MIT students Nick Schwartz, Olivia Zhao, and Liang Zhou are recipients of this year’s Marshall Scholarship, reports The Boston Globe’s J.D. Capelouto. Schwartz, Zhao, and Zhou are among the 43 students from across the country who received the scholarship, which allows them to pursue graduate studies at a British university.
Zeninjor Enwemeka writes for WBUR about two MIT spinoffs, nuTonomy and Optimus Ride, that are conducting autonomous vehicle research in Massachusetts. A recent passenger trial by nuTonomy in Boston, “is perhaps a promising move for companies hoping to bring self-driving vehicles to the state,” writes Enwemeka.
The MIT Museum and MIT List Visual Arts Center were two of 18 Boston-area museums that participated in this year’s #BostonInstaSwap. Each museum sent an employee to another local institution where they were “tasked with snapping and sharing pictures from the scene, highlighting exhibits and giving their followers a different experience,” writes Steve Annear for The Boston Globe.
A new study from Francis O’Sullivan, director of MITEI, and graduate student Justin Montgomery, finds that increases in oil and gas output gains are largely due to “low energy prices, which led drillers to focus on sweet spots where oil and gas are easiest to extract,” rather than advances in fracking technology, reports Jim Polson and Tim Loh of Bloomberg.
MIT Media Lab project, Biota Beats, collects bacteria from different parts of the body and turns it into music, reports Erin Blakemore from The Washington Post. “The team crowdsources swabs from body parts — including mouths, feet, and armpits — then cultures the microorganisms on petri dish-like ‘records,’” Blakemore writes.
Frederick Daso of Forbes highlights MIT alumnus Ryan Robinson, whose startup aims to share unused computational capacity with others who need to perform intensive calculations. This technology will one day “help companies afford cheap, distributed computational power via quantum computing, and allow individuals to make money by loaning out their spare processing power and mining for cryptocurrency,” writes Daso.
Alexa Vazquez of WBUR writes about a new MIT Museum exhibit that uses virtual reality to place visitors face-to-face with fighters who have experienced lifelong conflict. “The aim was to go for more kind of intimate conversations that you wouldn’t normally have access to, with people from diverse sides of these diverse conflicts,” says Prof. Fox Harrell, who worked on the VR aspect of the exhibit.
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson speaks with the Financial Times about a new report that aims to assess how quickly intelligent machines are progressing. This effort “was prompted by growing concerns about their impact on things such as employment,” writes Richard Waters.
In an article for the Financial Times about the best economics books of 2017, Martin Wolf highlights new works by Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Peter Temin. Wolf writes that in Temin’s “important and provocative book, [he] argues that the US is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with ever fewer households in the middle.”
Prof. David Autor has been named to the Bloomberg 50 list, which spotlights the thought leaders who defined global business in 2017. In describing why Autor was selected, Peter Coy highlights a pair of influential working papers this year in which Autor documents how the rise of superstar companies has impacted American workers.
Newsweek reporter Katherine Hignett writes that MIT and Harvard researchers have successfully manipulated individual atoms using lasers in one of the largest quantum computer simulations. Hignett writes that, “their technology could help make superfast quantum computers a working reality.”
Boston Globe reporter Alyssa Meyers writes that researchers from MIT and Harvard have demonstrated one of the largest quantum simulators that can trap individual atoms in laser beams. Prof. Vladan Vuletić explains that it is, “a major advance is to be able to align and arrange individual atoms so we can hold on to them and track them.”
Merrit Kennedy reports for NPR that MIT researchers have developed robotic artificial muscles that can lift 1,000 times their own weight. Prof. Daniela Rus explains that the technology could eventually be used to bring "soft strong mobility to people who are otherwise unable to move."
In a Financial Times article, Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen details how the proposed tax plan would encourage employers to relocate US jobs to foreign countries. As a result of the foreign profits minimum tax, countries could “offer a corporate tax rate at 10 percent to US companies if they would relocate their manufacturing or research facilities,” explains Pozen.
Writing for Fortune, Jamie Ducharme details how researchers from MIT and Harvard are one step closer to creating robots with superpowers, thanks to a new robotic artificial muscle they have developed. The new technology could be used, “in arenas ranging from medicine to architecture to space exploration,” Ducharme explains.