In the Media

In a piece for Forbes, Nancy Pardo highlights the new Smart Morphable Surface developed by MIT researchers that can change its surface texture. The material could be used to make more aerodynamic and efficient vehicles.

Robert Lee Hotz of The Wall Street Journal writes that researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed of prototype of a, “flexible, self-assembling machine.” Potential applications for the technology include everything from self-assembling satellites to shape-shifting search-and-rescue robots. 

In a piece for USA Today, Hoai-Tran Bui writes about how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed a robot that can self-assemble from a flat sheet of paper in minutes. "The big dream is to make robots fast and inexpensive," says Prof. Daniela Rus. 

Slate reporter Boer Deng writes about the self-assembling robot developed by scientists from MIT and Harvard. The robot, “forms itself, Transformer-like, from a flat sheet into a four-legged creature that crawls,” Deng writes. 

Joe Kloc of Newsweek writes about how MIT and Harvard scientists have developed a self-assembling robot that folds itself into a 3-D robot capable of movement. "We have achieved a long-standing personal goal to design a machine that can assemble itself," says Prof. Daniela Rus of the project. 

Ian Sample of The Guardian reports on how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed a “Transformer” robot that can self-assemble. "This will rapidly extend the manufacturing capabilities that we have today where configuring an assembly line is done manually and requires a lot of time," Prof. Daniela Rus explains.

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports on the mobile, self-assembling robot developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. "This is a simple, flexible and rapid design process and a step toward the dream of realizing the vision of 24-hour robot manufacturing," explains Prof. Daniela Rus.

WBUR’s Benjamin Swasey reports on Professor Chris Warshaw’s new study examining how reflective governments are of their constituents’ views. “When you put all this stuff together, it turns out that cities are quite responsive to how liberal their publics are,” explains Warshaw. 

Heather Kelly of CNN reports on how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to recreate audio from silent video. "We showed that we can determine pretty reliably the gender of a speaker from low-quality sound we managed to recover from a tissue box," says Dr. Michael Rubinstein. 

Luke Holland writes for The Guardian about work by the MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms to try to form 3-D structures comprised of light. “By manipulating photons, they've discovered a way of making them react with and deflect each other, essentially forming a new type of matter,” writes Holland.

Krissy Clark of NPR reports on Professor Amy Glasmeier’s work developing the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Clark reports that through examining the cost of living, Glasmeier found that areas with higher poverty rates tended to have higher amounts of minimum wage jobs where the minimum wage, “absolutely was not paying people enough to live on.”

“The MIT Media Lab recently released ScratchJr, a free iPad app that helps children 5-8 learn how to code,” writes Jordan Shapiro for Forbes. The ScratchJr language is a redesign of the original Scratch programming to simplify it for use by younger children.

“Nancy L. Rose PhD ‘85, a professor of applied economics at MIT, has been named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis by the U.S. Department of Justice,” writes Katherine Nazemi for The Tech. Rose will head the DOJ’s anti-trust division.

Mark Peplow writes for Nature about the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing and how work done there could contribute to the design of a device that automatically fabricate organic molecules. “A synthesis machine would be transformational,” says Professor Tim Jamison.

“The MIT Sloan School of Management announced on Tuesday that professor Simon Johnson won a spot at the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research,” writes Natalie Kitroeff of Bloomberg Businessweek. Johnson’s appointment follows the publication of a book that he coauthored: “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”