In the Media

As the curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, addressed how we can live together and how architecture is responding to longstanding global issues that contributed to Covid-19’s global spread, from climate change and migration to political polarization and inequality, reports Elisabetta Povoledo for The New York Times. “The pandemic will hopefully go away,” said Sarkis. “But unless we address these causes, we will not be able to move forward.”

Prof. Ronald Prinn writes for The Hill about the urgent need for countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help reduce global temperature increases. Lowering “transition risks toward net-zero-emissions economies will involve integration of both physical and transitional components, a process that requires new and improved models and frameworks,” writes Prinn. “The goal is to empower decision-makers in government and industry to lower the transition risks as an integral companion to mitigation strategies.”

Michael Hecht of MIT’s Haystack Observatory speaks with Eric Niiler of Wired about how the Mars MOXIE experiment is successfully extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. "It’s stunning how much the results look identical to what we had run in the laboratory two years earlier,” says Hecht, who leads the MOXIE team. “How many things can you put away for two years and turn on and even expect to work again? I mean, try that with your bicycle.”

Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson spotlights Strolling Cities, a new AI video project developed by researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which recreates the streets of Italy based on millions of photos and words. “I decided that the beauty and sentiment, the social, historical, and psychological contents of my memories of Italy could become an artistic project, probably a form of emotional consolation,” says Mauro Martino of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. “Something beautiful always comes out of nostalgia.”

Writing for The Boston Globe, Sloan Prof. Erin Kelly and University of Minnesota Prof. Phyllis Moen explore how to create an effect hybrid workplace. “Our hope is that after this past year’s normalization of remote work, more organizations will stop rewarding face time in favor of a future where a variety of work patterns are recognized as productive and welcome,” they write.

TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater writes that MIT researchers have developed a new robotic finger, dubbed the Digger Finger, that can sense and identify objects underground. “It’s a useful skill that could someday be deployed for landmines, finding underground cables and a variety of other tasks.”

Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, speaks with DesignBoom about the 2021 Venice Architecture Bienale, which was postponed for a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “The postponement led to open discussions among the participants about tactical things, thematic things, but also how do we respond collectively to a crisis like this?,” says Sarkis. “But then it also led to starting to share ideas about how it is more effective to ship from this port versus that, and using local support rather than shipping everything.”

MIT has been named to Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings of the top schools in the Northeast for academic resources, reports Gerard Yates for The Wall Street Journal.

UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that people tend to follow a predictable travel pattern that remains consistent in countries around the world. The findings could help urban planners “better understand how populations interact with their surroundings, as well as assist city planners with zoning, infrastructure and other development decisions,” writes Hays.

Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have uncovered a new travel pattern in human mobility that remains consistent across four continents, reports Beck Ferreira for Motherboard. “The notion that distance and frequency of visitation are related is in accordance with intuition,” the researchers explain. “What is surprising is that the relationship between these two quantities can be described by a simple and clean mathematical law.” 

A new study by MIT researchers finds that air pollution can enhance lightning sparked by wildfires, reports Nikk Ogasa for Science.  Ogasa notes that the researchers “also found that air pollution did more than enhance lightning; wildfire smoke more than tripled the intensity of thundershowers.”

Fast Company reporter Elizabeth Segran writes that a new study by MIT Prof. Jackson Lu finds that mask wearing is more prevalent in communities in the U.S. with higher levels of collectivism. “It’s important to understand how culture fundamentally shapes how people respond not only to this pandemic, but to future crises as well,” says Lu.

A new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Jackson Lu finds that a community’s level of collectivism influences whether someone is willing to wear a mask, reports Cara Murez for U.S. News & World Report. “The role of collectivism could be studied in other crises, such as wildfires or hurricanes,” notes Murez, adding that the researchers “felt it would be important to study whether the pandemic itself has affected the sense of collectivism or individualism.”

In an interview with Clare Wilson of New Scientist, Prof. Ed Boyden, one of the co-inventors of the field of optogenetics, discusses how the technique was used to help partially restore vision for a blind patient. “It’s exciting to see the first publication on human optogenetics,” says Boyden.

Prof. Ed Boyden speaks with New York Times reporter Carl Zimmer about how scientists were able to partially restore a patient’s vision using optogenetics. “So far, I’ve thought of optogenetics as a tool for scientists primarily, since it’s being used by thousands of people to study the brain,” says Boyden, who helped pioneer the field of optogenetics. “But if optogenetics proves itself in the clinic, that would be extremely exciting.”