MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

WCVB-TV spotlights two MIT startups, True Moringa, a beauty and wellness company that uses the oil from Moringa trees grown in Ghana to directly benefit farmers in Ghana, and Sourcemap, which traces supply chains and provides transparency about where goods are stemming from. Says Kwami Williams ’12, co-founder and CEO, of his inspiration for True Moringa: “I started to ask myself, if aerospace engineers can help put a man on the Moon, then what can I do to help put more food on the table for families” in Ghana.

Prof. Joshua Angrist, one of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics, speaks with Rachana Shanbhogue of The Economist’s Money Talks podcast about the evolution of his research and how his work has helped bring the field of economics closer to real life. “I like to tell graduate students that a good scholar is like a good hitter in baseball,” says Angrist of his advice for economics students. “You get on base about a third of the time you’re doing pretty well, which means you strike out most of the time.”

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Prof. Carlo Ratti spotlights how the City of Helsinki in Finland hosted an Energy Challenge aimed at solicit ideas to accelerate the city’s transition to green energy. “Helsinki and its Energy Challenge hold lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that climate efforts must balance competition with collaboration,” writes Ratti. The contest “allowed Helsinki to synthesize a diverse array of skills and visions.”

Forbes contributor Frederick Daso spotlights Fitnescity, a startup founded by MIT graduates that offers “a streamlined online platform to help consumers select lab kits, get tested, and display their data on a digital dashboard.” CEO and co-founder Laila Zemrani MBA ’13 explains that: “Fitnescity was founded to give people access to the information they need to improve their health and wellness.”

Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Brendan Murray and Enda Curran spotlight the MIT Beer Game, a role-playing exercise that is an annual rite-of-passage for first-year Sloan MBA students that “models the supply-and-demand dynamics among a brewery, distributor, wholesaler, and retailer.” “The pandemic revealed flaws that were latent all along our globalized supply chains,” says Prof. John Sterman. “It’s urgent that we figure out how to improve them so we are prepared for the next shocks, whether another pandemic, civil unrest, climate change—or all of the above.”

Ayr Muir ’00, SM ’01 speaks with Washington Post reporter Trisha Pasricha about how the goal behind his plant-based restaurants, Clover Foods Labs, is to use plant-based foods to help mitigate the climate crisis. “The overarching mission is global warming. And what we’re trying to do is help meat-lovers eat more meals that have no meat in them,” Muir said. “The more success we have with that, the greater impact we have on the environment.”

Erin Genia ‘19 a multidisciplinary artist, has been honored as one of The ARTery 25, which highlights artists of color in the Greater Boston area who stand out for the work they are making, reports WBUR. “Genia, a tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of South Dakota, sees her artistic mission as one of many efforts to make up for the centuries of assimilation and cultural repression.”

New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek explores the work of Prof. Joshua Angrist, who was honored as a recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work developing “research tools that help economists use real-life situations to test big theories, like how additional education affects earnings.” Angrist and his fellow recipients David Card and Guido Imbens “ushered in a new phase in labor economics that has now reached all fields of the profession,” said Prof. Trevon D. Logan of Ohio State.

Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with David Pogue of CBS Sunday Morning about what’s causing the current supply chain breakdowns. "The underlying cause of all of this is actually a huge increase in demand,” says Sheffi. “People did not spend during the pandemic. And then, all the government help came; trillions of dollars went to households. So, they order stuff. They order more and more stuff. And the whole global markets were not ready for this."

Researchers from MIT and other institutions analyzed images captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover and found that Mars’ Jezero crater was a lake 3.7 billion years ago, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “The new information shows the importance of sending rovers to explore the surface of Mars,” writes Strickland. “Previous images captured by orbiters had shown that this outcrop resembled the kind of fan-shaped river deltas we have on Earth. Perseverance's images show definitive proof of the river delta's existence.”

Rebecca Blank PhD ’83 has been selected as the next president of Northwestern University, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. “Blank’s selection as Northwestern’s 17th president represents something of a homecoming for her,” writes Nietzel. “She served on Northwestern's economics faculty from 1989-1999, where she was named the first tenured woman in the economics department. Her appointment will establish another record - she will be Northwestern’s first woman president.”

The MIT Haystack Observatory honored the work of Herbert Weiss, a trailblazing engineer and former researcher at MIT Lincoln Lab who helped establish Haystack, which operates a radio telescope whose work “is the stuff of scientific legend,” writes Thomas Farragher for The Boston Globe. “This place wouldn’t exist if he had not had the leadership and the vision and the drive to make it happen,” says Colin J. Lonsdale, director of Haystack.

TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater spotlights RFusion, a fully-integrated robotic arm developed by MIT researchers that “uses an RF antenna and camera mounted to an arm to find lost objects.”

Writing for The Washington Post, Prof. Kevin Esvelt argues that research aimed at creating pandemic-causing viruses should be considered a matter of international security. “Natural pandemics may be inevitable. Synthetic ones, constructed with full knowledge of society’s vulnerabilities, are not,” writes Esvelt. “Let’s not learn to make pandemics until we can reliably defend against them.”