Rafael Maranon's Blog

MIT News

• Newfound exoplanet may turn to dust
  Researchers at MIT, NASA and elsewhere have detected a possible planet, some 1,500 light years away, that appears to be evaporating under the blistering heat of its parent star. The scientists infer that a long tail of debris — much like the tail of a comet — is following the planet, and that this tail may tell the story of the planet’s disintegration. Accor […]
• ‘Hockfield Day’ celebrates MIT’s 16th president
  A carnival atmosphere overtook Killian Court today as students, faculty and staff came out en masse for a community picnic to celebrate Susan Hockfield, MIT’s 16th president, who will conclude her seven-and-a-half years of service on July 1. On Wednesday, Provost L. Rafael Reif was elected to succeed her as MIT’s 17th president. “It was a magnificent day for […]
• CloudTop takes top $100K competition prize
  This year’s MIT $100K Business Plan Contest drew a record 215 teams to compete for the coveted grand prize: $100,000 to start a business venture or market a new product. On Tuesday evening, eight finalists pitched their ideas to a capacity crowd in Kresge Auditorium — and while only one team walked away with the big check, there was plenty of seed money and […]
• Human touch
  No one can be all things to all people. But President-elect L. Rafael Reif is regarded by many members of the MIT community as “warm,” “humble” and “human,” and as someone who cares deeply about education. Those traits were a central theme of the reaction on the MIT campus to Wednesday’s announcement that Reif, currently MIT’s provost, will become the Instit […]
• ‘This is a dream I never dared to imagine’
  “I cannot tell you that this is a dream come true,” L. Rafael Reif said shortly after his election Wednesday morning as MIT’s 17th president, “because this is a dream I never dared to imagine.”Reif — who grew up in Venezuela and didn't speak English until arriving at graduate school in his early 20s — said at a press conference announcing his selection […]
• A new look at prolonged radiation exposure
  A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine when to evacuate people following a nuclear accident may be too conservative. The study, led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times great […]
• The elusive capacity of networks
  In its early years, information theory — which grew out of a landmark 1948 paper by MIT alumnus and future professor Claude Shannon — was dominated by research on error-correcting codes: How do you encode information so as to guarantee its faithful transmission, even in the presence of the corrupting influences engineers call "noise"? Recently, one […]
• Entrepreneurial students dive into product design and development
  A subway commuter digs through his backpack to find his iPad. A college student lugs a bag of dirty clothes to the laundry room in her dorm. A rushed Starbucks customer tears open a paper sugar packet.This semester, 11 teams of MIT and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) students — all enrolled in a course called “Product Design and Development” — sought to […]
• A physicist and an inventor
  As a boy growing up in Croatia, Marin Soljacic wanted to be an inventor. But he wasn’t interested only in designing new products; he wanted to discover physical phenomena that would enable completely new technologies.In that, Soljacic has succeeded remarkably. With others at MIT, he developed a way to transmit power wirelessly — a technology that might soon […]
• Whirr, click, hum: Robots go at it in 2.007 finale
  MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center took on the aura of an old-fashioned county fair on Thursday night, complete with popcorn, balloons, jugglers, cotton candy and pitchmen wearing brightly colored jackets and bowties. But rather than ring tosses and sheep-shearing, the central event was a series of one-on-one matchups between an amazing variety of robots that stu […]