Scott Kirsner writes for BetaBoston about the MIT Media Lab’s 30th anniversary celebration, which will feature a daylong symposium on October 30th. The event will feature talks by former United Nations Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan, and White House chief technology officer and MIT alumna Megan Smith.
New York Times reporter Emily Weinstein writes about MIT graduate J. Kenji López-Alt’s new cookbook, “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.” Weinstein writes that López-Alt is “a gifted explainer, making difficult concepts easy to grasp for those of us with a lifelong lack of aptitude for the sciences.”
The Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay speaks with Provost Marty Schmidt about HUBweek, a festival showcasing Boston’s prowess in arts, culture and technology. “Things move a lot faster now than they might have a quarter of a century ago, so HUBweek is, and is going to need to evolve rapidly,” says Schmidt.
Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Goodwin reviews “Einstein’s Dreams,” a play adapted from Prof. Alan Lightman’s 1993 novel. “The conceit behind Lightman’s deeply imaginative source material is that it presents a journal of Einstein’s nocturnal musings as he developed his theories of general and special relativity,” writes Goodwin.
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with ABC News about the impact of constant connectivity on how people relate to one another in the digital age. “Before we had our phones, conversation was the way we satisfied our need for stimulation,” explains Turkle. Face-to-face conversation “lays the groundwork for empathy.”
MIT researchers have developed a new material that mimics the cuttlefish’s ability to change texture, reports Gian Volpicelli for Wired. "We used ordinary plastic," explains graduate student Mark Guttag. "The important thing was figuring out the right difference in stiffness between the matrix and particles."
Boston Globe reporter Kathleen Burge speaks with Prof. Heidi Williams, a 2015 MacArthur fellow, about how she felt upon learning she had been honored by the MacArthur Foundation and her research examining technological change in the health care market. “It’s quite overwhelming to hear this news and to get that vote of support,” said Williams.
Prof. Heidi Williams has been named a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” award winner, according to the Associated Press. Williams was honored for her research exploring, “the causes and consequences of innovation in health care markets.”
Prof. Kripa Varanasi was named to the Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40” list, which honors “business and civic leaders who are making a major impact in the community while also improving the civic health of the Boston area through volunteer work and other forms of philanthropy.”
MIT and BU have joined forces to offer students entrepreneurs legal advice, the Associated Press reports. "It's almost like a godsend," says MIT sophomore Isaiah Udotong, who is starting his own company. "We were looking for legal advice and wondering how we were going to make sure everything is legitimate."
In a testimonial for U.S. News & World Report, MIT graduate Yiping Xing shares why MIT was the right school for her. “MIT doesn't simply teach you science or knowledge; it trains you to be a scientist and problem-solver, giving you many opportunities to apply what you learn,” says Xing.
Alexandra Ossola writes for Popular Science that MIT researchers have found a molecule that could make the CRISPR gene-editing technique more precise. The new molecule “makes the editing process easier to control and could create new possibilities for how scientists can edit DNA in the future.”
Matt McFarland writes for The Washington Post about Prof. David Mindell’s new book, in which he argues that automation can take away from the enjoyment of working. “The most advanced (and difficult) technologies are not those that stand apart from people, but those that are most deeply embedded in, and responsive to, human and social networks,” Mindell explains.
MIT researchers contributed to a new study that found that “severe floods – the kind likely to occur only every 500 years – may now strike every 24.4 years in the New York City area thanks to climate change,” writes Alan Neuhauser for U.S. News & World Report.
According to researchers from MIT and Climate Interactive, “even if countries manage to fulfill their existing pledges on reducing carbon emissions, the world will likely still experience potentially dangerous levels of global warming,” writes Justin Worland for Time. Without further action “the world will likely warm 6.3°F (3.5°C) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.”