Juan Orbea

High-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs): In HTGRs, gasses (typically helium) act as the coolant that is fed directly into the turbine to produce energy. Helium is an inert gas, so it generally won’t chemically react with any material, and exposing helium to neutron radiation won’t make it radioactive. Helium can therefore be heated to higher temperat... See more

We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work. This is the sign of a rich life, but one side-effect is that time to do your work will become increasingly scarce as you get deeper into your c... See more

Technology has always been a double edged sword, bringing us longer and healthier life spans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities on the one hand, while introducing new and salient dangers on the other. However, the means and knowledge will soon exist in a routine college bioengineering lab (and already ex... See more

Is there really a straight line between you and the things you want in life? Entrepreneur and educator Luke Burgis goes deep on how understanding mimetic desire can help you better connect the dots between where you are now, and where you want to go. 

Girard's point o departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in ind... See more

It seems very unintuitive because we're in a very unusual place in the world. It's only over the last couple of hundred years there's such a wild discrepancy between rich countries and poor countries where people in which countries have 100x the income of the poorest people in the world and where we have the technology to be able to change the live... See more

Human and Machine IntelligenceStudents will learn to tackle the challenges of designing and building artificial intelligent systems that attain or exceed human-level performance in complex tasks. Suggested subjects are 6.034, 6.006 and 6.009.