MIT alumni Noelle Marcus and Rachel Goor have created a housing app that matches graduate students looking for housing with homeowners looking for assistance with household chores, writes Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed. Marcus explains that the app could help the “aging population in the U.S. stay in their homes.”
In this New York Times opinion piece, Prof. Emeritus Noam Chomsky discusses the current state of American politics with George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University. Speaking about the weightiest issues facing humanity, Chomsky explained that in his view, “The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war.”
President L. Rafael Reif speaks with Bloomberg TV about Greater Boston’s world-renowned leadership in education for a segment aired during the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. “I say to everybody, you can live anywhere you want, but when you’re young spend four years in the Greater Boston area,” says Reif. “It’s going to change your life.”
In this Bloomberg TV video aired during the July 4th Spectacular, Profs. Sangeeta Bhatia and Robert Langer discuss the Greater Boston area’s prowess in medical research. Langer explains that for his research, which is focused on inventing, “new things in chemical engineering that can change people’s lives in medicine, there is no better place.”
NPR’s Shankar Vedantam reports on a study by Prof. Joseph Doyle that finds that second-born children, compared to their older siblings, are much more likely to end up in serious trouble. While only a minority of children end up getting into serious trouble, Doyle found that, “there appear to be sizable differences between first- and second-born brothers.”
FOX News reporter Grace Williams writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system to assist people with visual impairments in navigating their surroundings. “We wanted to primarily complement the white cane to allow users with visual impairments to quickly assess their environment in a contactless manner,” explains graduate student Robert Katzschmann.
Writing for STAT, Anna Spier, a senior policy associate for J-PAL, emphasizes the importance of relying on scientific evidence when policymakers determine which opioid addiction programs to fund. “As governments and philanthropists collaborate to learn what’s working to fight opioid addiction, establishing an infrastructure to share knowledge across local, state, and federal agencies will accelerate their collective work.”
MIT researchers have developed a laser sensing technique that can decipher the makeup of space debris orbiting around Earth, reports Alex Kingsbury for The Boston Globe. Knowing what material the debris is made of, “will allow for more precise calculations of momentum, velocity, and the danger they may pose to other objects aloft in orbit,” explains Kingsbury.
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that MIT researchers have simulated a tiny motor that can be powered by light. Hays explains that the researchers designed, “a particle that could be powered and manipulated by simple light sources,” adding that the technique could be applied in medicine, in addition to a number of other fields.
MIT researchers have developed a light-based computing system that could enhance deep learning, reports Jesse Dunietz for Scientific American. Future versions fabricated for deep learning, “could provide the same accuracy as the best conventional chips while slashing the energy consumption by orders of magnitude and offering 100 times the speed.”
New Scientist reporter Evelyn Wang writes that a study by MIT researchers finds that, “the question of whether a scrambled Rubik’s cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what’s called NP-complete – that’s maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve.”
Times Higher Education reporter Nicola Ingram examines Prof. Peter Temin’s latest book, which examines the state of the U.S. economic system. Temin, “provides an engaging commentary on the complexities of policy developments and their impact on workers’ conditions, as well as the problematic voting behaviour that seals their fate.”
Writing for Science, Jeffrey Mervis features NASA’s 2017 astronaut candidates, which included three MIT affiliates. Mervis highlights how at MIT, Prof. Warren Hoburg, one of this year’s candidates, was focused on developing an, “unmanned, solar-powered airplane that could fly nonstop around the world.”
In an article for HuffPost, Alvaro Fernandez writes about Solve’s 2017 Global Challenge, which is dedicated to brain health. Fernandez writes that, “through the Brain Health Challenge, we are seeking to unearth and support innovative solutions to improving brain health and fitness for all.”
In an article for Bloomberg, Peter Coy examines Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s latest book, which examines how smart machines might be integrated into the businesses of the future. Coy explains that the book is written for, “executives and entrepreneurs trying to make their way in this brave new world of driverless cars and hackathons.”