In the Media

Debbie Siegelbaum reports for BBC News on how long-term unemployment is impacting Americans. The article cites research by MIT Professor Ofer Sharone, who found that Americans tend to blame themselves for unemployment.

NECN’s John Moroney profiles the team from MIT running in this year’s Boston Marathon. The team, called MIT Strong, includes MIT faculty, staff, alumni, and students.

Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, MIT Sloan graduate student Ricky Ashenfelter describes Spoiler Alert, an online marketplace that he created with his classmate, Emily Malina, to help solve the food waste problem in the U.S.

New York Times reporter William Yardley explores the legacy of MIT alumnus Patrick McGovern. “He was often referred to as ‘Uncle Pat’ by the thousands of employees at his company, and he was known for a determinedly human gesture in the cyberworld: traveling the planet to hand-deliver Christmas bonus checks of $500 to everyone who worked for him,” writes Yardley.

“Now researchers at MIT have devised a way to combine a living E. coli cell with inanimate building blocks, like gold nanoparticles and quantum dots, to create a hybrid ‘living material,’” writes Dexter Johnson in IEEE Spectrum.

The New York Times’ Dennis Overbye explores Professor Alan Guth’s theory of inflation in the wake of the discovery of gravitational waves from the seconds after the Big Bang occurred. The discovery appears to confirm Guth’s findings.

In an NPR piece about the implications of drivers using Google Glass, MIT Professor Earl Miller weighs in on the debate as to whether the new technology is a distraction on the road.

Nadia Drake writes in Wired about MIT researchers developing living materials. “By tricking E.coli into incorporating gold nanoparticles or quantum dots into their proteins, the team has crafted biofilms with a range of crazy capabilities,” Drake reports.

Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan reports on how MIT researchers are creating living materials by incorporating inorganic matter into bacterial cells. The living material could be used to make batteries, solar cells or even biomedical devices.

Writing for USA Today, Karen Weintraub reports on Professor Michael Strano’s work to give plants the ability to serve as sensors, antennae and power plants thanks to carbon nanotubes embedded inside the plant.

Researchers from the Broad Institute have found that specific gut bacteria are associated with the development of Crohn’s disease, reports Beth Skwarecki in Scientific American.

“Patrick J. McGovern, who became a billionaire as founder and majority owner of Boston-based technology publisher International Data Group, died March 19 at a hospital in Palo Alto, California,” writes Lawrence Arnold in The Washington Post.

“Mr. McGovern, who with his wife, Lore, gave $350 million to open the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, died Wednesday in Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif,” writes J. M. Lawrence in The Boston Globe.

The Economist profiles Luis Videgaray, an MIT graduate and Mexico’s finance minister. Videgaray explains how his education at MIT has helped shape his policy decisions.

NPR’s All Tech Considered looks at new research from MIT Professor Fiona Murray that indicates attractive males are more likely to receive funding for their startups than females.