Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Gold spotlights how Form Energy, a startup co-founded by Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, has developed an inexpensive iron-air battery that can discharge power for days. The batteries could be “capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing,” writes Gold.
Rik Eberhardt of the MIT Game Lab speaks with Popular Science reporter Matt Hongoltz-Hetling about efforts to preserve the traditional games of Indigenous people around the world. Eberhardt, who has been providing input on the Open Digital Library on Traditional Games, notes that: “Most games have the biases of the colonizers. They almost never take the view of the colonized.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray spotlights Accion Systems, an MIT startup that makes “small thrusters that use an electric current to turn a liquid propellant into a stream of ionized gas. The result is gentle but effective thrust that can be used to adjust a satellite’s orbit or slow it down at the end of its life, so it can fall harmlessly back to earth.”
Boston Globe reporter Kevin Lewis highlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds “voter turnout increased by several percentage points among municipal employees in New York City whose hourly wages were affected by increases in the minimum wage.”
Boston.com reporter Erin Kuschner spotlights Umamicart, an online grocery store specializing in products from Asian American- and immigrant-led businesses that was founded by alumna Andrea Xu ‘20. Xu called Umamicart the “culmination of what I’ve lived through my life.” She added that: “My parents are Chinese, and they moved to Spain in their early 20s. They worked in Chinese restaurants and [opened] their own Chinese restaurants and just worked hard for their entire life. So that’s the entrepreneurial inspiration for me.”
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have been able to observationally confirm one of Stephen Hawking’s theorems about black holes, measuring gravitational waves before and after a black hole merger to provide evidence that a black hole’s event horizon can never shrink, reports Caroline Delbert for Popular Mechanics. “This cool analysis doesn't just show an example of Hawking's theorem that underpins one of the central laws affecting black holes,” writes Delbert, “it shows how analyzing gravitational wave patterns can bear out statistical findings.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu makes the case in a piece for The Washington Post that there should be oversight of how AI is applied, arguing that current AI technologies are already having tangible impacts on the labor market, the criminal justice system and on democratic discourse and politics. “Will AI be allowed to work increasingly to displace and monitor humans, or steered toward complementing and augmenting human capabilities,” Acemoglu writes, “creating new opportunities for workers?”
New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz spotlights a study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that demonstrated how Medicaid coverage could improve Americans’ financial health. “It’s a misnomer — it’s not just to insure your health,” says Finkelstein. “It’s actually to protect you economically in the event of poor health.”
MIT researchers have developed a new type of stent based on kirigami, the Japanese art of folding and cutting paper, which is “designed to improve localized drug delivery for diseases that affect tubular organs such as the oesophagus and bowel,” writes Cynthia Keen for Physics World. “We view these approaches as having the capacity to transform the patient experience by reducing the need to take medications and thereby significantly improving drug adherence,” says Prof. Giovanni Traverso.
TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater writes about Inkbit, a CSAIL spinout, which is developing self-correcting 3D printing technology. “Its primary differentiator from the slew of existing 3D printers is a vision and AI system designed to identify and correct mistakes during the printing process,” writes Heater.
Ariel Ekblaw, founder and director of MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, speaks with 7 News about the Blue Origins spaceflight. “We are at that cusp now of interplanetary civilization,” she said. “As the economy grows around space exploration, it will become more accessible and prices will drop, and that will become a huge success for everyone involved.”
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights Venti Technologies, an MIT startup developing self-driving cargo trucks for seaports. “The trucks can automatically transport containers to dockside, where cranes can load them onto ships,” writes Bray. “Or they can pick up containers as they’re unloaded, and move them to staging areas where they can be transferred to other ships.”
Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, emphasizes the importance of reaching net-zero emissions as fast as possible. “By pushing natural gas—which is indeed cleaner than coal, but it’s still a fossil fuel that releases a lot of CO2 and more importantly, a lot of methane—we are actually hurting renewables,” says Paltsev.
Writing for The Boston Globe, research scientist Lisa D’Ambrosio emphasizes how “caregiving faces an innovation gap. Although there is plenty of inventive energy pouring into some caregiving needs, the core tasks of caregiving — the ones requiring the most intensive, even laborious attention — appear to be last in line for a technological helping hand.”
MIT researchers are developing an electronic skin that can withstand sweating, reports Karen Kwon for Inside Science. The researchers “punched holes on the e-skin to match the size of sweat pores and the distance between them. Then, inspired by kirigami, the team cut away even more material between two holes in an alternating pattern,” writes Kwon. The resulting pattern “could tolerate bending and stretching more than the conventional e-skin with simple holes.”