In the Media

MIT researchers have developed a new color-changing ink that “reacts to different light to produce various hues,” reports Nick Kwek for BBC Click.

Gizmodo reporter Andrew Liszewski writes that CSAIL researchers have developed “a new spray-on ink that can infinitely change colors, designs, and patterns when blasted with different wavelengths of light.”

Writing for Ms., Julie Wosk spotlights Prof. Dava Newman’s work developing the BioSuit, a form-fitting suit that will provide astronauts greater mobility in space. Newman hopes that the suit will inspire girls and young women. “I do believe they need to ‘see’ themselves as astronauts and aerospace engineers to open up their minds and to allow themselves to accomplish these dreams!”

Principal research scientist Andrew Sutherland and a colleague at the University of Bristol have  solved a decades-old math problem known as the “summing of the three cubes.” The team found the answer with the help of the platform the Charity Engine, “which utilizes idle, unused computing power from over 500,000 home PCs to create a crowdsourced and environmentally conscious supercomputer,” writes David Grossman for Popular Mechanics. 

MIT researchers have conducted a new examination of the Dead Sea Scrolls in an effort to determine how the documents have lasted so long. Prof. Admir Masic “sought to decode just how this unique parchment was made, in hopes that the ancient technology might also reveal new approaches to preserving sensitive historical documents in the modern age,” writes Evan Nicole Brown for Fast Company.

Esteban Bustillos of WGBH’s On Campus highlights the work of MIT Director of Athletics Julie Soreiro ahead of her retirement at the end of the fall semester. “Soriero's biggest contribution may be making the school’s athletic mission an extension of its academic one,” says Bustillos. “It’s best summed up in a phrase that’s become something of a mantra for her: ‘We will not apologize for winning.’”

Inspired by the interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, researchers at MIT have developed a “four-point strategy to understand the impact of fake news and social-media manipulation,” reports Annalisa Merelli for Quartz. Prof. Sinan Aral notes that “granting data access for analysis while otherwise maintaining strong protection of it would be vital” in order for the strategy to be used properly.  

A study from the MIT AgeLab shows that people who take out student loans for their children or grandchildren typically decrease the amount they save for their own retirement. “[I]f one’s loan obligations extend all the way into retirement age, then the time to begin saving may never arrive,” writes AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin for Forbes.

A report by MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future recommends investing in workers to ensure Americans will be able to secure good quality jobs in the future, reports WBUR’s Zeninjor Enwemeka. “Workers in general have not benefited from the technological progress we've experienced in this country nor the productivity growth we've experienced,” explains Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of the task force.

Ryan Mandelbaum writes for Gizmodo about the efforts of principal research scientist Andrew Sutherland and others to use a crowd-sourced supercomputer to solve a math problem that scientists have been working on since the 1950s. “You wait and wait and just when you’re at the point of giving up, the number shows up,” said Sutherland. “It’s very gratifying.”

A new MIT study of the Dead Sea scrolls found “salts used on the writing layer of the Temple scroll [that] are not common to the Dead Sea region,” reports Nicola Davis for The Guardian. “These salts are not typical for anything we knew about associated with this period and parchment making,” explains Prof. Admir Masic.

A new paper from Prof. Kristin J. Forbes finds that the increased impact of globalization on the rate of inflation will affect everything from government policy to stock market returns. “The study's findings also suggest that central banks may be losing their power to direct the economy,” reports Dion Rabouin for Axios.

Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle speaks with Big Picture Science about the science behind the redefinition of the standard of mass for the kilogram. “We are defining the units in terms of perfect objects, objects made by nature and not manmade objects, which have imperfections,” explains Ketterle. “What we have now done instead is redefined the kilogram as the mass of an exact number of natural particles.”  

Martin Finucane writes for The Boston Globe about a “thought-provoking new report” from the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. “There is a lot of alarmist rhetoric about how the robots are coming,” said Elisabeth Beck Reynolds, executive director of the task force. “MIT’s job is to cut through some of this hype and bring some perspective to this discussion.”

A new study by MIT researchers examines how tech workers adjust when certain skill set declines in importance, reports Michelle Cheng for Quartz. “The findings suggest that when their skills became obsolete, the IT workers who adjusted were thinking about the long term and were capable of learning by doing,” Cheng explains.