Boston Globe reporter David Weininger writes about “Persona,” a new opera by Prof. Jay Scheib and Prof. Keeril Makan, based on a 1966 Ingmar Bergman film. The opera is staged as if the action is being filmed, which allows viewers to be “more involved with what’s happening than I think they’re expecting,” explains Makan.
MIT grad student and NFL player John Urschel speaks with USA Today reporter Charlotte Wilder. Urschel, who occasionally practices with the MIT football team, says that what impresses him about the MIT team is that they play “because they love it. That is something so refreshing and amazing, it’s like no other football team I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
CIO’s Sarah K. White talks to Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Education, about how cultural differences in the workplace can impact communication. Pant explains that there has been an “explosion in the ability to communicate with people across borders with such great ease."
In this video, Bloomberg News reporter Sam Grobart examines the new hydrogel developed by MIT researchers that can bend and twist without breaking, and could be used to deliver medicines and monitor our health. Grobart explains that the hydrogel “could be a building block of the medicine of the future.”
WBUR reporter Jack Lepiarz speaks with Prof. Marta Gonzalez about her traffic study that found that if drivers switched routes during rush hour they could cut back on congestion. “We have enough space, in theory, but we are all filling up a few streets that get congested,” Gonzalez explains.
Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney writes that MIT researchers have found that the Paris climate agreement pledges would let the world warm by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The researchers found that “with each year that countries wait to strengthen their current pledges, the rate at which emissions must decline gets steeper and steeper.”
MIT researchers have found that plants may use prions, the proteins responsible for mad cow disease, to form memories, reports Anil Ananthaswamy for New Scientist. “Prions, we think, are responsible for some really broad, really interesting biology,” says Prof. Susan Lindquist. “We have only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.”
A new study co-authored by Prof. David Autor examines how manufacturing job losses caused by trade have contributed to the current political discord, reports Nelson Schwartz and Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. “There are these concentrated pockets of hurt,” explains Autor, “and we’re seeing the political consequences of that.”
As part of their “This Day in History” series, The Boston Globe highlights how on April 24, 1962, MIT researchers “achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, using NASA’s Echo 1 balloon satellite to bounce a video image from Camp Parks, Calif., to Westford, Mass.”
KEYE-TV’s Adam Winkler spotlights incoming MIT freshman Trey Roberts’ work in the classroom and on the baseball field. Roberts, who attends Leander High School in Texas, says he enjoys his classes so much, especially chemistry, that he thinks, “Wow, I would not mind spending the rest of my life doing something like this.”
Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Gehrman speaks with MIT alumna Ceres Lee about her career as a software engineer at Google. Of the field of computer science, Lee says that “everyone uses it, it’s important, and it’s basically everywhere.”
Under the Dome: MIT’s Open House was featured in The Boston Globe’s top picks for activities to do this weekend. The Globe notes that "the 100-year-old campus opens its doors to any and all who want to see some science. Whether you’re thrilled by 3-D printing or down for some DNA repair, this is prime access.”
Popular Science reporter Mary Beth Griggs writes that in an MIT course students developed a fleet of duckie-adorned self-driving taxis for a village called “Duckietown.” “Each of the robot taxis is equipped with only a single camera, and makes its way around the roads without any preprogrammed maps."
Inside Higher Ed reporter Carl Straumsheim highlights how the new Online Education Policy Initiative report stresses the central role of faculty members to online learning. Prof. Karen Willcox notes that the report discusses “ways online education can make what we do better.”
Justine Hofherr of Boston.com speaks with Bhaskar Pant about MIT Professional Education’s Innovation and Technology Certificate program, which educates working professionals on how to create innovation within their own companies.