Rhod Sharp, presenter of Up All Night on BBC Radio 5, talks with Prof. Sara Seager about the functionality of TESS and the details of its orbit. “TESS has a very unique orbit, it’s like a giant ellipse,” says Seager. “The cameras are made to be very stable thermally, so little temperature changes don’t expand or contract different parts of the lens assembly, and thus mess up the image.”
WHDH highlights an MIT Libraries exhibit at the Maihaugen Gallery in memory of Officer Sean Collier. “On display at the exhibit is a collection of items left in the officer’s honor after he was killed in 2013,” 7 News reports. Condolence materials left with the MIT Police in 2013 and 2014 are also included.
Meghna Chakrabarti of WBUR’s Radio Boston talks with Sky & Telescope editor J. Kelly Beatty about what makes the launch of TESS, an MIT-led NASA mission to discover new planets, so exciting. “We should give a nod to the great minds at MIT,” says Chakrabarti, “because they had quite a significant role in the thought behind getting this satellite up in the first place.”
Postdoc Gabriel Leventhal has created a project to track how the microbes in a sourdough starter change as it gets shared around the world, writes Alex Kingsbury of The Boston Globe. To track the starter, “Herman,” each descendant is given a unique name and number before the samples are returned to the lab to track how the microbes evolve, Kingsbury explains.
A recent study co-authored by Assistant Prof. Danielle Li in Sloan found evidence to support the “Peter Principle,” which theorizes that the best employees do not always make the best managers, reports Rodd Wagner, a contributor for Forbes. The researchers concluded that “promoting based on lower-level job skills rather than managerial skills can be extremely costly.”
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will enter an unusual, highly elliptical orbit around the Earth to capture images of about 20,000 new exoplanet candidates, writes Robbie Gonzalez of Wired. "We are setting the stage for the future of exoplanet research—not just for the 21st century, but the 22nd century and beyond," says MIT Kavli Institute senior research scientist George Ricker, leader of the TESS mission.
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Jane Wakefield of BBC World Service about the importance of having conversations that focus on how AI will dictate the future. “What will happen, if the ultimate goal of AI actually succeeds?" Tegmark asks. "AI and other powerful technology isn’t evil, nor is it good. It is a tool that can amplify our ability to do whatever we want.”
Prof. Hugh Herr and his team in the Biomechatronics Group are developing prosthetics that “respond to neural commands with the flexibility and speed of regular limbs,” writes Eillie Anzilotti for Fast Company. In a process pioneered by the group, “doctors leave the tendons and nerve endings intact so they can continue to feed sensations down past where the human leg ends,” Anzilotti says.
An outgrowth of MIT’s delta v accelerator, Mayflower Venues offers those owning farm land the option to host weddings, while Mayflower handles details such as insurance and marketing. “Every single day, farm land is lost in New England,” co-founder and Sloan alumnus Sam McElhinney tells Katheleen Conti of The Boston Globe. He hopes his startup will help preserve undeveloped space and offset expenses associated with local farming.
A scholarship established in memory of MIT police officer Sean Collier will be awarded for the first time on April 19 at Collier’s alma mater, Salem State. Salem State Prof. Emeritus Ed LeClair tells Emily Sweeney of The Boston Globe that Collier was “an inspirational leader,” and remembers him as “an exceptionally good community police officer.”
James Gallagher of BBC News speaks with several experts about the microbiome and how diversity in gut bacteria is essential to health. “One thing that we're learning is, based on the microbiome, different people may need to consume different diets in order to get the same effect,” says Prof. Eric Alm.
Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour talks with computer scientist Neha Narula to explain how Bitcoin works. “Part of Bitcoin’s threat model is that no single entity ends up getting a majority of the processing power in the network,” says Narula. “If somebody got 51 percent of the processing power in the network, they could theoretically rewrite history and change the state of transactions in the ledger.”
With TESS scheduled to launch, Kathleen McKiernan of The Boston Herald spoke with postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Burt and TESS researcher Natalia Guerrero, both at MIT's Kavli Institute. “It is NASA’s next exoplanet hunter,” said Burt of the MIT-led NASA mission.
Chris Emma of NBC Boston reports from “Stronger After 5,” an event organized by survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings to remember those who were lost, including MIT Police Officer Sean Collier. All proceeds from the event, which “signified the strength and resiliency of Boston, the victims and their families after the bombings five years ago,” will support the Sean Collier Memorial Fund.
Loren Grush of The Verge examines the potential findings of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which “will stare out at the cosmos searching for never-before-seen worlds” for two years, after launching on April 16. “[W]e’ll have a whole catalog of these planets in an order of priority for follow-up,” says Prof. Sara Seager, deputy science director for TESS.