned to the fact that they were scammed, they were happy to eventually receive their matches.

The Crimson reports that Cambridge's two larger institutions of higher education are selling their edX portal to some for-profit concern and that they'll use the money to build a new non-profit aimed at improving the online educational experience, in particular for "under-resourced and historically disadvantaged populations."