In the Media

Financial Times reporter John Thornhill speaks with MIT alumnus and former British foreign secretary David Miliband about his work with the International Rescue Committee, life in New York City and the European Union. 

Curt Nickisch of WBUR reports that MIT, Harvard, MGH and The Boston Globe are joining forces for HUBweek, a weeklong festival focused on innovation to be held in the fall of 2015. “MIT plans to host a huge gathering called SOLVE to tackle with some of the world’s most perplexing problems,” reports Nickisch. 

Matt Murphy writes for WBUR about Solve, an event MIT will host next fall as part of the HUBweek innovation festival. The event will focus on “research and problem-solving exercises” aimed at four areas: education, health care, manufacturing, and environmental sustainability and energy. 

Yiqing Shao of Boston Magazine reports on HUBweek, a new innovation festival that will be co-hosted by MIT, The Boston Globe, Harvard and MGH. “By uniting so many of the region’s leading institutions, HUBweek itself embodies the open, collaborative spirit that has helped make Greater Boston and Cambridge a hotbed of innovation and new ideas,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif.

USA Today reporter Matt Krantz examines new research by MIT Visiting Professor Lily Fang showing that stock prices typically fall following long school vacations. “The after holiday effect is largely negative because it’s the bad news that gets largely missed during school breaks,” writes Krantz. 

Writing for Popular Science, Kelsey Atherton reports on how scientists from MIT, Harvard and Texas A&M have developed an injectable gel that uses synthetic nanoplatelets to staunch bleeding. “The gel carries within it specially made platelets between 20 to 30 nanometers in diameter, but only about 1 nanometer thick,” writes Atherton. 

Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about the affordable wheelchair made out of bike parts developed by Prof. Amos Winter. Winter and his team have now created a second wheelchair that allows riders to “navigate ski slopes and bike trails.”

Boston Globe reporter Michael Levenson writes about HUBweek, an “innovation-themed festival” that aims to showcase Boston. As part of HUBweek, MIT will host “‘Solve’ to brainstorm solutions to problems in education, energy, the environment, manufacturing, and infrastructure.”

“If the festival helps experts in Greater Boston make new connections across disciplines and across institutions — and find common interests and opportunities for collaboration with people around the world — the region as a whole can only benefit,” writes The Boston Globe Editorial Board of HUBweek, which will be co-hosted by MIT. 

Cynthia Graber of Scientific American reports that MIT researchers have developed a new technique that turns a smartphone into a sensor that can detect hazardous gases and environmental pollutants. "The method was tested with ammonia, cyclohexanone and hydrogen peroxide. And the tags could sense the substances at levels of a few parts per million,” reports Graber. 

Through a comprehensive comparison of genetic activity, MIT researchers have found that humans and birds share many of the same singing genes. "There's potential for songbirds to be used to study neurodegeneration – especially conditions like Huntington's," says Dr. Andreas Pfenning of MIT.

Malcom Ritter of the Associated Press reports on how scientists have developed a new family tree for most of the bird species alive today, providing new insight into evolutionary history. Research conducted by Dr. Andreas Pfenning “found that birds with this "vocal learning" ability share some similarities with humans in the activity of certain genes in the brain.”

Researchers have uncovered evidence that volcanic activity could have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs, reports Joel Achenbach for The Washington Post. Prof. Sam Bowring says the eruption “began just prior to the extinction and continued throughout.” 

Prof. Richard Binzel speaks with Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson about the New Horizons spacecraft, which will collect information about Pluto. “Everything we know about Pluto up to this point has been learned through telescopes," says Binzel. "That will change starting early next year."

Aviva Rutkin writes for New Scientist about algorithms developed by MIT graduate student Karthik Dinakar that can detect abusive speech in online comments. "We need better tools not just for monitoring, but also to tell people what good digital citizenry is all about,” says Dinakar.