In an article for Science based off his AAAS Presidential Address, Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and former president of the AAAS, discusses the need to accelerate the transition from discovery to innovation to address the challenges facing society. “To meet oncoming global challenges, we will need to better link discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” Sharp explains.
Financial Times reporter John Authers highlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work examining how human aversion to risk impacts financial decisions. Lo’s research provides evidence that “investors in markets will take risk-averse actions rather than the purely rational decisions that economists have classically assumed."
Dr. Anjali Sastry writes for WBUR about three questions donors should ask themselves to determine the best charities to contribute to. “Don’t just feel good about giving, do good by investing in organizations that keep doing things better,” writes Sastry.
Visiting Lecturer Irving Wladawsky-Berger gives his reaction to the preliminary report examining innovation at MIT in a piece for The Wall Street Journal. “Beyond MIT, the report should be of value to anyone interested in the growing importance of innovation to institutions, economies and societies around the world.”
CSAIL PhD students Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang write for Wired about their recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session and gender disparities in STEM. “By raising awareness and generating discussion, we hope to help women and other minorities feel more supported pursuing careers in STEM,” write Glassman, Narula and Yang.
Vijee Venkatraman writes for BetaBoston about Kumbhathon, a tech buildathon co-founded by Professor Ramesh Raskar to address problems specific to the Kumbh Mela religious gathering in India. “This is a bottom-up approach to innovation,” says Raskar.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered methane and carbon in Martian rocks, reports Andrew Soergel for U.S. News & World Report. “Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved,” says Prof. Roger Summons, a member of the Curiosity team.
In an article for Newsweek about nuclear energy, Josh Freed highlights Transatomic, a company founded by two MIT PhD candidates to commercialize their concept for a molten salt reactor that can safely burn nuclear waste.
Writing for Forbes, Andy Boynton and William Bole examine MIT Visiting Scholar Michael Schrage’s new book ‘The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas.” “[Schrage] argues that even good ideas are ‘the enemy’ of innovation because they distract people from what’s most important—making sure you could do something useful with the ideas."
David Slocum of Forbes lists “The Second Machine Age” by Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Dr. Andrew McAfee as one of the best creative leadership books of the year. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, “explore the forces reinventing fields as diverse as medicine, retail, and transportation and having far-ranging implications for creative collaboration, business leadership and policy-making alike.”
Susan Adams writes for Forbes about research coauthored by Dr. Sara Ellison that indicates that single-sex teams are less productive than their co-ed counterparts. “The authors say their research shows that switching from a single-sex group to a co-ed team could increase revenues by a whopping 41%,” Adams writes.
A study by Prof. Thomas Malone found that social perceptiveness can be gained through electronic communications, writes Financial Times reporter Jonathan Moules. “People develop social intelligence skills even when they cannot see into each others’ eyes,” says Malone.
Wall Street Journal reporter Atish Patel highlights new MIT research indicating that volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Patel explains that the findings suggest “dinosaurs were already in decline, suffering from the climate change prompted by the volcanic eruptions.”
Hannah Northey of Greenwire features the work of MIT alumnus Samuel Brinton, an energy fellow at Third Way and LGBT activist who is known for his bright red mohawk. "A lot of Hill staffers know me as the MIT or nuclear kid with a red mohawk," says Brinton. "It gets the conversation started."
Richard Eisenberg of Forbes speaks with Professor Ofer Sharone about his research and tips for white-collar job seekers. “Meeting with people face to face who you worked with in the past and can vouch for your abilities can help you overcome some of the barriers built into the hiring process,” says Sharone.