Inverse reporter Emma Betuel reports on a new study by MIT researchers showing that air quality impacts the happiness of people living in cities in China. “When the air is polluted people stay home, they don’t go out, and they order food delivery while staying home playing computer games and shopping online,” explains Prof. Siqi Zheng.
By analyzing posts on social media in China, Prof. Siqi Zheng has found that air pollution can cause increased levels of depression and unhappiness, reports Adele Peters for Fast Company. “We want to show that there’s a wider range of the social cost of air pollution,” explains Zheng.
Prof. Bill Aulet speaks with Financial Times reporter Seb Murray about how business schools can help prepare students to become entrepreneurs and highlights MIT’s delta v program, an educational accelerator that allows business school students to work with engineers, designers and scientists to create companies. “Entrepreneurship is about creation, leadership,” says Aulet. “We need programs that convene heterogeneous teams.”
Writing for Forbes, AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin examines the importance of retirement planning, based off of a recent conversation he had with a Lyft driver. “Today’s retirement planning story must also add several chapters of imaginative, yet realistic, planning that go well beyond financial security and goal-setting alone,” writes Coughlin.
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr writes about the MIT AI Policy Conference, which examined how society, industry and governments should manage the policy questions surrounding the evolution of AI technologies. “If you want people to trust this stuff, government has to play a role,” says CSAIL principal research scientist Daniel Weitzner.
Prof. Evan Ziporyn and his colleagues have created a multimedia, interactive performance that allows viewers to tour a spider’s web, reports Erin Blakemore for The Washington Post. “The group took laser-scanned images of the spider’s web, then associated different parts of the web with different sounds,” Blakemore explains. “They were inspired by the intricate, yet tough protein fibers that make up spider webs.”
MIT researchers found that the silicone gloves football players wear are 20 percent stickier than a human hand, reports David Waldstein for The New York Times. Prof. Anette Hosoi explained that the “key to their performance was how soft and deformable the silicone is, meaning it covers and adheres to the tiniest variations on the surface of the ball,” writes Waldstein.
La República reporter David Luna speaks with 15 MIT researchers, postdoctoral fellows and students from Colombia about their work and experience at MIT. Luna writes that “what sets the Institute apart is its commitment to open, borderless, shared learning,” adding that “MIT understands the true meaning of education: mind and hand to move forward.”
In an article for The New York Times, Prof. David Rand examines what makes people susceptible to believing false or misleading information. Rand and his co-author write that their research “suggests that the solution to politically charged misinformation should involve devoting resources to the spread of accurate information and to training or encouraging people to think more critically.”
Popular Mechanics reporter David Grossman writes that MIT researchers have developed a new imaging technique that allows entire neural circuits in the brain to be explored at speeds 1,000 times faster than currently available methods. The new technique could allow scientists to “spot where brain diseases originate or even the basics of how behavior works.”
Fast Company reporter Jeremy Deaton highlights Prof. Jessika Trancik’s research showing that electric vehicles are often cheaper than comparable gas-powered vehicles. “The reason is that the lower fuel costs of EVs relative to gasoline-fueled cars compensate for the higher vehicle costs of EVs,” Trancik explains.
Researchers from seven universities, including MIT, have teamed up to create “a digital currency that they hope can achieve speeds Bitcoin users can only dream of without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization,” reports Alastair Marsh for Bloomberg News.
Quartz reporter Dan Kopf writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how the lack of jobs for workers without college degrees in American cities is contributing to income inequality. “Gentrification in some major cities may be as much a result of the decline in opportunities for people without college degrees as it is an influx of highly educated, highly paid workers,” writes Kopf.
MIT researchers have developed a new high-resolution technique to image the brain that could be used to create more precise maps of the brain and identify the causes of brain disease, reports Megan Thielking for STAT. “If we can figure out exactly where diseases begin,” explains Prof. Edward Boyden, “that could be pretty powerful.”
Guardian reporter Ian Sample writes that MIT startup Synlogic are developing a “living” medicine” made from genetically modified bugs. “By engineering these bacteria, we are able to control how they operate in the human gastrointestinal tract,” says Caroline Kurtz of Synlogic. “It allows us to think about many other diseases where you may need to produce something beneficial, or remove something that is toxic for the patient.”