In a piece for Forbes, George Anders writes about how edX, the online-education initiative run by MIT and Harvard, is expanding its curriculum to offer, “26 new classes aimed at high-school students who are hoping to master some advanced-placement subjects before heading off to college.”
PhD candidate Josephine Wolff writes for Slate about last week’s NATO decision to explicitly prescribe a collective response to a cyber-attack on any one member. “[T]he change appears to be largely symbolic because sufficiently severe cyberattacks would likely have been covered under the nations’ treaty regardless,” writes Wolff.
MIT Professor Abhijit Banerjee and Varad Pande of Harvard write for The New York Times about the United Nations’ forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals. The authors provide suggestions for the development of successful objectives, including outlining specific goals and limiting the number of objectives.
“The online-learning collaborative edX, a partnership between Harvard University and MIT, is expanding its reach beyond higher education and will begin offering courses geared toward high school students,” reports Matt Rocheleau for The Boston Globe. “EdX plans to unveil its first free classes for younger students Wednesday.”
In the new book “Innovative Women: The Changing Face of Technology,” MIT alumna and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith co-authors a chapter about how to increase opportunities for women in technology. In an excerpt provided to Fortune, Smith writes that we’re at a “tipping point” and about to accelerate the path to lasting gender equality.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston reports that MIT researchers have proposed a new solar-powered, desalination system for purifying groundwater. “Wright and Winter argue that for the low levels of salt in the groundwater in up to 60 percent of rural India, they can extract enough power from solar panels to run their electrodialysis setup,” writes Subbaraman.
Boston Globe reporter Chris Reify writes that Professor Sangeeta Bhatia has been awarded the 2014 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. “Dr. Bhatia is a wonderful example of a woman who has used her brilliance, skill and creativity to radically improve the detection and treatment of serious global health issues,” says Dorothy Lemelson, Lemelson Foundation chair.
NBC News reports that MIT Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT prize for her work designing miniaturized biomedical tools. "As innovations emerge, we're constantly asking whether they can be repurposed for one of the two diseases we concentrate on: liver disease and cancer,” says Bhatia.
Thomas Tamblyn of The Huffington Post writes about a new video showing MIT’s Atlas robot carrying a metal frame. Tamblyn writes that the video demonstrates an advancement by MIT researchers, “who have been trying to juggle the complexities of making a robot walk while still dragging a weighted object in one hand.”
Writing for Scientific American, Tim Radford reports on Professor Paul O’Gorman’s new study, which shows that despite climate change blizzards will still occur. Radford writes that O’Gorman’s research shows that while some areas may receive less overall snowfall, extreme snowfall could become more intense.
Kyle Plantz profiles MIT’s Underwater Hockey Club for USA Today. “It’s social, it’s an exercise, it’s competitive, it’s a great workout, it’s a three-dimensional sport,” says Underwater Hockey Club organizer Martin Jaspan.
Marc Abrahams writes for BetaBoston about ‘The Breast Pump Hackathon,' which is scheduled to take place Sept. 20-21 at the MIT Media Lab. The event will bring together a wide variety of people to collaborate on designing a better breast pump.
Thor Benson writes for United Press International about a new video of MIT’s Atlas robot that shows the robot moving objects of different weights while maintaining balance. A team of MIT researchers is competing with the Atlas robot in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
Research by James Rice, deputy director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, finds that few companies are actually ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs to the U.S., writes Robert Wright of The Financial Times. The study indicates that the trend has had a negligible effect on employment in the U.S.
Henry Grabar of Salon writes about new research by Professor Carlo Ratti on the impacts of taxi sharing. If taxi sharing was implemented in New York City, “the total distance traveled by New York City cabs would fall by 40 percent, relieving traffic, reducing air pollution and speeding up travel for everyone else on the road,” Grabar writes.