In the Media

Prof. John Hart, co-founder of VulcanForms, speaks with Rana Foroohar at the Financial Times about the digital manufacturing company, which uses 3D printing with metals to create parts. “Everything we see around us, with the exception of ourselves and the food we grow, is manufactured,” says Hart. “Now, post-pandemic, several forces are aligning to reshape how we make things. We understand the need for agile supply chains. We realize how important production is for our economic and national security. And third, we need to decarbonize, which will require the growth of new manufacturing systems at scale.” 

Graduate student Crystal Owens speaks with NPR correspondent Miles Parks about her study which sought to find out the perfect ratio for breaking apart an Oreo cookie. “What we actually found was that all of the results were basically the same,” says Owens. “You can’t do it wrong because there’s no way to do it right.”

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab and elsewhere “have created a database of certain media that has the potential to give you chills,” reports Hannah Docter-Loeb for Motherboard. “Although we know that chills stimulate brain regions associated with reward and emotion, there is still much we do not understand about the connection between the body and this powerful sensation and how the experience impacts our brain,” says graduate student Abhinandan Jain. 

Prof. Simon Johnson writes for The Los Angeles Times about the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates despite the recent instability in the banking sector. “Increasing the deposit insurance cap and focusing on small-business transaction accounts could stabilize midsize banks, reduce more deposit transfers out of those institutions, and shore up confidence in the banking system,” writes Johnson.

Milford High School student Elsie Sutherland created “Community Connector,” as her final project for MIT’s Leadership Training Institute, reports Lisa Hughes for CBS. The website “connects people who want to volunteer with organizations that need help,” explains Hughes. “Each listing includes a description of the non-profit, its event, the nature of the service project and a sign-up.”

Bob Metcalfe ’69, a CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, has been awarded this year’s Turing Award for his work inventing Ethernet, reports Randy Bean for Forbes. “Turing recipients include the greatest pioneers in the advancement of computer science,” says Metcalfe. “I am grateful to be considered among these giants.”

Prof. Emeritus Marcia Bartusiak speaks with GBH co-hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel about her four decades of experience as a science communicator covering the fields of astronomy and physics. “That’s the role of a science writer, is to take those, what seemed to be difficult ideas and, through metaphors and analogies, show how it affects your everyday life, or explain them with examples that they would be familiar with from their everyday life,” says Bartusiak.

Alum Sophie Bai, founded B.A.I Biosciences and through her research has created Pavise, a skincare line focusing on sun care and aging, reports Celia Shatzman for Forbes. “I believe skincare starts with sun care, because 90% of skin problems are caused by UVA,” says Bai.

Researchers at MIT have quantified the shift toward the artificial intelligence industry and how it has impacted academia, reports Madhumita Murgia for Financial Times. “The MIT research found that almost 70 percent of AI PhDs went to work for companies in 2020, compared to 21 per cent in 2004,” writes Murgia.

Wall Street Journal reporter Aylin Woodward writes about how graduate student Crystal Owens and undergraduate Max Fan set out to solve a cookie conundrum: whether there was a way to twist apart an Oreo and have the filling stick to both wafers. Woodward writes that for Owens, the research “was a fun, easy way to make her regular physics and engineering work more accessible to the general public.”

Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics Radio about why insurance markets are broken, how they can be fixed, and her new book, “Risky Business.” Finkelstein explains that “one thing I hadn’t realized ‘til I started working in economics is there’s another type of market frailty that’s really important, that’s the subject of a lot of government policy, but that most people just don’t seem to be as aware of. And that’s the problem of selection. And it’s front and center in insurance markets.”

Prof. Aleksander Mądry’s testimony before a House subcommittee was highlighted by Politico fellow Mohar Chatterjee in a recent newsletter exploring how large tech companies are dominating how generative AI technologies are developed and utilized. During his testimony, Mądry emphasized that “very few players will be able to compete, given the highly specialized skills and enormous capital investments the building of such systems requires.”

MIT researchers have developed a low-cost air quality sensor that can be 3-D printed using open-source instructions and used by people around the world, reports Kristin Toussaint for Fast Company. “The reason we started this project was because we wanted to democratize environmental data,” explains research scientist Simone Mora. “We’re not just opening the data we’ve collected so far, but we hope to funnel a huge development in terms of sensors deployed in the streets, and in turn [make] the data collected available to everyone.”

Prof. Li-Huei Tsai and Prof. Ed Boyden co-founded Cognito Therapeutics after their research found that gamma waves could help clear amyloid plaques, which are known to appear in Alzheimer’s patients, reports Ryan Cross for The Boston Globe.  “It was the most surprising result I’ve ever got in my life,” says Tsai. “When we published our first paper, most people said, ‘I don’t believe it. This is too good to be true. How can something this simple have this kind of effect?’”

CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus Bob Metacalfe ‘69 has been awarded the 2022 Turing Award for his contributions to creating Ethernet, a method for enabling personal computers to communicate directly with one another over a wired connection, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Variants of the original Ethernet connect countless millions of computers around the world,” writes Bray.