Boston Globe reporter Kate Tuttle spotlights “We (The People of the United States),” a new poetry book by Prof. Joshua Bennett. “I started to think of it as an ode to invention,” says Bennett. “There are poems in the book about individual people, but there are also poems about the television, the typewriter, the trampoline. I really wanted to celebrate the invention of a people, the invention of a country, the invention of a certain vision of the human genre.”
During his time as a visiting artist at the Media Lab, keyboardist Jordan Rudess worked with researchers from the Responsive Environments Group to develop “jam_bot, a machine learning model designed to emulate his playing style and improvise while performing alongside him,” reports Annie Sarlin for The Boston Globe.
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, and Prof. Salvatore Vitale join Edgar B. Herwick III of GBH’s Curiosity Desk to discuss the science behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and how close we are to unraveling the secrets of the early universe. LIGO has provided the ability to “observe the universe in ways that have never been done before,” says Mavalvala.
Using new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers from MIT determined that asteroid 2024 YR4 will not collide with the moon, reports Hannah Devlin for The Guardian. “[Asteroid] 2024 YR4 is exceedingly faint right now, reflecting about as much light as an almond at the distance of the moon,” explain Prof. Julien de Wit and Andy Rivkin PhD '91, who co-led the observations. “Webb is the only observatory that could hope to make these measurements, as it is the only one with the required sensitivity and stability combined with precise moving-target tracking needed to follow and study objects like this.”
Chronicle reporter Jon Rineman spotlights Prof. Li-Huei Tsai’s work researching how stimulation via light and sound could one day potentially be used to help fight Alzheimer’s disease. “People who continued with this treatment, their memory capacity really has been maintained at a steady state level,” explains Tsai. “And in a couple of patients, their Alzheimer’s biomarkers actually significantly reduced.”
Visiting Senior Lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Newsweek reporter Adam Mills about how AI implementation across organizations can have impacts on business oversight and governance. “The organizations I’ve seen moving fastest have built governance systems early enough that they become a permission structure, rather than a constraint,” says McDonagh-Smith.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”