Dear Physics Community,

I am sorry to have gone so long without a community message.  Recently, the Academic Continuity Meetings have been more sporadic than usual — which is good as these meetings were born of the crisis last March.  At the same time, much has been happening in other venues.

I’m away this week and will return, with our student announcements, next week.

Above the Fold

Campus operation – Research is going at the 50% occupancy level while the rest of the campus is at about the 5% occupancy level.  The number of positive COVID-19 tests remains very low (Dashboard here).  Testing has ramped up with the opening of the new test center on the Ice Rink in Johnson athletic center.  Access to the campus is possible – please contact Matt, Peter (after next week), or the head of your lab to you would like some time to use your office occasionally. Lots of data here. There have been 34 positive cases since testing started, and MIT Emergency Management and MIT Medical have analyzed where the infections cames from here.

Cool thing – The Alm Lab in Biological Engineering has been analyzing wastewater and can see Sar-COV-2 biomarkers that lead detection by testing by at least five days.  They have set up a pilot in 7 MIT buildings, slides here.  Wastewater sampling is great stuff, and I’ve invited the research lead, Dr. Katya Moniz, to give a lunch talk about their work.

Many discussions about ramping to 100% research and one of the milestones is full compliance, hence this rather unpleasant memo here.

What is going to happen this Spring?  This note just went to academic officers (but not faculty or Department Heads, I’m told).  I have also heard from our students they are being asked about their preferred plans for the spring (i.e. will you be here or there).

Department

• Last week, we had David Elwell from ISO talk about OPT, slides here
• Arup has a new book out on viruses, vaccines, and immunity.
• I’ve spent almost a year working with Tavneet Suri of Sloan on companion reports on how MIT should evolve our gift processes.  They are here.  There will be a Town Hall week after next to hear comments and, I am sure, much more strum und drang after that.
• Information on MIT sponsored tutoring programs for MIT children up to high school.
• Thursday, I hosted a panel, “Should I go to graduate school?” The panel was Wolfgang Ketterle, Richard Fletcher, Yannick Selelim, and Alyssa Rudelis.

Physics

• PRL Cover – Hubbard Model from Martin
• Wha? Department – Nature article on Numpy
• Dark matter – could be primordial black holes, according to Quanta.  I’ve always liked this solution: no new theory is needed.  But, they are hard to find.
• Insight Fellows announcement

Los Endos

I watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix – tech CEO’s tell-all about how the tech companies use our data.  Did not learn much new – but if you don’t know, read Soshona Zuboff’s book – but I’ve decided to remove everything Google from my computer. To replace Chrome, I’ve installed Brave as my browser and am using Qwant as my search engine.

Peter