Live Science reporter Tanya Lewis highlights Shigeru Miyagawa’s work exploring the origins of human language. Miyagawa's hypothesis, “could explain how human language, which can theoretically produce infinite meanings, developed from the limited forms of communication seen in the rest of the animal world,” Lewis reports.
Jeremy Hobson interviews Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia about her work 3-D printing tiny human livers on NPR’s Here and Now. The livers are, “about the size of the pin of a needle, and they allow us to do drug testing to test if drugs would be safe when they got into humans,” Bhatia explains.
Callum Borchers of The Boston Globe writes about the Copenhagen Wheel developed by MIT SENSEable City Lab startup, Superpedestrian. The device is designed to replace a bicycle’s rear wheel and kicks in to give the rider a boost when facing higher resistance on inclines.
Michael Farrell of The Boston Globe reports on a robotic ankle created by Professor Hugh Herr’s startup, BiOM. “The BiOM ankle is programmed to replicate all the natural functionality of the foot and ankle,” writes Farrell.
Timothy Aeppel writes for The Wall Street Journal about Professor Erik Brynjolfsson’s belief that advances in automation have the same transformative impact on the economy as inventions of the past. “For the first time in history, we can talk to machines and they talk back to us,” says Brynjolfsson.
The exhibit “features work by an international array of artists who apply such critical awareness to their art and their place in society that they keep stepping away, to reappraise and to escape labels and easy reads,” writes Cate McQuaid of the “9 Artists” exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Living on Earth reporter Steve Curwood highlights new MIT research that casts doubt on how methane’s global warming power is measured. “Professor Trancik proposes an alternative method of measuring the climate impact, weighting methane as thirty times more destructive than CO2 now,” he reports.
“Marriott and MIT have teamed up to develop a new app that connects people with shared interests who are staying at the same hotel,” writes Laura Reston of Boston.com. The app uses LinkedIn to match people based on shared tastes or backgrounds.
The MIT Sloan School of Management has introduced a new essay prompt for potential applicants that asks them to write a professional letter of recommendation for themselves, reports Cory Weinberg for Bloomberg Businessweek. The assignment is inspired by the increasingly common business practice of self-evaluation.
Della Bradshaw of The Financial Times writes about Professor Andrei Kirilenko, who recently spent three-and-a-half weeks in Ukraine advising the country’s government on how to stabilize the economy. Kirilenko is a U.S. citizen who grew up in the Ukraine.
Wall Street Journal reporter Irving Wladawsky-Berger examines Prof. David Autor’s research on income inequality. “Mr. Autor estimates that the difference in the yearly earnings between a college-educated two-income family and a high school-educated two-income family has risen by $28,000 between 1979 and 2012,” he writes.
Katie Couric speaks with Prof. Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, about the growing influence of online education and the opportunities edX has created for people around the world. EdX is a not-for-profit venture in online learning launched jointly by MIT and Harvard in May 2012.
“Sugababe took three years and a team of MIT and Harvard scientists to create,” writes Margaret Rhodes for Wired about a project by Italian artisit Diemut Strebe in which researchers genetically engineered an ear using biological material from Vincent Van Gogh’s brother’s great-great-grandson.
Kerry Flynn of Forbes reports on a new system developed by the MIT Senseable City Lab that reduces wasted energy by creating local, personal climates throughout buildings. The system targets and tracks people in a building and synchronizes climate control by sending data to heat-radiating bulbs.
Carey Goldberg of WBUR features Prof. Ed Boyden’s optogenetics research in a segment on neuroscience advances. “We might be in a golden age of making such tools because most fields of engineering had not been applied to the brain, so there’s just a gold rush of possibility,” says Boyden.