An anonymous donor gave $2.5 million to illuminate the Harvard Bridge stretching across the Charles River from Boston to the MIT campus, writes Nestor Ramos for The Boston Globe. The distance between light poles will be measured in Smoots, a unit of measurement created by MIT student Oliver Smoot in 1958.
The Associated Press writes about MIT alumnus and visiting professor Jean Tirole, who was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. MIT Professor Bengt Holmstrom, who collaborated on a book with Tirole, says he is "committed to bettering the world."
Boston Globe reporter Jack Newsham writes about Jean Tirole, the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics and an MIT alumnus. Tirole, who holds the title of visiting professor at MIT, was honored for his studies of market power and regulation.
Associated Press reporters Karl Ritter and Nathalie Rothchild write about Jean Tirole, an MIT alumnus and former faculty member who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics. "What’s been great about much of Jean’s work is that he’ll start with a problem that people are struggling with,” said Professor Nancy Rose of Tirole’s work.
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.