According to Prof. Yossi Sheffi, increasing customer demand is the driving force behind the supply chain bottlenecks impacting the global delivery network. “The smoking gun for consumer demand as the main culprit is that bottlenecks didn’t emerge as a significant hurdle until spring of 2021, says Sheffi…That was after the federal government has juiced spending by sending three rounds of stimulus checks to most households,” writes Paul Davidson for USA Today.
Cary Lin MBA ’16 co-founded Common Heir, a clean and plastic-free beauty company dedicated to creating “a high-impact line of skincare that had a low impact on the environment,” reports Geri Stengel for Forbes.
Research engineer Paul Woskov speaks with Bloomberg Radio host Tom Moroney and Joe Shortsleeve about his work with Quaise Energy in developing a laser to drill holes into the earth. “There is a lot of heat contained within our planet. The amount of heat that is present, if tapped, could supply all of our energy needs for several million years,” says Woskov.
A new report co-authored by Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that tenants in predominately nonwhite neighborhoods are nearly twice as likely to face eviction than renters in mostly white areas, reports Chris Lisinski for WBUR. “Our takeaway here is that we really have to act now,” says Huntley. “Ensuring an equitable recovery is a critical first step toward securing safe and stable homes for all.”
A campaign led by RRS Discovery, and Prof. Raffaele Ferrari has found that deep-ocean water rises due to the turbulence created by undersea mountains, reports Paul Voosen for Science. “The turbulence that was found tended to grow with depth. Like a spoon stirring milk into coffee, it was driving water down, not up, says Ferrari,” writes Voosen.
Using machine learning techniques, MIT researchers analyzed social media sentiment around the world during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and found that the “pandemic precipitated a dramatic drop in happiness,” reports Charlotte Hu for Popular Science. “We wanted to do this global study to compare different countries because they were hit by the pandemic at different times,” explains Prof. Siqi Zheng, “and they have different cultures, different political systems, and different healthcare systems.”
NASA astronaut Raja Chari SM ’01 and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer performed a spacewalk to help maintain the crucial cooling systems aboard the International Space Station (ISS), reports Ed Browne for Newsweek. “Spacewalks are an important part of life on the space station,” writes Browne. “Also called an extravehicular activity (EVA), a spacewalk is when an astronaut or cosmonaut gets out of the ISS whilst wearing a pressurized and oxygenated space suit that protects them from the vacuum of space.”
With the announcement of the new MIT Morningside Academy for Design, MIT is looking to create “a hub of resources for the next generation of designers, integrating areas of study such as engineering and architecture in the process,” reports Dana Gerber for The Boston Globe. “This is really going to give us a platform to connect with the world around problems that communities are facing,” explained Prof. John Ochsendorf, who will serve as the academy’s founding director.
MIT was ranked the best value college in Massachusetts by SmartAsset, reports Frank O’Laughlin for WHDH 7. The ranking compared “educational institutions across five metrics, including scholarships, starting salary, tuition, living costs, and retention rate to identify colleges in the Bay State that offer the best return on student investment,” writes O’Laughlin.
Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that eviction rates for communities of color in Massachusetts were nearly twice as high as eviction rates for predominately white neighborhoods, reports Katie Johnson for The Boston Globe. “In neighborhoods made up predominately of people of color, landlords filed 30 evictions for every 1,000 renters, while majority-white neighborhoods had 18.5 evictions filed for every 1,000 renters,” writes Johnson.
A new analysis by lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley finds that communities of color were hit harder by new eviction filings than white residents after Massachusetts’s eviction moratorium ended in October 2020, reports Adam Reilly for GBH. “Huntley also found that there were nearly twice as many eviction filings per renter in predominately nonwhite communities as in predominantly white ones – and, in certain municipalities, the disparity was even greater,” writes Reilly.
MIT engineers have developed a new contactless method to clean solar panels that could save billions of gallons of water, reports Anuradha Varanasi for Popular Science. “I was amazed at the sheer amount of pure water that is required for cleaning solar panels,” says Prof. Kripa Varanasi. “The water footprint of the solar industry is only going to grow in the future. We need to figure out how to make solar farms more sustainable.”
Profs. Ruonan Han and Qing Hu speak with Popular Science reporter Rahul Rao about their work with terahertz waves. “There’s a laundry list of potential applications,” says Hu of the promise of terahertz waves.
Fortune reporter Jeremy Kahn spotlights a study co-authored by Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi exploring issues associated with “explainable” AI systems that are being applied in fields such as healthcare, finance and government. The researchers explain that those using such systems “might have misunderstood the capabilities of contemporary explainability techniques—they can produce broad descriptions of how the AI system works in a general sense but, for individual decisions, the explanations are unreliable or, in some instances, only offer superficial levels of explanation.”
Prof. Sara Seager has been awarded one of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) awards, which will help fund her project aimed at sending an orbiter that deploys an inflatable probe to Venus, as part of an effort to search for habitability or signs of life, reports Ramin Skibba for Wired. “This search for signs of life on Venus has been around for a long time, and now the stars are aligned to start taking it seriously,” says Seager.