Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, writes for Forbes examines how new technologies could help people follow-through their New Year’s resolutions. Coughlin writes that marketing innovations that leverage “behavioral science insights are emerging to help with sustained behavioral change.”
New York Times reporters Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui highlight Prof. David Autor’s new research that shows cities do not offer workers without college educations the same economic opportunities that they did in the past. Autor found that the declining urban wage premium has been caused by the “disappearance of ‘middle-skill jobs’ in production but also in clerical, administrative and sales work.”
In an article for Forbes, Prof. David Mindell highlights the technologies on display at the annual CES showcase in Las Vegas. “To visit CES is to immerse oneself in imagined futures with vivid colors, encountering the technologies that will make our own cars, homes, and jobs a bit more like Las Vegas,” writes Mindell.
Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”
Financial Times reporter Andrew Jack spotlights MIT alumnus Socrates Rosenfeld, who founded a cannabis distribution startup that has become the subject of a new case study taught at MIT. “We try to create live cases where the answer is not known in advance,” explains Prof. Scott Stern. “They were looking at an industry with a good degree of uncertainty.”
Forbes contributor Angelica Krystle Donati highlights a recent presentation by Prof. Robert Langer, in which he shared his experience founding more than 40 startups.
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt highlights Prof. Emeritus Olivier Blanchard’s address to the American Economic Association, in which he argued that governments are overly concerned with debt. “Blanchard’s case revolves around the fact that economic growth rates in modern times are usually higher than interest rates. This pattern means that governments can often repay their debts more easily than people expect,” Leonhardt explains.
Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner of The Engine, speaks with Fortune reporter Renae Reints about The Engine’s commitment to nurturing startups that require more time and patient capital. Rae explains that The Engine “has an investing horizon of up to 18 years, which allows us to think about bigger, longer-term bets—and these could be world-changing.”
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that researchers determined how fast a supermassive black hole spins by measuring a star being swallowed by the black hole. Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham explains that, “this measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant.”
In a letter to The Boston Globe, Prof. Michael Golay argues that nuclear energy should be included in the portfolio of options used to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Golay notes that “we face the existential challenge of climate change that likely will demand nearly complete replacement of the existing energy infrastructure within this century.”
Boston Globe reporter Andy Rosen highlights how MIT startup Cambrian Innovations is working with Tree House Brewing to clean the waste water produced by the facility. Rosen explains that Cambrian Innovations “plans to treat Tree House’s waste water on site, using a microbial system that promises to clean up the outflows while generating gas to heat the brewery.”
Astronomers from MIT have detected echoes in X-ray flares emitted by a black hole consuming stellar material, writes Charles Q. Choi for Space.com. The findings “might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes,” writes Choi, “but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that a team of researchers, including MIT scientists, have detected fast radio bursts (FRB) coming from a distant galaxy. Coldewey explains that the researchers used the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment radio telescope, which “points at the whole sky and chooses where to ‘look’ using software,” to identify 13 new FRBs.
NESN spotlights MIT senior Riley Quinn, who was born without a left hand and forearm, and his success in the classroom and on the football field. “My only option was to outwork people, whether that was on the field, in the classroom, in relationships, day-to-day life,” says Quinn, “being a good person and taking that with me in everything I do.”