MIT researchers have found five main predictors of attrition: toxic work culture, job insecurity, stressing innovation, not being recognized for performance, and poor response to Covid-19, reports Meghan M. Biro for Forbes. “Everything boils down to valuing your people – and possibly undertaking a bout of serious self-assessment,” writes Biro.
New research by Professor Erik Demaine, lecturer Zachary Abel, robotics engineer Martin Demaine and their colleagues explores whether it is possible to “take any polyhedral (or flat-sided) shape that’s finite (like a cube, rather than a sphere or the endless plane) and fold it flat using creases," writes Rachel Crowell for Quanta Magazine. “By moving finite to infinite ‘conceptual’ slices, they created a procedure that, taken to its mathematical extreme, produced the flattened object they were looking for,” Crowell explains.
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Nidhi Subbaraman about the dramatic drops in costs to manufacture and sell renewable technologies. Subbaraman notes that Trancik’s research shows that “the steep drop in solar and lithium-ion battery technology was enabled by market expansion policies as well as investment in research and development by governments and the private sector.”
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried ‘14 speaks with Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux about his work in cryptocurrency and the influence of the effective-altruism movement in his philanthropic work. Bankman-Fried explains that he plans to “keep enough money to maintain a comfortable life," writes Faux. “Other than that, he still plans to give it all away – every dollar, or Bitcoin, as the case may be.”
To celebrate the list of known exoplanets topping 5,000, New York Times reporter Becky Ferreira spoke with astronomers, actors and astronauts about their favorite exoplanets or exoplanetary systems. “TOI-1233 is an outstanding planetary system with its high number of transiting planets, sunlike host star and its proximity to the solar system,” says postdoc Tansu Daylan of the system he detected along with two high school students he was mentoring.
MIT researchers have developed reconfigurable, self-assembling robotic cubes embedded with electromagnets that allow the robots to easily change shape, reports John Koetsier for Forbes. “If each of those cubes can pivot with respect to their neighbors you can actually reconfigure your first 3D structure into any other arbitrary 3D structure,” explains graduate student Martin Nisser.
Amazon workers from Staten Island have become the first group to vote in favor of unionizing, reports Ari Levy and Annie Palmer for CNBC. “I would expect now that there is this first victory on the part of a union that Amazon is going to have to reassess its labor relations strategy and begin to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement,” says Prof. Tom Kochan.
Educators from the Asia School of Business and MIT have developed a course aimed at teaching central bankers how the market is impacted by bottlenecks and how monetary policy can help, reports Enda Curran for Bloomberg. “The curriculum covers topics that include crisis prevention, behavioral finance, cybersecurity, digital currencies, and ethics,” writes Curran.
Writing for The New York Times, Steven Simon, a fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, and Jonathan Stevenson of the International Institute for Strategic Studies explore the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s nuclear threats. “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons,” they write, “not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have developed a new simulation that illuminates how stars formed in the early universe, reports Martin Finucane for The Boston Globe. “It was a neutral, dark cosmos that became bright and ionized as light began to emerge from the first galaxies,” explains Aaron Smith, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
CSAIL researchers have developed a new technique that could enable robots to handle squishy objects like pizza dough, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The system is separated into a two-step process, in which the robot must first determine the task and then execute it using a tool like a rolling pin,” writes Heater. “The system, DiffSkill, involves teaching robots complex tasks in simulations.”
Boston Globe reporter Michael Blanding spotlights Prof. Hugh Herr’s work with Dr. Matthew Carty in developing a new amputation surgery called agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI) procedure, which reconnects muscles to amplify electrical signals sent along the nerves. “My dream as a scientist is that a person with an arm amputation could play a Beethoven piece at normal speeds and dexterity – and for legs, that a person could dance ballet,” says Herr.
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about his latest research on a program designed to increase health care access to immigrants across New York. “We reached out through a variety of mechanisms through non-government organizations through social media and we offered them a program to improve their healthcare. We brought them in and what we did was basically just connect them with doctors,” says Gruber.
David J. Collins MA ’59, a pioneer in creating a system to identify railcars and developing a way to scan bar codes with flashes of light, has died at the age of 86, reports James R. Hagerty for The Wall Street Journal. “By developing a system to identify railcars, he helped turn bar codes and their derivatives into an inescapable badge of modern life, used to identify merchandise, inventories, packages and people getting on airplanes,” writes Hagerty.
The MIT AI Hardware Program is aimed at bringing together academia and industry to develop energy-optimized machine-learning and quantum-computing systems, reports Katyanna Quach for The Register. “As progress in algorithms and data sets continues at a brisk pace, hardware must keep up or the promise of AI will not be realized,” explains Professor Jesús del Alamo. “That is why it is critically important that research takes place on AI hardware."