Umair Irfan of ClimateWire writes that a new paper by Prof. Jessika Trancik finds that renewable energy storage can be a good investment, and provides insight on which storage technologies are the most economically feasible. “One of the major technology challenges of scaling up renewables is developing economically feasible energy storage," says Jessika Trancik.
Prof. Daniel Hastings, director of SMART, writes for Today that in order to tackle complex social issues, policymakers must have an understanding of science. “Many of the issues faced by Singapore and other societies today are social-technical in nature. Having policymakers equipped with a knowledge in science and technology will be essential to meeting Singapore’s ambitions.”
A study by MIT researchers finds that by adjusting grid operations, China could increase its usage of wind power, reports Chelsea Harvey for The Washington Post. Prof. Valerie Karplus explains that the study “considers the operation of the electric grid and how wind interacts with other sources of generation, particularly coal generation.”
Jordan Graham of the Boston Herald writes that the Open Music Initiative - a new collaboration between MIT, Berklee College of Music, and the music industry - will create a new standard method of calculating and tracking how artists, rights holders, music labels, and distributors get paid in the internet era.
In an article for the Financial Times, Laura Noonan highlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work investigating how the theories of financial engineering could be used to fight cancer. “In cancer drug development, because the risks of failure are so high, the probability of success goes up quite dramatically if you create a portfolio,” says Lo.
Using data compiled by the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines concerning Twitter conversation before and after the mass shooting in Orlando, Aaron Blake of The Washington Post shows that political priorities leading up to the presidential election “may depend heavily on world and domestic events that nobody can predict.”
Prof. David Kaiser speaks with Jeremy Hobson of Here & Now about the history of science. Kaiser notes there are ebbs and flows in the pace of scientific discovery “tied to priority cycles in various nations or whole parts of the world…people’s imaginations can get swept up in whether they can even imagine building a tool to test something.”
MIT will be offering employees free MBTA passes for local bus and subway service to encourage more people to use public transportation and reduce the environmental impact of commuting, Inside Higher Ed reports.
In an article for Wired, Tim Moynihan writes that a team of CSAIL researchers has created a machine-learning system that can produce sound effects for silent videos. The researchers hope that the system could be used to “help robots identify the materials and physical properties of an object by analyzing the sounds it makes.”
In an article for The Boston Globe, Steve Annear writes that MIT is rolling out several new benefits for faculty and staff commuting to campus, including free, unlimited subway and local bus usage. “By providing employees with the pass, the school hopes to ease the demand for parking near campus and help reduce carbon emissions,” Annear writes.
Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard writes about the life and work of Prof. Emerita Suzanne Corkin, who was widely known for her work with the famous amnesiac Henry Molaison. Brenda Milner, a neuroscientist at McGill University, noted that Corkin’s “painstaking attention to detail and her enormous enthusiasm – it’s a very nice combination, and she showed that always.”
A new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Susan Silbey examines why female students leave the field of engineering. When the researchers analyzed "more than 40 engineering students’ twice-monthly diaries, they found that female students often felt marginalized during group activities,” Inside Higher Ed reports.
Ryan Mandelbaum of Popular Science speaks with David Shoemaker, who leads MIT’s LIGO Lab and Advanced LIGO, about the second successful detection of gravitational waves. "It’s wonderful," says Shoemaker. "It’s so different from the first one ... but its importance is no less."
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz writes that scientists have been able to detect gravitational waves for the second time. “It’s a wondrous thing,” said David Shoemaker, who leads the MIT lab that helped build the detectors. “Three months apart, 1.4 billion years ago, these two events happened at two different places in the sky.”
Scientists have observed a second pair of black holes colliding using the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times. Overbye writes that LIGO provides “a way of hearing the universe instead of just looking at it.”