Changing careers + evaporating light + fuel from CO2 + Tetris champ

[view in browser]( MIT Weekly [MIT Logo] November 4, 2023 Greetings! Tuesday is Election Day. Are you ready to vote? Find election and voting resources at [MITvote](. Want a daily dose of MIT in your inbox? [Subscribe to the MIT Daily](. Changing Careers #[Silhouette of a thoughtful person and arrows pointing left and right, with cityscape in background]( MIT Technology Review recently profiled five alumni who radically rethought their careers — and aren’t looking back. “I definitely see more career changes and people carving out niches for themselves,” says Ann Guo ’98, MEng ’99, now a career coach. [Full story via MIT Technology Review→]( Top Headlines In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat A newly identified process could explain a variety of natural phenomena and enable new approaches to desalination. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide The approach directly converts the greenhouse gas into formate, a solid fuel that can be stored indefinitely and could be used to heat homes or power industries. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( MIT’s Justin Yu wins Classic Tetris World Championship In a Q&A, the MIT junior describes how all the pieces fell into place as he captured the Tetris world title. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( Innovating for health equity As an engineer and an EMT, senior Abigail Schipper works to make medicine more accessible to all. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( The brain may learn about the world the same way some computational models do Two studies find “self-supervised” models, which learn about their environment from unlabeled data, can show activity patterns similar to those of the mammalian brain. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( Designing cleaner vehicles Graduate student Adi Mehrotra ’22 is developing sustainable solutions in vehicle design. [Full story via MIT News →]( [MIT Heat Island]( #ThisisMIT #[Youtube Short still of graduate student wearing face mask holding a colorful painting of a calaverasal, a skull, as part of Día de Muertos.]( [Follow @MITGradDiversity on YouTube→]( In the Media This liquid crystal fabric is “smart” enough to adapt to the weather // Popular Science MIT researchers developed a programmable, shape-changing smart fiber called FibeRobo that can change its structure in response to hot or cold temperatures. [Full story via Popular Science→]( The Jurassic Park of perfume, this brand taps DNA of extinct flowers for its fragrances // Forbes Jasmina Aganovic ’09 founded Future Society, a brand that uses sequenced DNA from extinct flowers to create new scents. [Full story via Forbes→]( Why you can understand what your baby is trying to say // Newsweek Researchers from MIT and Harvard University have found that an adult’s ability to “parse the early attempts of children to talk may also help the children learn how to speak properly faster.” [Full story via Newsweek→]( How quantum “squeezing” will help LIGO detect more gravitational waves // Science News By employing a new technology called frequency-dependent squeezing, LIGO detectors should be able to identify about 60 more collisions between massive objects like neutron stars and black holes than before the upgrade. [Full story via Science News→]( Planning Just Indigenous Futures #[Rectangular hand-woven textile featuring small rectangular blocks in slightly different shades of crimson. Six vertical stripes are woven into the artwork, parallel to each other in lines made from tiny stitches of gray leather.]( To mark National American Indian Heritage Month, we highlight the latest issue of [Projections]( the journal of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, published annually by the MIT Press. Edited by doctoral candidate Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru), Daniel Engelberg PhD ’23, and yəhaẃ Indigenous Creatives Collective, the newest issue engages and centers the voices of Indigenous scholars, community leaders, and artists — alongside non-Indigenous scholars — to support visions of planning practice that are meaningfully aligned with contemporary Indigenous movements for resurgence, sovereignty, and life. [Learn more via MIT DUSP→]( Digit 950,000 Number of MIT Open Learning Library learners from 228 countries around the globe [Learn more via MIT Open Learning →]( Arts on Display #[An L-shaped wooden table has nine piles of colorful documents atop, while plywood walls with framed images of buildings surround it.]( Now on view in the Wiesner Student Art Gallery in Building W20: Come Back and Tell Me Why Things Last, by architecture graduate students Lauren Gideonse and Adriana Giorgis. The exhibit, which explores factors that affect building lifespan in the U.S., was the product of two long road trips through the American landscape with the route shaped to pass particularly old and materially significant buildings. It was also reinforced by the artists’ ongoing collaboration with Boston Building Resources, a local building material reuse non-profit. [Learn more via Arts at MIT→]( This edition of the MIT Weekly was brought to you by [Halloween costumes inspired by Nobel Prize-winning research](. 🟢 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. [subscribe]( [update preferences]( [unsubscribe]( [view in browser]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Youtube]( [Instagram]( MIT News Office · 77 Massachusetts Avenue · Cambridge, MA 02139 · USA