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.”
In an essay for The Daily Beast, researchers at the MIT AgeLab explore the extent to which driving is a “secondary” activity when piloting a vehicle, and caution that automation on its own cannot protect drivers from distractions. “While these technologies can nudge us in a safer direction, the decision to practice safer phone habits ultimately lies in the hands of drivers,” they write.
TVision, a startup founded by Yan Liu SM ’15, uses cameras and deep learning to “detect how closely people are paying attention to the shows they’re watching,” writes Jordan Graham of The Boston Herald. The company, “founded while Liu was in the middle of completing his MBA at MIT, has raised close to $10 million in investor funding,” Graham reports.
Ryan Mandelbaum of Gizmodo writes that MIT scientists have found that diamonds can bend without snapping when in the form of nano-needles. These needles can potentially be used to “store data or to deliver drugs directly into cells, or simply as ultra-strong nanostructures,” explains Mandelbaum.
MIT spinout ClearMotion’s “Proactive Ride” system accounts for bumps and potholes in the road, with quick-sensing hydraulic actuators that can adapt to imperfections to create a smooth ride. “Every car with ClearMotion also maps the surface of that road, and shares it with other equipped cars,” says Mike Wankum for WCVB. “A car approaching a rough patch already knows about it before encountering the first bump.”
CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley explores the MIT Media Lab for 60 Minutes, highlighting several of its projects. “The lab is a six-story tower of Babel where 230 grad students speak languages of art, engineering, biology, physics and computer coding,” says Pelley, “all translated into innovation.”
A paper from MIT and others shows that when diamonds are in the form of a nano-needle, they can be bent and stretched before returning to their original shape, reports Aristos Georgiou for Newsweek. The researchers “found that they could bend and stretch by as much as 9 percent without breaking, which is approaching the theoretical limit of diamond flexibility,” notes Georgiou.
The Human Cell Atlas, compiled by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has released its first batch of data with details of 530,000 immune system cells, writes Jason Daley of Smithsonian. New computational methods “allowed scientists to tackle… about 100 times as many cells as most cell-sequencing experiments handle,” explains Daley.
Gary Gensler, a top financial regulator in both the public and private sector, spoke with Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times about virtual currencies and the need for regulation. This fall, Gensler will hold dual appointments at Sloan and the Media Lab, “where he will write and teach about the potential he sees for blockchains to change the financial world.”