Katie Walmsley reports for CNN Money on SHINE, a program founded by MIT graduate Kirin Sinha that teaches math to young girls through dance. "We saw an almost 300% improvement in their math scores, we saw over 100% improvement in confidence," says Sinha.
“A new analysis of Mars One's plans to colonize the Red Planet finds that the explorers would begin dying within 68 days of touching down,” writes Jeffrey Kluger for Time about a new study from MIT researchers that indicates there are a number of potential problems with current plans to colonize Mars.
Bloomberg News writes about the work of Jean Tirole, an MIT alumnus who was the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics. His work is the “foundation for much of the incentive regulations that have been adopted over the last 25 years across the world,” said MIT Professor Nancy Rose.
Rafi Letzter of Popular Science writes that a team of MIT researchers has published a study debunking Mars One’s plan to establish the first human colony on Mars by 2025. The team found that “without dramatic improvements in equipment life, the space colonists, who would have no way to return to Earth, could starve to death,” writes Letzter.
Philip Ball of The Guardian speaks with graduate student Steve Ramirez about the potential for neuroscientist to one day be able to replace bad memories with good ones. “I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory we like, or erase unwanted memories,” says Ramirez.
An MIT study indicates that plans for settling on Mars could put colonists in danger of starvation, reports Thor Benson for UPI. "Our habitation simulations revealed that crop growth, if large enough to provide 100% of the settlement's food, will produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat,” the researchers explain.
Larry Greenemeier of Scientific American examines the new MIT Laboratory for Social Machines, based out of the Media Lab and funded by a commitment from Twitter. Greenemeier writes that the lab will be focused on finding new ways of “extracting meaningful semantic and social patterns from Twitter’s daily flood of selfies, rants and observations.”
Huffington Post reporter Thomas Tamblyn writes that a team of MIT scientists has found that the Mars One colonization plans are flawed. The researchers found that Mars colonists are unlikely to survive as the production of crops will over saturate the living environment with oxygen, Tamblyn writes.
Boston Magazine reporter Stacy Shepherd writes that researchers from MIT and Harvard have created a “muscle-on-a-clip” to test new medications for asthma. The clip, a soft polymer that contains small airway muscles, mimics the structure of the human airway in the respiratory system, reports Shepherd.
Sharon Crowley of Fox News reports on the new study co-authored by MIT economist Dr. Sara Ellison on diversity in the workplace. The study found that while diverse workplaces are more productive, workers are happier in single-sex offices.
In a piece for WBUR about hidden time capsules in the Boston area, Zeninjor Enwemeka highlights several time capsules at MIT, including the Building 20 time capsule, created to preserve the historic and scientific achievements that took place in the building, and a digital time capsule created in 1999.
Researchers from MIT have detected the brightest pulsar ever recorded, reports Brook Hays of UPI. “Despite its small dimensions and modest mass, the pulsating dead star is burning with the energy of 10 million suns,” writes Hays.
Atlantic reporter Tim Fernholz writes that MIT researchers have analyzed Mars One’s plans for a colonization project on Mars. The researchers found that “growing plants would increase the amount of oxygen in the air to the point where it would need to be vented outside of the habitat to avoid increasing the pressure within the life support unit,” writes Fernholz.
Sacha Pfeiffer and Lynn Jolicoeur of WBUR report on Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a company founded by MIT Professor Hari Balakrishnan to help improve driver safety. The company developed an app that “automatically detects when you’re in the car and driving, it detects when you’ve stopped driving, and then it provides feedback to you,” Pfeiffer and Jolicoeur report.
Amy Robinson writes for Scientific American on work being done by MIT researchers in the field of microfluidics and its potential applications in neuroscience. Microfluidics technology is being used "to study stages of development and decipher how variance in chemical and physical processes causes neurons to grow or recede,” Robinson writes.