In an article for Scientific American, Sloan research scientist Mohammad S. Jalali writes about the concerning ways hospitals are vulnerable to cyber attacks, despite being responsible for some of people’s most sensitive information. Jalali suggests that “policymakers, health care leaders and hospitals themselves should work together to make the industry as a whole less susceptible to attacks that threaten people’s privacy and their very lives.”
A team led by research scientist Ming Dao has made diamond nano-needles that can bend without breaking and snap back into to their original position, New Scientist reports. “The tiny needles had very little room for defects in their crystal structure, so they could bend without snapping,” the article explains.
A study led by research scientist Nick Obradovich found that people’s behavior on social media may be influenced by weather conditions. “Positive posts increased as the temperature rose,” reports Robert Preidt in US News & World Report, but “precipitation, humidity levels of 80 percent or higher, and high amounts of cloud cover were associated with a greater number of negative posts.”
Alumni Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, will be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in July for hosting NPR’s famed show Car Talk for 25 years. “On the show, listeners would call in to describe their car problems, often trying to imitate the sound that their cars were making,” writes Chris Isidore for CNNMoney. “The brothers would offer a diagnosis, and a number of jokes.”
A new study finds that a 4% reduction in China's carbon emissions by 2030 could save a total of $464.5 billion in healthcare costs, writes Chase Purdy for Quartz. “We have all these policy goals for a transition toward a more sustainable society,” says Associate Prof. Noelle Selin. “Mitigating air pollution, a leading cause of death, is one of them, and avoiding dangerous climate change is another.”
WBUR's Carey Goldberg profiles Prof. Feng Zhang, a “sunny science superstar” whose discoveries include major advances in optogenetics and CRISPR. "Feng is a one-in-a-generation scientist who sees connections that the rest of us have overlooked," says Prof. Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.
Andy Rosen writes for The Boston Globe about a new restaurant established by MIT alumni that uses a robotic kitchen to deliver affordable, healthy food that’s “ready in just a few minutes.” Rosen notes that “the company started with the help of a couple of grants from MIT in 2015, the year it built its first prototype.”
Spyce, a robotic kitchen created by four alumni, will open in Boston’s Downtown Crossing this May. The group “built their first prototype in [an MIT] fraternity basement in 2015; now they have patent-pending technology and backing from acclaimed chef Daniel Boulud,” writes Jenna Pelletier of Boston Magazine.
Former MIT Visiting Artist Pedro Reyes returns to the Institute with the premiere of his latest puppet play, “Manufacturing Mischief,” writes Jeremy Goodwin of The Boston Globe. Partially based on the writings of Prof. Emeritus Noam Chomsky, and featuring puppets of famous figures like Chomsky, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, the play is “about staging a conflict between opposing worldviews and opposing ideologies,” says Reyes.
Forbes contributor Brid-Aine Parnell describes new research from MIT and others who discovered that even though diamonds are hard and brittle, “needle nanodiamonds can stretch by as much as 9%.” Because of this, such nanodiamonds could “be biocompatible for vivo imaging, optoelectronics or even delivering drugs into cancer cells,” writes Parnell.
In this one-minute read for Fast Company, Michael Grothaus quips that “40 is the new 20,” based on a new working paper by Sloan Prof. Pierre Azoulay and graduate student Daniel Kim. They found that “when it comes to entrepreneurship, the average successful business founder is 42 years old,” reports Grothaus.
A device developed by MIT researchers allows people to be aware of the brief period between wakefulness and sleep or hypnagogia, reports Daniel Oberhaus of Motherboard. “The system is meant to prevent the user from falling deeper into sleep, effectively suspending them in an extended state of hypnagogia,” Oberhaus explains.
Davide Castelvecchi of Nature explores the “ambitious scientific quarry” that gravitational-wave scientists are after, including what happened in the first few moments after the Big Bang. Castelvecchi, who speaks with MIT physicist Rainer Weiss for this piece, notes that the field has already “delivered discoveries at a staggering rate, outpacing even the rosiest expectations.”
In a VICE News Tonight climate segment, MIT postdocs Volodymyr Koman and Seon-Yeong Kwak explain their technique for making plants glow in the dark to a first-grade class in Boston. Following a demonstration mixing plant glucose with the specialized nanoparticles, one student exclaims in disbelief, “no battery or anything!”
Camila Russo of Bloomberg reports on Gary Gensler’s comments at MIT Technology Review’s Business of Blockchain conference. Gensler, a visiting lecturer at Sloan and former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said many cryptocurrenciers “are operating outside of U.S. laws.”