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.
Droplette, a skincare device designed by a group of MIT alumni, has been named one of the most innovative personal care products of 2021, reports Jordan Blok and Rachel Feltman for Popular Science. The product “turns pods of treatment like collagen and retinol into a super-fine mist to help skin absorb the ingredients more quickly,” writes Blok and Feltman. “The company’s ultimate aim is to use the tech to deliver drugs without needles."
After the Covid-19 pandemic caused a drop in revenue, Christine Marcus MBA '12 reinvented Alchemista, her food tech delivery service, reports Geri Stengel for Forbes. Marcus targeted the home market allowing property managers to “use temperature-controlled food lockers as vending machines to offer meals, snacks, and more in the lobby or another common area,” writes Stengel.
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 MBA ’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.
Edgar Herwick of GBH News visits the lab of Prof. Mathias Kolle to explore the science behind what causes rainbows to arc across the sky. “The sun has to be behind you. Then water in the atmosphere in front of you. And that's usually when it rains, you get that condition,” says Kolle. “Then what you also want to do is you want to look at the right spot.”
Forbes has named Paul Cheek, a lecturer and the Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship to their list of the 30 Under 30 Leading The Green Energy Transition. “On a mission to end plastic pollution, Paul cofounded Oceanworks to be a global marketplace for facilitating trade in recycled plastic.”.
Writing for Wired, Prof. Nicholas De Monchaux compares the clear division between digital and physical reality presented in The Matrix films with life in real cities where the physical and virtual worlds are increasingly merging. “This new world is inhabited by our digital shadows,” writes De Monchaux. “They follow our steps in the real one and are born from the data trail we leave when we post on social media, search on Google Maps, order things from Amazon, or leave reviews on restaurant sites.”
Google created a doodle honoring the late Lotfi Zadeh ’46 for creating the mathematical framework known as “fuzzy logic,” reports Brett Molina for USA Today. Zadeh’s theory “has been used in various tech applications, including anti-skid algorithms for cars,” writes Molina.
MIT scientists have mapped out the web of a tropical tent-web spider and assigned each strand a tone audible to humans reports, Hicks Wogan for National Geographic. “We’re trying to give the spider a voice, and maybe someday, communicate with the arachnid via vibrations,” explains Prof. Markus Buehler.
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.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Kate Kellogg explores how managers can more effectively help their employees transition to using new technologies. “Managers need to realize that introducing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics and robotics aren’t straightforward,” writes Kellogg. “Managers who hope to successfully implement these technologies need to focus on issues of employee status and roles, and the amount of new work that will need to be done.”
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.