Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with WBUR reporters Vivian La and Barbara Moran about the impact of NOAA cuts on the future of weather forecasting. “They're cutting into bone and muscle when they should be cutting into fat,” says Emanuel. He adds that streamlining operations and saving money “requires deep understanding of the organization and deep consultation with people who understand it.”
Prof. Pulkit Agrawal speaks with Darian Woods and Geoff Brumfiel of NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money about his work developing a simulator that can be used to train robots. “The power of simulation is that you can collect, you know, very large amounts of data,” explains Agrawal. “For example, in three hours', you know, worth of simulation, we can collect 100 days' worth of data.”
WBUR reporter Amelia Mason spotlights MIT Visiting Scholar Wasalu Jaco (Lupe Fiasco) and his work exploring “the creative possibilities of site-responsive music.” Jaco “calls the process of making these songs ‘ghotiing,’ which is confusingly pronounced “fishing” – a phonetic joke in which the “f” sound is drawn from the “gh” in ‘rough,’ and so on,” explains Mason. “Fiasco uses ghotiing as a teaching tool, sending his MIT students on outings to various public art pieces across campus to ‘fish’ for musical inspiration. He ultimately hopes to make a song for every piece of art on MIT’s campus.”
Meli Beer, founded by Samara Oster MBA '22, has created the first beer in America made from quinoa, reports Doug Meehan for WCVB. "I think the point is, a beer drink experience that tastes great but also feels great in your body and doesn't feel like you’ve had a loaf of bread, or you have that heaviness or bloat, is for everyone,” explains Oster. “And so, what I really aspire to do is create a drink that everyone can enjoy.”
MIT Open Space will host The Modular Troupe, an “artist collective that will be bringing live hip-hop and R&B sounds,” to the area on Wednesday, May 14, reports Marianna Orozco for The Boston Globe. “In collaboration with the Cambridge Hip Hop Collective, the Midday Music event will turn lunch hour into a dance party with high-energy performances and on-site food trucks selling local eats,” explains Orozco.
Prof. Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, speak with Boston Herald reporter Vicki Salemi about how spring-cleaning strategies can be applied to organizing work, from handling emails and meeting requests to tackling new assignments. “First, most people take on too many tasks at once and start those tasks before they are ready,” says Repenning. “We would never let a surgeon do three procedures at once or start operating before all the equipment and people were in place, but knowledge workers do this every day.”
ArchDaily reporter Reyyan Dogan explores the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale with Prof. Carlo Ratti, this year’s curator. Dogan notes that “by fostering a forward-thinking dialogue on the intersection of architecture and global crises, the Biennale encourages both visitors and practitioners to think critically about the role of architecture in shaping the future.” Ratti explains that this year’s exhibit “is really about how architecture can bring together all different forms of intelligence, and bridge them, and actually help adapt to a changing climate.”
New York Post reporter Marissa Matozzo cracks into a new study by MIT researchers that uncovers the best way to keep eggs from cracking. The researchers found that eggs dropped sideways are less likely to break than those dropped vertically. “It turns out the sides can take more of a beating than their pointy or rounded ends, and that could mean a lot for proper storage,” says Matozzo.
MIT researchers have discovered that “eggs are less likely to crack when they fall on their side,” reports Adithi Ramakrishnan for the Associated Press. “It’s commonly thought that eggs are strongest at their ends — after all, it’s how they’re packaged in the carton,” explains Ramakrishnan. “The thinking is that the arc-shaped bottom of an egg redirects the force and softens the blow of impact. But when scientists squeezed eggs in both directions during a compression test, they cracked under the same amount of force.”
A study by MIT researchers has found that “dropping an egg horizontally is more likely to keep it intact than a vertical drop,” reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. “People tend to have better intuition for stiffness and strength, which are important in statics,” explains Prof. Tal Cohen. “It is common that they refer intuitively to the redistribution of a load along the arch. However, when dynamics are involved, toughness is also an important quantity.”
Researchers at MIT have found that eggs dropped on their sides and not their tips are more resilient and less likely to crack, reports Veronique Greenwood for The New York Times. The researchers found that “eggs dropped so they landed on their sides were substantially less likely to crack,” writes Greenwood. “When they hit, the shell was able to compress, absorbing some of the blow. Eggs dropped on their ends, where the shell is stiffer, did not show such flexibility.
Forbes reporter Amanda Kooser spotlights a new study by MIT scientists that has found eggs are less likely to crack when dropped on their side. “The researchers put eggs through their paces in two different tests,” explains Kooser. “One was a static compression test that applied increasing force to the eggs. The other was a drop test.”
Researchers at MIT have discovered that eggs dropped on their side are less likely to crack than those dropped on their tips, reports Doyle Rice for USA Today. The researchers conducted both a drop and compression test on the eggs, and the findings “suggest that future research could explore the application of these findings to engineering scenarios, such as how structures respond to dynamic loads,” writes Rice.
Prof. Carlos Portela and postdoc James Surjadi speaks with TechBriefs reporter Andrew Corselli about their work developing a new metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy. “We have demonstrated the concept with these polymeric materials and, from here, we see a couple of opportunities,” Surjadi explains. “One is extending this to more brittle material systems. The real dream will be to be able to do this with glasses, other ceramics, or even metals — things that normally we don't expect to deform a lot before they break. Brittle materials are the perfect candidates for us to try to make into woven-type architectures.”
Emily Young '18, co-founder and CEO of MIT D-Lab spinout Moving Health, speaks with The World’s Jeremy Siegel about her startup’s commitment to transforming “maternal healthcare in rural Ghana, where access to ambulances is severely limited, by creating an emergency transportation network that uses motorized ambulances." Young discovered that “what rural communities needed most was transportation that could actually handle rough terrain while still being cost effective and easy to scale at a local level.”