Senior Lecturer Ken Urban speaks with HuffPost reporter Michael Levin about the burgeoning theater program at MIT. “There is a lot of institutional support for the arts in all of its forms at MIT and I think it’s because that process of being creative and realizing that it’s super-important for engineers,” says Urban.
The Engine has raised $200 million and financed its first seven companies “in fields such as aerospace, advanced materials, genetic engineering and renewable energy,” reports Michael McDonald of Bloomberg.
Prof. Mitch Resnick spoke about his new book, Lifelong Kindergarten, which is “his attempt to distill what he's learned over the last few decades…[and] includes the voices of children and teenagers who have participated in Lifelong Kindergarten projects,” writes NPR’s Anya Kamenetz.
After studying more than 100 languages, Prof. Edward Gibson has “discovered a pattern in the way different cultures discern and label colors,” writes Ben Thompson for the Boston Globe.
Prof. Alan Berger shares his ideas for creating suburbs that attract tech savvy and environmentally conscious millennials in The New York Times. “Millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods.”
Asma Khalid of WBUR reports that The Engine has raised $200 million and funded its first seven “tough tech” companies. "We have to believe it's a breakthrough [idea] that can have big impact in the world," says Katie Rae, president and CEO of The Engine, of the selected companies.
Prof. Regina Barzilay, a breast cancer survivor, participated in a Washington Post Live discussion about “her own experience with the disease and how she uses data and machine learning to advance detection and treatment.”
Boston Globe reporter Andy Rosen writes that The Engine has raised $200 million to invest in “tough tech” companies. “The interest from private investors reflects a recognition that the venture capital world must find better ways to evaluate the technical promise of emerging technologies, and give them time to succeed,” notes Katie Rae, CEO of The Engine.
A new study from Prof. Edward Gibson examines the way different languages describe colors. “If you were to take the spectrum of colors that are perceptibly different to humans and chop it in half, every language would have more words for describing the warm half than the cool half,” writes Rachel Gutman for The Atlantic.
The Engine has announced its initial investments in seven startups ranging from alternative energy to space communications, reports Alex Konrad of Forbes. “By helping research teams productize their ideas early, at the pre-seed and seed stages of investment,” The Engine hopes to keep talented students and professors in the Boston area, explains Konrad.
Bryan Marquard of The Boston Globe writes about the legacy of Paul Gray, the 14th president of MIT, who died at 85 and was known for his efforts to increase diversity at MIT. Gray was a “transformative administrator who enrolled at MIT as an electrical engineering student in 1950 and retired in 1997 as chairman of the MIT Corporation, the institute’s governing body,” writes Marquard.
A new study by MIT researchers examines how people who speak different languages describe colors, reports Zach Zorich for Science. The researchers found that, “the ability to describe colors isn’t as rooted in our biology as many scientists thought. And that means that language development may be far more rooted in our culture than in how we literally see the world.”
Boston Globe reporter Alyssa Meyers spotlights an MIT course that exposes students to what it is like to live with different disabilities. Based off their experience, students develop, “an assistive technology for a client, where the clients are individuals in the community who have proposed project ideas to the class,” explains senior lecturer Julie Greenberg.
In this article written in Portuguese, graduate student Jennifer Groff speaks with Paula Adamo Idoeta of the BBC News about effective teaching methods. “We try to help teachers see the value of more playful learning by exploring a topic rather than ‘filling’ the students' heads with ideas,” Groff says.
In an article for The Los Angeles Times, Research Scientist Nick Obradovich writes that the way the human brain functions can make it harder for people to take action on climate change. Obradovich notes that, “we’re likely to do better with policies that generate immediate and tangible benefits.”