Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Associated Press reporter Paul Wiseman about how the conflict with Iran has impacted the global economy. “The Strait of Hormuz has to be reopened,” says Johnson. “It’s 20 million barrels of oil a day going through there. There’s no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.”
A new essay by Profs. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson, has offered “a more hopeful vision for the future of human work,” in a world infused with AI, reports Greg Rosalsky for NPR’s Planet Money. The authors “spend much of the essay providing a thought-provoking analysis of how new technologies can affect human jobs in general,” writes Rosalsky. “In short, it's complicated. Yes, often they do kill jobs. Other times they can make jobs less lucrative by, for example, making those jobs easier to do — or ‘de-skilling’ them — which means the supply of workers who can do these jobs goes up and wages for the occupation can go down.”
Florencia Pierri, associate curator of Science and Technology at the MIT Museum, speaks with NPR’s All Things Considered host Andrea Shea about the 150th anniversary of the world’s first telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, “didn’t set out to create a telephone,” explains Pierri. “He set out to create a better telegraph. But still had this idea of, like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I could talk to somebody, even if I wasn’t right there in the room with them?’”
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with New York Times reporter Emmett Lindner about how the conflict with Iran has influenced gas prices in the United States. “When there’s a supply disruption in the Middle East, that raises prices for every barrel of oil in the world,” explains Knittel. “Those price increases then trickle down to products that use oil, gasoline being the most relevant one.”
Luana Lopes Lara '18 and Tarek Mansour '18, MNG '19, co-founders of prediction market firm Kalshi, have been named to the Forbes World’s Youngest Billionaires list, reports Simone Melvin for Forbes.
MIT has launched a new effort aimed at helping high schoolers across the U.S. tackle calculus, reports Juliet Schulman-Hall for MassLive. The new program, called the MIT4America Calculus Project, pairs trained MIT undergraduates and alumni with school districts across the U.S. to tutor high school students from Montana to Texas in calculus. The program “was created last year with an in-person summer calculus camp,” Schulman-Hall notes. “Since then, it has grown to include 14 school districts.”
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers from MIT and other institutions have determined that asteroid 2024 YR4 will not collide with the moon, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “Every time we observe an asteroid, we reduce the range of possible trajectories,” explains Prof. Julien de Wit. “In this case, the JWST observations both provided very precise positional measurements and significantly extended the time span over which the asteroid has been observed.”
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with Bloomberg reporter Stacey Vanek Smith about increased gas prices. “Gas is something we tend to buy on a weekly basis,” says Knittel. “But also, we see the price hundreds of times a day. Even if you’re not buying it, you see the price, so the salience of gas prices is like no other.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with CNBC Squawk Box reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of private credit. “The opacity of this sector has become a problem,” says Johnson. “I think disclosure, at least to the authorities and publicly, would be healthy for everyone.”
Graduate student Verena Bellscheidt has been awarded the Zonta Club of Wuaboag Valley Women in STEM award, reports The Republican. Bellscheidt is “dedicated to advancing the field [of theoretical physics] at the intersection of cosmology and particle physics while mentoring the next generation of female scientists.”
Researchers at MIT have developed an “AI-driven optimization method that works like ‘ChatGPT for spreadsheets’ – a tabular foundation model designed to handle spreadsheet-style data common in engineering design problems,” reports Gene Marks for Forbes. “The AI system identifies which design variables matter most and focuses search efforts on those, making problem solving less cumbersome,” writes Marks.
Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks with Politico reporter James Bikales about the price of oil and gasoline in the United States. “Economists talk about what’s called rockets and feathers — that gas prices go up like rockets when oil prices go up, but then if oil prices go back down … they go back down like feathers,” says Wolfram. “Especially if you’re coming into the period when [gas prices] tend to rise because of summer driving, they might just stay high, even if oil prices go back down.”
Prof. Richard Teague speaks with CNN reporter Asuka Koda about how an international team of astronomers have “captured the most complete, high-resolution map of the cold gas at the center of the Milky Way, which contains the raw material from which stars and planets are made” using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. “I think astronomy on this scale is really no longer about small individual people pushing in their labs, but about huge international collaborations,” says Teague. “And I think that’s what’s particularly impressive about this piece of work, just the scale of that collaboration that you need to make it happen.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz about the potential impact of rent control in Massachusetts. “Capping the price doesn’t solve the problem,” says Gruber. “It simply allows the existing set of people to have their prices not increase at the expense of other people who might benefit from living in Massachusetts.”
Vogue editor Lisa Wong Macabasco spotlights “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time,” a new exhibit at the MIT Museum that “traces the rhythms of life itself: circadian patterns, light’s command over the body, and the delicate architecture of alertness and rest.” The exhibit features “18 works that blend science and art, from immersive soundscapes to visualizations of circadian patterns and reflective spaces where you observe your own heartbeat and alertness in new ways,” explains Macabasco.