Eclipse prep + tech vs. employment + functional fabrics

[view in browser]( MIT Weekly [MIT Logo] April 6, 2024 Greetings! Here’s a roundup of the latest from the MIT community.  Want a daily dose of MIT in your inbox? [Subscribe to the MIT Daily](. Preparing for the Eclipse #[A montage of solar eclipse photos. In the top row, the moon's shadow gradually covers the sun's disk, moving from upper right to lower left. The center row shows three images of totality and near-totality. The bottom row shows the solar disk reemerging.]( On Monday, the United States will experience a rare total solar eclipse. In preparation, Brian Mernoff of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics offers best practices for getting the most out of your eclipse experience, wherever you may be. [Full story via MIT News →]( Top Headlines Does technology help or hurt employment? Combing through 35,000 job categories in U.S. census data, economists found a new way to quantify technology’s effects on job loss and creation. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( A new computational technique could make it easier to engineer useful proteins MIT researchers plan to search for proteins that could be used to measure electrical activity in the brain. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( Programming functional fabrics PhD student Lavender Tessmer applies computation to create textiles that behave in novel ways. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( Researchers 3D print key components for a point-of-care mass spectrometer The low-cost hardware outperforms state-of-the-art versions and could someday enable an affordable, in-home device for health monitoring. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( Most work is new work, long-term study of U.S. census data shows The majority of U.S. jobs are in occupations that have emerged since 1940, MIT research finds — telling us much about the ways jobs are created and lost. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( “Life is short, so aim high” Professor Rafael Jaramillo relishes the challenge of developing new, environmentally beneficial semiconductor materials. [Full story via MIT News →]( [News thumbnail]( #ThisisMIT #[Peter Child bows on stage towards a full audience in music hall as septet with mix of string and percussion instruments clap and surround Child. Text via @mitmta: We recently teamed up with @collagenewmusic to celebrate MTA faculty composer Peter Child's 37 years of teaching at MIT! Collage performed five of Child's recent works to a packed house at Killian Hall.]( [Follow @mitmta on Instagram→]( In the Media Would the “3 Body Problem” deadly nanofiber web actually work? // The Ringer Professor Gregory Rutledge explores the science behind nanofibers and whether it’s possible to create ultrathin and ultrastrong nanofibers that are invisible to the human eye, as depicted in the science fiction series “3 Body Problem.” [Full story via The Ringer→]( MIT tool shows climate change could cost Texans a month and a half of outdoor time by 2080 // TechCrunch MIT researchers have developed a new tool to quantify how climate change will impact the number of “outdoor days” where people can comfortably spend time outside in specific locations around the world. [Full story via TechCrunch→]( Meet the Cambridge resident tapped for the first-ever “Jeopardy!” invitation tournament // Boston.com Graduate student Dhruv Gaur discusses his viral message expressing support for Alex Trebek when he competed on “Jeopardy!” in 2019, and his experience being invited back for the show’s first invitational tournament. [Full story via Boston.com→]( Supermassive black hole’s mysterious “hiccups” likely caused by neighboring black hole’s “punches” // Space.com Astronomers have found periodic eruptions from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth could be caused by a “second, smaller black hole slamming into a disk of gas and dust, or ‘accretion disk,’ surrounding the supermassive black hole, causing it to repeatedly ‘hiccup’ out matter.” [Full story via Space.com→]( Digit 13,000 Kilograms of CO2 emissions avoided so far thanks to the MIT community’s use of the Rheaply item-exchange platform [Learn more via the Office of Sustainability →]( Watch This #[Joshua Bennett speaks at a microphone with pink light shone upon him. An illustrated word cloud appears on the wall behind him, with letters obscured so the viewer can’t read what it says.]( To mark National Poetry Month, we spotlight Joshua Bennett, professor of literature and distinguished chair of the humanities at MIT, and his new course, 21W.756 (Writing and Reading Poems: Nature Poetry), in which MIT students get to create various forms of expression and share them with their peers. “So much of what I’m trying to teach is really for us to just use the literary arts as an excuse to come together and celebrate being alive,” says Bennett. [Watch the video→]( Meet Your MIT Neighbor #[Headshot of Gabriel Adams]( Name: Gabriel Adams Affiliation: Software engineer at Lincoln Laboratory How did you come into your current role? I was … offered a full-time staff position in 2022. I help develop and maintain my group’s Common Open Architecture Radar Programs (COARPs)-compliant radar processor on the Laboratory’s Airborne Radar Testbed (ARTB). The COARPs specification is meant to enable radar subsystems acquisition, processor hardware refresh, and third-party technology insertion. When did you become interested in computer science? In my freshman year of high school, I took an Intro to Java course and knew soon afterward that I wanted to study computer science in college. If you could bring any technology into existence, what would it be and why? Teleportation, for sure. I have spent enough time in traffic on the [Massachusetts Turnpike] and working around [MBTA] Red Line issues to choose anything else! [Full interview via Lincoln Laboratory]( This edition of the MIT Weekly was brought to you by [engineering bagels](. 🥯 Have feedback to share? Email mitdailyeditor@mit.edu. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! —MIT News [Forward This Email]( [Subscribe]( [MIT Logo] This email was sent to {EMAIL} because of your affiliation with MIT, or because you signed up for our newsletters. 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