Robots constructed by 32 students competed in the annual 2.007 Robot Competition, which was held in person for the first time in three years, reports Lisa Gresci for 7 News. “The atmosphere is absolutely electric,” explains third year student Joshua Rohrbaugh. “It’s really amazing we can celebrate this kind of academic competition in this kind of way. It’s almost like a sporting event and that gets me hyped up.”
Motherboard reporter Audrey Carleton writes that MIT researchers have developed a “filter-less portable desalination device that uses an electrical field generated by solar energy to repel charged particles like salt, bacteria, and viruses.” Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon explains that: “All indicators tell us that water scarcity is a growing problem for everyone due to rising sea levels. We don’t hope for a grim future, but we want to help people be prepared for it.”
Financial Times reporter William D. Cohan profiles Robert Joseph Scaringe SM ’07, PhD ’09 and his personal and professional career in developing Rivian, an electric vehicle technology company dedicated to building vehicles that change the way we consume fossil fuels. “Scaringe has been pining to run his own car company since he was a 17-year-old growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, just south of Cape Canaveral. ‘If you were to go in my bedroom as a kid, you’d find [car] hoods under the bed and windshields in the closet,’ he says.”
Prof. Silvio Micali speaks with Los Angeles Times reporter Laurence Darmiento about his predictions for the future of crypto. “The moment the blockchain starts to be used for transactions, the few blockchains that are really capable of transacting at a very low cost, they’re going to emerge, in my opinion,” says Micali. “When traditional finance starts getting on the blockchain, you’re going to see the blockchains that are really used in a massive and transactional way are going to accelerate.”
MIT astronomers have detected what appears to be a black widow binary with the shortest orbital period ever recorded, reports Becky Ferreira for Vice. “It behaves exactly like a black widow in many, many ways,” says postdoctoral fellow Kevin Burdge, “but it also does a few new things that we've never seen before in any known black widow.”
Inverse reporter Charles Q. Choi writes that MIT astronomers have observed what appears to be the most tightly coupled black widow binary yet. "The one thing I know for sure is we really have never seen anything quite like this object,” says postdoctoral fellow Kevin Burdge, “and that there is probably a lot more to learn from it and other similar objects that I am finding right now, and that's what has me so excited about these."
WBUR host Robin Young speaks with Danielle Dreilinger, author of “The Secret History of Home Economics,” which spotlights alumna Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend MIT and the institute’s first female instructor. “Ellen Swallow Richards was an amazing woman… and she was devoted to science in the public interest… and she turned her attention to helping everyday women in the home,” says Dreilinger.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Alex Amouyel, executive director of MIT Solve, makes the case that “innovation is about solving problems. And if innovation is about solving problems, what problems you are solving and who is setting about solving them is key.” Amouyel adds: “If we are going to get serious about solving world challenges, we all need to adopt more open and participatory systems to find, fund, and support innovators, wherever they may be.”
Lecturer John Liu and Mary Ellen Wiltrout, director of online and blended learning initiatives in the Department of Biology, share how the pandemic has transformed the way in which universities approach digital teaching. Liu noted that the pandemic had “forced [universities] to rethink community and support…on a class level but maybe on a program level” as well as to refocus on how teaching modes best served learning objectives,” reports Times Higher Education.
Vice reporter Becky Ferreira writes that MIT researchers developed a new system, called the Reverberation Machine, to detect the echoes from eight new echoing black hole binaries. “These echoes offer a rarely seen glimpse into the otherworldly surroundings of stellar-mass black holes, which are about five to 15 times the mass of the Sun,” writes Ferreira.
Prof. Jared Curhan has found that “breakthroughs in negotiations occurred nearly twice as frequently after a conversational lapse of between 3.5 and 9.5 seconds as they did at any other point in the conversation,” reports Heidi Mitchell for The Wall Street Journal.
CSAIL researchers have developed a robotic arm equipped with a sensorized soft brush that can untangle hair, reports Douglas Belkin for The Wall Street Journal. “The laboratory brush is outfitted with sensors that detect tension," writes Belkin. “That tension reads as pain and is used to determine whether to use long strokes or shorter ones.”
CSAIL researchers have developed a robotic glove that utilizes pneumatic actuation to serve as an assistive wearable, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “Soft pneumatic actuators are intrinsically compliant and flexible, and combined with intelligent materials, have become the backbone of many robots and assistive technologies – and rapid fabrication with our design tool can hopefully increase ease and ubiquity,” says graduate student Yiyue Luo.
MIT researchers have detected eight echoing black hole binaries in the Milky Way and then converted the black hole X-ray emissions into sound waves, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. The researchers developed a new tool, dubbed the Reverberation Machine, which “combed satellite data from NICER, a telescope aboard the International Space Station that studies X-ray emissions from sources like black holes and neutron stars, including a weird type of emission known as an ‘echo.’”
Graduate student Anna Waldman-Brown writes for Wired about the future of automation technology and how it can impact labor dynamics in the future. “While some scholars believe that our fates are predetermined by the technologies themselves, emerging evidence indicates that we may have considerable influence over how such machines are employed within our factories and offices – if we can only figure out how to wield this power,” writes Waldman-Brown.