December 2022

A gallery of presidents

December 19, 2022
When Sally Kornbluth becomes MIT’s 18th president on January 1, 2023, she joins a long line of leaders that includes mathematicians, chemists, physicists, engineers, an astronomer, a neurobiologist, two Rad Lab researchers, a US Census superintendent, a dean of the Sloan School, and an editor of Technology Review—many of whom served as scientific advisors to…

Mark and Teresa Medearis

December 19, 2022
After their son Nicky ’22 broke his leg competing for the MIT indoor track team in 2019, Mark and Teresa Medearis, 3,000 miles away in California, were heartened by the outpouring of support from the MIT track community and the Division of Student Life. “We were embraced by the community when we had this adversity,”…

Turning MIT inside-out

December 19, 2022
The all-new MIT Museum opened in Kendall Square this fall, welcoming more than 13,000 visitors in its first month. The 56,000-square-foot space next to the T station offers interactive exhibits and hands-on learning labs and makerspaces. As museum director John Durant told the Boston Globe, “We’re trying to turn MIT inside-out, so that things that…

Rerouting

December 19, 2022
When I tell people that I work on getting robots to cook and do household chores, they often ask me why this is so difficult. “A child can learn to make an omelet,” they say. “Why is it so hard for a robot?” I usually tell them that they think it’s so easy because they’re…

Product designer finds engineers’ playground in Wisconsin

December 19, 2022
As the youngest of four girls, Rosalie Phillips ’21 looked up to her sisters, and everywhere they went, she went. As early as fifth grade, she recalls, she was joining her oldest sister at robotics meetings in the machine shop of a local college, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.  “They would hand me…

Salon software Mangomint raises $13M as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage

December 19, 2022

Ever needed to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment? The process is annoying, and it makes you wonder how safe it is to give a stranger your personal details. That’s why Los Angeles-based Mangomint built a SaaS tool that strives to streamline the booking experience for the beauty […]

Salon software Mangomint raises $13M as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

WhatsApp lets you undo ‘Delete for Me’ in case you hit that button too quickly

December 19, 2022

WhatsApp has introduced a feature to undo the ‘Delete for Me’ action to save you from being potentially embarrassed over accidentally deleting a message only for you that you wanted to pull for everyone on the app. The new feature, called ‘accidental delete,’ brings a five-second window to let users reverse the action of deleting […]

WhatsApp lets you undo ‘Delete for Me’ in case you hit that button too quickly by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

YouTube is testing a feature to let users in India watch a video in multiple languages

December 19, 2022

Today, at the Google for India event, the company made several announcements focused on healthcare content on YouTube. In particular, it is testing a feature to let users switch between multiple audio tracks in different languages. For now, this feature is only available with a set of healthcare videos with language support for English, Hindi, […]

YouTube is testing a feature to let users in India watch a video in multiple languages by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

The Download: metaverse ethics, and spotting AI text

December 19, 2022
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit,…