On CBS This Morning, Prof. John Leonard weighed in on “Deflategate,” validating a local student's experiment that showed how cold weather causes a football to lose pressure. "It's just basic laws of physics, it doesn't matter if you root for the Patriots, or the Eagles, or the Redskins, this is what happens to footballs in cold weather," Leonard said.
In an article for Wired, Liz Stinson writes about the new academic publication launched by the Media Lab and MIT Press, the Journal of Design and Science. According to Stinson, Media Lab Director Joi Ito explained that the goal of the journal was to encourage “ideas presented in the journal to morph and evolve and become interconnected over time.”
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a new material, called bioLogic, that alters its shape with changes in humidity and opens ventilation ducts when the wearer starts sweating, writes Olga Kharif for Bloomberg Business.
In this video, The Economist explores how MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that can predict where and when rogue waves might strike. The algorithm “identifies groups of waves most likely to form a rogue wave. The MIT algorithm is so thrifty that a ship’s skipper can run it on a laptop.”
MIT researchers have uncovered a potential link between a high-fat diet and increased risk of many types of cancer, reports Chukwuma Muanya for The Guardian. Muanya explains that the study “reveals the effect that a high-fat diet has on the biology of stem cells… and how this might make cancer more likely.”
In this “Science of Innovation” segment, NBC Learn explores Prof. Angela Belcher’s work using viruses engineered in her laboratory to form nanoscale wires for tiny batteries. “By harnessing nature’s own processes, Angela Belcher has been able to turn today’s viruses into tomorrow’s batteries.”
In an article for Forbes about urban gardening, Laurie Winkless highlights the MIT CityFARM project, through which researchers analyze and share data on the ideal growing environment of various crops. Winkless writes that the goal of CityFARM is to allow people “to download the settings needed to reproduce the growing conditions exactly.”
Popular Science reporter Dave Gershgorn writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system that cuts down on the amount of time it takes for webpages to load. The system allows browsers to download web pages "more effectively, saving up to 34 percent of load time.”
CSAIL researchers have developed a new system that allows websites to load 34 percent faster than with a standard web browser, reports Charlotte Wilder for Boston.com. Wilder writes that, “the researchers tried out their code on 200 different websites, including Weather.com and ESPN, and found the load time was significantly less across the board.”
Christian Science Monitor reporter Jack Detsch writes about the “Cambridge 2 Cambridge” hackathon, which brought together students from MIT and Cambridge University to hack websites and discover built-in vulnerabilities. “It’s not a law of nature that machines are insecure,” says CSAIL’s Howard Shrobe. This hackathon “is the first step of piquing curiosity to fix it.”
Prof. Paula Hammond speaks with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell about why she feels it's imperative that researchers from different disciplines collaborate on cancer research. Hammond explained funding is needed to bring “scientists, clinicians, technologists together in places like the Koch Institute," where people "work collectively toward a cure.”
Prof. Neri Oxman’s “Wanderers” project is featured as part of the “Beauty — Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. New York Times reporter Daniel McDermon writes that in her project, Oxman “imagines wearable objects to augment the human body’s capabilities, possibly enabling survival on distant planets.”
MIT researchers have developed a tool, dubbed Eyebrowse, that allows users control over how their Internet activity is shared, reports Dan Misener for CBC News. Graduate student Amy Zhang explains that without a tool like Eyebrowse “people that actually create the data don't get to see their own data.”
Steve Annear writes for The Boston Globe about the video MIT Admissions created to announce that admissions decisions will be released on March 14, “Pi Day.” Annear writes that in the video, “a robot the school is calling a ‘Decisions Droid’…emerges from the school’s personal robots lab and makes its way to Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill’s office.”
Curt Nickisch reports for WBUR on the remarks Robert Hannigan, director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, made at MIT on encryption and privacy. CSAIL’s Daniel Weitzner says that he feels that the fact that both Hannigan and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spoke out against mandatory backdoors, is “a really significant shift in the debate.”