Hal Gregersen, a senior lecturer in MIT's Sloan School of Management, talks with Stephanie Vozza of Fast Company about his new book, Questions Are the Answer. “The best leaders in the world ask better questions, creating conditions and situations that cause them to be wrong or uncomfortable and quiet,” says Gregersen. “When that happens, they end up being almost forced to ask things other people wouldn’t ask.”
Synaps Labs, an adtech startup co-founded by Sloan graduate student Alex Pustov, uses analytics to cater digital billboard advertising to specific individuals depending on the make and model of their vehicle. This technology could also potentially “fund traffic analytics, improve road safety, and allow cities to adopt advances in digital infrastructure faster,” writes Frederick Daso for Forbes.
Research co-authored by Prof. Christopher Palmer in Sloan found that loan rates vary substantially, even when two borrowers are relatively similar, due primarily to the variations in the lender’s markup. “You would never get away with this if you were selling milk,” Palmer told Jo Craven McGinty of The Wall Street Journal. “It would be the same price for everyone.”
Media Lab spinout “Ori” has developed what its founder Hasier Larrea SM ’15 calls a “Swiss Army knife for studio apartments,” writes Andy Rosen for The Boston Globe. A “robotic furniture system,” the compact 8 by 5 foot design can equip even the smallest rooms with a bed, multiple desks, closet, and entertainment system.
MIT Media Lab researchers have created a system that can detect obstacles through fog that are not visible to the human eye, writes Darren Weaver for CNBC. “The goal is to integrate the technology into self-driving cars so that even in bad weather, the vehicles can avoid obstacles,” explains Warren.
WBUR's Meghna Chakrabarti and Prof. Alan Lightman discuss his new book, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. On the impact of an experience detailed in it, Lightman says: "I suddenly understood in a deeper way than I had before, the longing for the permanent, the absolute, the indestructible, the eternal, and that, of course, contrasted strongly with my experience as a scientist."
Prof. Evelyn Wang has led the development of a device that may solve water shortages in arid climates. “The device is powered by sunlight only, and the researchers said it could eventually be used to provide more than one-fourth of a liter of water per kilogram of metal-organic framework each day,” writes Chukwuma Muanya of The Guardian.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is “the brainchild of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” hopes to “identify at least 50 rocky exoplanets—Earth-size or bigger,” that will eventually be scrutinized by a larger telescope that is launching in 2022, writes Daniel Clery for Science. “This is the finder scope,” explains research scientist and TESS principal investigator George Ricker.
Launching next month, the TESS satellite “is NASA's next mission in the search for exoplanets,”writes Ashley Strickland for CNN. “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers,” said George Ricker of the MIT Kavli Institute, who is a principal investigator on the mission.
Researchers at MIT have developed a “kirigami” film, based off of the ancient paper-folding technique of the same name, that can be used for bandaging tricky areas like the knee or elbow, writes David Grossman for Popular Mechanics. “We are the first group to find, with a systematic mechanism study, that a kirigami design can improve a material’s adhesion,” says postdoc and lead researcher Ruike Zhao.
Mark Feeney writes for The Boston Globe about the exhibit “György Kepes Photographs: The MIT Years, 1946-1985,” which is on display at the MIT Museum through July 2018. This is the second show in a two-part series that celebrates the 50th anniversary of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, which Kepes founded as an Institute professor.
“Spacewar!” – a video game developed by students in MIT’s Model Train Club on a mainframe computer in 1962 – is one of the finalists for this year’s World Video Game Hall of Fame. The game is "credited with helping launch the multibillion-dollar video game industry,” notes the Associated Press.
Sean Illing of Vox speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her insights on how the digital world is impacting our human relationships. “I’m not anti-technology,” said Turkle. “I’m pro-relationships and pro-conversations and pro-communities and pro-politics. I want people to be media-savvy and to use it to their best advantage.”
In a report published by personal-finance website SmartAsset, MIT ranked number one for the third year in a row for best value. "The site ranked colleges by their value, using data about their tuitions, living costs, scholarship and grant offerings, retention rate and graduates’ starting salaries," writes Maria LaMagna for MarketWatch.
Endor, a spin-out that originally began at the Media Lab, has acquired $45 million in token pre-sales for its “blockchain-based predictive analytics technology” notes Reuters. “Endor’s platform allows users to key in questions and get predictions as answers. Its tokens can be spent by individuals and data owners to access predictions.”