In the Media

Celtics forward Jaylen Brown spoke with Dana Jacobson of CBS Mornings about his mission to help improve equality in the City of Boston, highlighting the Bridge Program at the Media Lab, which is aimed providing opportunities in science and technology for underrepresented communities. “I think education is one of the most powerful devices that we have and is one of the ways our social mobility is being controlled at a very early age,” says Brown. “Being able to have my students… get to learn directly from MIT professors, MIT scientists, NASA astronauts, you get to directly benefit from those stories and life lessons. My goal is to build the next leaders, the next generation of leaders for the world.”

AP reporter Ronald Blum spotlights the premiere of Prof. Jay Scheib’s augmented reality-infused production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “We sort of focus on a future society in which myth has become possible again," says Scheib. "But at the same time, we’re not that far in the future and the third act is set around a broken lithium-ion field. We’re set in a world that is somehow post-planet and post-collapse of energy production.”

Celtics forward Jaylen Brown signed his supermax contract extension in front of high school students participating in the Bridge Program at the Media Lab, an effort focused on providing opportunities in science and technology for underrepresented communities, writes Adam Himmelsbach for The Boston Globe. Brown noted he found out the deal was finalized during a robotics session with the students. “I was learning,” he said. “I was a part of the curriculum. We were doing some teaching, doing some active engaging, some workshops. So I was able to put my phone down and just get right into class with the Bridge students.”

MIT researchers at MIT have developed a microfluidic chip-based model of liver tissue that “allows researchers to understand the biological mechanisms underlying liver tissue regeneration and points to several molecules that may promote the process,” reports William A. Haseltine for Forbes. "These results mark significant progress in our understanding of the human body’s regenerative properties," writes Haseltine. 

Writing for The Washington Post, research affiliate Bina Venkataraman emphasizes that “if biomedical breakthroughs are to benefit the millions of children afflicted with rare diseases, genetic testing of babies needs to expand.” Venkataraman adds: “By screening newborn genomes for currently known genetic diseases, patients and scientists could gain insights that lead to the treatment and prevention of thousands of illnesses that currently lack cures.”

MIT has been ranked among the top employers for women in 2023, according to Forbes and Statista, reports Rachel Rabkin Peachman for Forbes. “The ranking derives primarily from surveys of more than 60,000 workers at companies with at least 1,000 employees,” writes Peachman.

Researchers at MIT have developed a mobile vaccine printer capable of printing a vaccine onto a patch of microneedles that can be absorbed into the skin without injection, reports Sandra Tsing for NPR. “These printed vaccines could be used in areas that are unable to refrigerate traditional vaccines,” explains Tsing.

Forbes reporter Marco Annunziata spotlights Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s new book, “We’ve Got You Covered.” Annunziata writes that “the book underscores the stunning absence of a health care budget," adding that the authors "do a great job at highlighting how the current setup poses no limit to expenditures and encourages doctors and providers to run up larger bills.”

The New York Times reports that a new study from Opportunity Insights examines the advantage wealthy applicants have in gaining admission to highly selective universities, and shows that at MIT they were no more likely to attend than the average applicant with the same test score. Stu Schmill, dean of admissions and student financial services, notes: “I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not, and our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income.”

Prof. Jacob Andreas explored the concept of language guided program synthesis at CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes. “Language is a tool,” said Andreas during his talk. “Not just for training models, but actually interpreting them and sometimes improving them directly, again, in domains, not just involving languages (or) inputs, but also these kinds of visual domains as well.”

At CSAIL’s Imagination in Action event, Prof. Stefanie Jegelka’s presentation provided insight into “the failures and successes of neural networks and explored some crucial context that can help engineers and other human observers to focus in on how learning is happening,” reports research affiliate John Werner for Forbes.

MIT has been ranked among the top universities with the most successful start-up founders according to a new survey, reports Patrick Jack for Times Higher Education.

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, writes for Forbes about Prof. Dina Katabi’s work using insights from wireless systems to help glean information about patient health. “Incorporating continuous time data collection in healthcare using ambient WiFi detectable by machine learning promises an era where early and accurate diagnosis becomes the norm rather than the exception,” writes Rus.

Researchers at MIT have discovered that the ocean’s color has changed considerably in the last 20 years and is “another warning sign of human-driven climate change,” reports Maria Luisa Paul for The Washington Post. “These ecosystems have taken millions of years to evolve together and be in balance,” says Senior Research Scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz. “Changes in such a short amount of time are not good because they put the whole ecosystem out of balance.”

Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s new book “The Case for Good Jobs,” which presents “a tough, evidence-backed approach to improving what is often unhelpfully classed as ‘unskilled’ work.” Hill notes that: “Ton’s recipe has four ingredients: focus and simplify, standardize and empower, cross-train staff and ‘operate with slack’, which allows employees greater autonomy and gives them time to solve problems and come up with new ideas themselves.”