Prof. Junot Diaz speaks with Karen McPherson of The Washington Post about his new children’s book, Islandborn, about a girl from the Dominican Republic growing up in an urban immigrant community. “The best stories provide us with opportunities for recognition and estrangement — to be spoken to most directly, or to feel that we are eavesdropping,” Diaz says.
Robin Young and Femi Oke of WBUR’s Here and Now highlight research from Sloan and the Media Lab that shows how quickly false news travels the internet. “We [also] found that false political news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than any other type of false news,” says Prof. Sinan Aral.
MIT will partner with Commonwealth Fusion Systems in an effort to make fusion power a reality in 15 years. “MIT and CFS are hoping to facilitate a leap forward on several of these problems at once with a new superconducting material that will help make more efficient magnets to control the plasma,” Eric Limer writes for Popular Mechanics.
Students from the School of Engineering used a machine with six motors to break the record for fastest time to solve a Rubik’s cube at just .38 seconds. “The process happens so fast that debugging requires reviewing high-speed footage,” Eric Limer writes for Popular Mechanics. “And a miscalibrated machine will just blow up cubes left and right.”
Researchers from Sloan and the Media Lab examined why false news spreads on Twitter more quickly than factual information. “Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones,” writes Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic. “Fake news prospers, the authors write, ‘because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”
Two students in the School of Engineering have designed a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in .38 seconds. “Their contraption used two PlayStation Eye cameras from the old PS3 console to identify the configuration of the cube,” reports the BBC, which allowed the students to beat the currently recognized Guinness World Record of .637 seconds.
Prof. Sinan Aral writes for The New York Times about research he co-authored with Postdoc Soroush Vousaghi and Associate Prof. Deb Roy, which found that false news spreads “disturbingly” faster than factual news. “It could be, for example, that labeling news stories, in much the same way we label food, could change the way people consume and share it,” writes Aral.
In this opinion piece published by The Boston Globe, Vice President for Research Maria T. Zuber writes that fusion energy is within reach: "The MIT design uses established science for the plasma confinement, and thus puts fusion power plants within reach on a faster time-scale than previously thought possible."
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg are donating $30 million to an MIT and Harvard initiative to improve child literacy. Reach Every Reader, which will be funded for five years, “will combine scientific research with new methods of tracking and predicting students’ reading abilities,” writes Jordan Graham for The Boston Herald.
A study co-authored by Prof. David Autor finds that over the past five decades, automation has helped increase total employment, but wages have not increased, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath. According to Autor, the findings help explain “why inequality between the world’s wealthiest and everyday workers has increased.”
Mashable highlights the robotic system, developed by researchers at MIT and Princeton, that can pick up, recognize, and place assorted objects. The researchers created an algorithm that allows the crane to “grab and sort objects (such as medicine bottles) into bins making it a potential timesaver for medical experts.”
Deborah Cramer, a visiting scholar at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, writes for The New York Times about “the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale.” “We must act boldly and swiftly,” writes Cramer. “With only about 100 breeding female right whales left, we haven’t much time.”
MIT startup Ministry of Supply has developed a jacket that utilizes AI to keep its wearer warm. “The jacket…can also be voice-controlled through devices like the Amazon Echo or manually with an app,” writes Erin Black for CNBC.
The Koch Institute has chosen 10 new scientific images from MIT researchers to display in a public gallery in its lobby. The images “span a range of subject matters and approaches, capturing both fundamental biology and how that biology is upended by disease processes,” writes Lisa Raffensperger of STAT.