Boston Globe reporter Janelle Nanos spotlight Spoiler Alert, an MIT startup that works with major food brands to save food that might have gone to waste. “One of our core beliefs is that waste is no longer a necessary or acceptable cost of doing business,” said Spoiler Alert cofounder and chief product officer Emily Malina ’13. “Everything we do is geared towards moving perishable inventory faster to benefit brands, retailers, consumers, and the planet.”
Bloomberg Opinion reporters Peter R. Orszag and Zachery Halem spotlight Prof. Andrew Lo's work examining the relationship between global companies, their equity value, and greenhouse gas emissions. “With carbon prices rising and other climate-protection measures strengthening, it’s reasonable to speculate that company valuations will become increasingly tied to emissions control,” writes Orszag and Halem.
Prof. Sara Seager speaks with Vox podcast host Brian Resnick about the potential of for life on Venus. “So, for Venus, far above the surface, at 50 kilometers or so above the surface, the temperature is actually just right for life,” says Seager.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, and Luke Yoquinto, a research associate at the AgeLab, emphasize the importance of increased investment in aging-related research in an article for The Boston Globe. Coughlin and Yoquinto call for “ramping up age-related disease research across the board: not just in health care and robotics, but also in smart-home tech, user design, transportation, workplace technologies, education and training, and nutrition. R&D in these fields won’t just improve lives; it will also strengthen tomorrow’s economy.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Li-Huei Tsai underscores the need for the Alzheimer’s research community to “acknowledge the gaps in the current approach to curing the disease and make significant changes in how science, technology, and industry work together to meet this challenge.” Tsai adds: “With a more expansive mode of thinking, we can bridge the old innovation gaps and cross new valleys of discovery to deliver meaningful progress toward the end of Alzheimer’s.”
Prof. Stuart Madnick shares tips with NBC reporter Mike Manzoni about how to shop safely online this holiday season and protect your personal information. “If you get a notice from Best Buy that they are having a sale, that is relatively benign. If they ask you to fill in credit card information, then you want to be real cautious,” says Madnick.
Dr. Jay Last ’56, the founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp, died on Nov. 11, reports James R. Hagerty for The Wall Street Journal. Dr. Last figured out “ways to manufacture integrated circuits in bulk, helping to put the silicon into Silicon Valley and make the region a synonym for digital technology,” writes Hagerty.
A new report by researchers from MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, the Migration Policy Institute and the World Food Programme investigates the motivations and costs of migration from Central America, and finds that migrants spend $2.2 billion every year trying to reach the U.S., reports Catherine E. Shoichet for CNN. "That is an extreme amount of money," explains Prof. Sarah Williams. "That $2.2 billion is all paid for by the migrants themselves, so the risks, both in terms of debt and personal risk, is borne by the migrant."
Provost Martin A Schmidt has been named the 19th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), reports Diverse Issues in Higher Education reporter Jessica Ruf. “MIT has been a remarkable home for me,” Schmidt told Ruf. “It has allowed me to pursue my research and teaching passion, and I’ve been presented with outstanding opportunities.”
Wired reporter Adam Rogers spotlights Prof. Nancy Kanwisher’s research on the fusiform face area, which becomes active when a person sees a face, and what would happen if the area were intentionally activated. Kanwisher’s experiment “certainly suggested the possibility, the power, of jacking directly into the brain,” writes Rogers.
CNET science writer Monisha Ravisetti spotlights MIT researchers who have successfully recorded the scale formation of butterfly wings during its transformation. “Understanding their schematics could ultimately benefit constructed materials like windows and thermal systems and even bring an ethereal quality to textiles,” writes Ravisetti.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, writes for Forbes about the importance of comprehensive longevity planning. “As younger adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s today, Millennials and Gen X’ers are catching a glimpse of their possible future selves in their parents aging,” writes Coughlin. “Now is the time to ask how are today’s choices and behaviors defining their older self tomorrow?”
Popular Science reporter Hannah Seo writes that MIT researchers have developed a way to watch and record how the microscopic scales on a butterfly’s wings grow and tile themselves as the butterfly develops inside its chrysalis. The researchers hope to “use butterfly scales as inspiration for the design of new materials,” writes Seo. “Butterfly scales have other fascinating properties such as water repellency and the ability to regulate temperature.”
Andy Rivkin ’91 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Andrew Brinker about his work on NASA’s DART mission, which is aimed at testing whether a rocket could be used to help steer an asteroid away from Earth. “I’ve always been interested in stars and space and planets since I was a kid,” said Rivkin. “At MIT, I was in the earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences department, and that’s when I started looking at asteroids. And then as a graduate student, I studied asteroids. And then I ended up doing my dissertation on them. It sort of all started [at MIT].”
Researchers from MIT have developed a 3-D printable ink made from bacterial cells that can release anti-cancer drugs or remove toxins from the environment, reports Carissa Wong for New Scientist. This is the first of its kind,” says research affiliate Avinash Manjula-Basavanna. “A living ink that can respond to the environment. We have repurposed the matrix that these bacteria normally utilise as a shielding material to form a bio-ink.”