In the Media

Chancellor Melissa Nobles discusses challenges facing higher education, touching on the importance of diversity, inclusion, and affordability in higher learning, as well as her research on race and politics. Nobles notes that MIT’s signature ability is “to foster excellence in fundamental research and education and then to use that research and education to help tackle the world’s toughest problems. Our success rests crucially on our people. We support, we welcome, and we collaborate with some of the best faculty and staff around the world. And, of course, we attract the best students.”

In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, emphasize the importance of ensuring international graduate students can stay and work in the U.S. after graduation. “International graduate students are one of the 21st century’s most valuable resources,” they write. “It is time for the United States to start treating them that way.”

Writing for The Hill, Randolph Kirchain and Hessam AzariJafari of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub emphasize the importance of encouraging development of building materials with low lifetime carbon impact. “When we choose a construction material without considering its life cycle impacts,” they write, “we not only miss an opportunity to reduce use phase and end-of-life emissions, but we can unintentionally worsen them.”

Lecturer Jim Aloisi speaks with CNN reporter Nathaniel Meyersohn about how Taylor Swift’s sold-out Eras Tour is impacting public transportation across the United States. “What Taylor Swift is doing, and I thank her for this — although I don’t know she intended to — is proving that if you give people better, reliable transit alternatives, they’ll take it,” says Aloisi. “They would prefer to do that than be stuck in soul-crushing traffic.”

Ali Khademhosseini PhD ’05 founded Omeat, a cultivated meat startup that “enables the cultivation of any meat in a way that is orders-of-magnitude more sustainable and humane than the conventional approach,” reports Christine Hall for TechCrunch.

Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Yahoo News reporter Rebecca Corey about the benefits and risks posed by the use of AI tools in health care. “I think the problem is when you try to naively replace humans with AI in health care settings, you get really poor results,” says Ghassemi. “You should be looking at it as an augmentation tool, not as a replacement tool.”

Prof. Kevin Esvelt and his students have found that language-generating AI models could make it easier to create pandemic potential pathogens, reports Kelsey Piper for Vox.

Herbert Kalmus ‘03 and former MIT Prof. Daniel Frost Comstock ‘04 co-founded Technicolor, the company that helped bring color to the movies. Boston Globe correspondent Scott Kirsner notes that the company’s name was “an homage to MIT, which publishes a yearbook called Technique.” Kirsner adds that Technicolor engineers “had to develop their own cameras, shooting and lighting techniques on set, film processing, and add-ons to the movie projector... Technicolor became one of the giants of 20th-century Hollywood.”

Postdoc Josh Borrow and his colleagues used simulations to explore how early-universe galaxies born inside alternative dark matter halos start out, and what happens as they grow, reports Lyndie Chiou for Scientific American. “The simulations also revealed a new discovery: a connection between alternative dark matter types and starbursts, periods of extremely rapid star formation inside a galaxy.”

Researchers at MIT have showed that “they could induce people to dream about a particular subject and that doing so helped them become more creative,” writes F.D. Flam for Bloomberg. “The findings should remind us that the line between productivity and resting is blurry — especially in creative endeavors,” writes Flam.

Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill highlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s new book “The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work” in a roundup of his best books of the year thus far. “Ton has assembled a hard-to-dispute argument that better and better-paid jobs contribute to a virtuous circle of greater competitiveness, productivity and, above all, worker dignity and wellbeing,” writes Hill.

MIT researchers have found that when enhanced with salt, a rubbery hydrogel commonly found in diapers can absorb record amounts of moisture from the air, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science.  “Across a wide variety of humidity conditions, the team’s enhanced hydrogel could swell and absorb impressive amounts of air moisture without leaking,” Paul notes.

MIT researchers have developed a new compact, lightweight design for a 1-megawatt electrical motor that “could open the door to electrifying much larger aircraft,” reports Ed Gent for IEEE Spectrum. “The majority of CO₂ is produced by twin and single-aisle aircraft which require large amounts of power and onboard energy, thus megawatt-class electrical machines are needed to power commercial airliners,” says Prof. Zoltán Spakovszky. “Realizing such machines at 1 MW is a key stepping stone to larger machines and power levels.”

Prof. Carlo Ratti writes for Nikkei Asia about the importance of world expositions. “We do not need expos to showcase products across the world, but we do need them as playful, experimental sandboxes for testing ideas and trialing concepts,” writes Ratti. “Putting the focus on innovation would not require wholesale reinvention, but instead a re-emphasis on an element that has been part of expos since the beginning.”

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights Cleana, a startup launched by engineers from MIT and BU that is developing “a new kind of toilet seat that raises or lowers itself to avoid unwelcome splashes, or to prevent objects from falling accidentally into the bowl.” Bray explains that “the company’s engineers created a semi-automatic seat that must first be raised or lowered by the user. This action powers up a pneumatic system with a built-in timer that waits about 30 seconds and then raises or lowers the seat, depending on the application.”