Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, speaks with Radio Boston’s Deborah Becker about her book on Harvey Washington Wiley’s quest to make food safer in America. “I think we have a long way to go in being really transparent about what’s in food,” says Blum about current food safety protections.
Writing for STAT, Eric Boodman highlights how Prof. Jing-Ke Weng’s lab at the Whitehead Institute has mapped the genome of a firefly in an effort to understand how fireflies acquired the ability to glow. The researchers hope their findings will eventually be used to develop “better laboratory tools for studying disease and developing treatments.”
Bloomberg News reporter Mihir Sharma writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that “intergenerational mobility has remained stagnant for Indians since the economy was liberalized in 1991.” For Indian Muslims, the researchers found that opportunities for upward mobility are declining.
MIT has been named the best college in Massachusetts by MONEY, reports Kaitlin Mulhere. “MIT is one of the world’s most prestigious tech schools–and that reputation pays off,” Mulhere explains. “Recent graduates report earnings that are 10% higher than other colleges with a STEM focus.”
BBC Click reports on a system developed by CSAIL researchers that creates 3-D motion sculptures based off of 2-D video. The technique, say the researchers, “could help dancers and athletes learn more about how they move.”
Robotic furniture produced by MIT spinout Ori, which created a furniture system that reconfigures itself with the push of a button or voice commands, could be the solution to living in small spaces, writes Candace Jackson for The New York Times.
Quartz reporter Maria Thomas writes that MIT researchers found there is a lack of upward mobility available to Indian men born to fathers in the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution. The researchers found that the imbalance is the result of a “substantial rise in upward mobility for the historically-marginalised scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs)… and a substantial decline for Muslims.”
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, examines the increasing influence of AI in our lives. Coughlin concludes that in the absence of a human alternative, brief interactions could change our perception of an AI system from “a simple tool that ‘does stuff’ around the house, to a presence that is a real part of our social self.”
As part of the InCube entrepreneurial challenge, a team of MIT students is living in a glass cube for five days as they work on developing a better ambulance, reports Andy Rosen for The Boston Globe. Gene Keselman, executive director of the MIT Innovation Initiative, explains that the glass cube offers passersby a glimpse at what “the entrepreneurial journey looks like.”
Boston Globe reporter Dugan Arnett spotlights MechE senior Alex Hattori, a six-time national yo-yo champion. Hattori, who was originally inspired to attend MIT so that he could take a course where students design and build yo-yos, explains that he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop competing. “I love yo-yoing as much as I did the first day,” he says.
Local biotech companies raised money to help MIT’s Bear Lab study Fragile X syndrome by competing in lawn games, writes Allison Hagan for The Boston Globe. The $30,000 raised provides “a very real chance at a success in this disease, and it’s going to have a much broader impact,” says Prof. Mark Bear.
A new demographic model proposed by researchers from MIT Sloan and Yale finds that there may be double the number of estimated undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., reports Scott Lanman for Bloomberg. MIT Senior Lecturer Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi and Jonathan Feinstein and Edward Kaplan of Yale found that, “the widely accepted estimate of 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States is too small.”
Two months after its launch, the TESS satellite has already identified two new exoplanet candidates, reports Mary Beth Griggs for Popular Science. “The team is excited about what TESS might discover next,” explains Prof. Sara Seager, who is serving as the deputy science director for the mission.
New Scientist reporter Will Gater writes that the TESS satellite has found its first two exoplanets. “This is one of the first objects we looked at,” says MIT postdoctoral fellow Chelsea Huang of the discovery of an exoplanet about 60 light years away. “We were immediately saying ‘hey this is too good to be true!’”
New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye writes about how the TESS satellite has already identified at least 73 stars that might have exoplanets. “TESS is doing great,” says George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT who is leading the TESS mission. Ricker adds that the satellite is, “all that we could have wished for!”