After Kevin Lujan Lee came out to his parents, he found another family in Improving Dreams, Equality, Access, and Success (IDEAS), an undocumented student advocacy and support group at the University of California at Los Angeles. After joining the organization to support his undocumented partner at the time, he fell in love with the group and community around it, and became involved in organizing alongside undocumented youth. When Lee found himself struggling to make ends meet upon graduation, it was his then-partner’s parents who took him in and cared for him despite their limited means and the constant threat of deportation. “I would be nothing if it weren’t for IDEAS, if it weren’t for undocumented people sheltering me and giving me food,” Lee says. “This was the spirit that the group embodied. People who were more than willing to just fork out what they didn’t have.” The third-year PhD candidate credits the family and mission of IDEAS for every subsequent step he has taken, from his master’s degree at the University of Chicago to his current research in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning....

The construction and operation of all kinds of buildings uses vast amounts of energy and natural resources. Researchers around the world have therefore been seeking ways to make buildings more efficient and less dependent on emissions-intensive materials. Now, a project developed through an MIT class has come up with a highly energy-efficient design for a large community building that uses one of the world’s oldest construction materials. For this structure, called “the Longhouse,” massive timbers made of conventional lumber would be laminated together like a kind of supersized plywood. The design will be presented this October at the Maine Mass Timber Conference, which is dedicated to exploring new uses of this material, which can be used to build safe, sound high-rise buildings, if building codes permit them. John Klein, a research scientist in MIT’s architecture department who taught a workshop called Mass Timber Design that came up with the new design, explains that “in North America, we have an abundance of forest resources, and a lot of it is overgrown. There’s an effort to find ways to use forest products sustainably, and the forests are actively undergoing thinning processes to prevent forest fires and beetle infestations.”...

Cancer therapies that target specific molecular defects arising from mutations in tumor cells are currently the focus of much anticancer drug development. However, due to the absence of good targets and to the genetic variation in tumors, platinum-based chemotherapies are still the mainstay in the treatment of many cancers, including those that have a mutated version of the tumor suppressor gene p53. P53 is mutated in a majority of cancers, which enables tumor cells to develop resistance to platinum-based chemotherapies. But these defects can still be exploited to selectively target tumor cells by targeting a second gene to take down the tumor cell, leveraging a phenomenon known as synthetic lethality. Focused on understanding and targeting cell signaling in cancer, the laboratory of Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor Science and director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, seeks to identify pathways that are synthetic lethal with each other, and to develop therapeutic strategies that capitalize on that relationship. His group has already identified MK2 as a key signaling pathway in cancer and a partner to p53 in a synthetic lethal combination....

A highly porous material, cement tends to absorb water from precipitation and even ambient humidity. And just as the shape of a sponge changes depending on water saturation, so too does that of cement, according to recent work conducted at MIT. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University discuss just how the material’s porous network absorbs water and propose how drying permanently rearranges the material and leads to potential structural damage. Cement paste begins as a dry powder composed of carefully blended ingredients including calcium, iron, aluminum, and silicon. From here, this powder is mixed with a certain proportion of water to form cement paste. This is where the pore network begins to form. During cement hydration, the cement hydrate's nanograins aggregate with each other, forming a network that glues all constituents together. While this gives cement its strength, the spaces between the cement hydrates create an extensive pore network in the cement paste....