Prof. Paulo Lozano speaks with CBS Boston about the Artemis 1 moon mission and the reasons behind the recent launch delays. "It's very exciting because the last time we were on the moon was during the Apollo years and we didn't stay. Our current generation has just a vague memory of that," says Lozano. "All we learn by going to the moon we can apply to go to other places in the solar system."
Prof. Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab, speaks with Los Angeles Times reporter Samantha Masunaga about the delay of the Artemis 1 moon mission. “We don’t take chances, especially on such a huge, powerful rocket,” said Newman, a former NASA deputy administrator. “Everything has to work perfectly.”
David HC Correll, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, writes for The Hill about how environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria impacts global supply chain managers and their sustainability efforts. “From 2020 to 2021, we observed that investors were by far the fastest-growing driver of sustainability pressure on firms,” writes Correll. “At the same, the understanding of what exactly ESG and supply chain sustainability entails changes depending on the geography, industry and year that we ask.”
MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin writes for Forbes about why many former retirees are returning to the workforce. “These older adults are inventing something that is neither our current idea of retirement or of work,” writes Coughlin. “They are quietly creating something else — a new life stage altogether that sees the retirement age of today as a mile marker, not an exit.”
Washington Post reporter Pranshu Verma writes about how Prof. Dina Katabi and her colleagues developed a new AI tool that could be used to help detect early signs of Parkinson’s by analyzing a patient’s breathing patterns. For diseases like Parkinson’s “one of the biggest challenges is that we need to get to [it] very early on, before the damage has mostly happened in the brain,” said Katabi. “So being able to detect Parkinson’s early is essential.”
Writing for Bloomberg News, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Robert Muggah of the Igarapé Institute make the case that cities should use venture capital strategies to manage risk and spur innovation. “To do so, local governments need to change their approach to procurement,” they write. “If administrators pay more close attention to what venture capital can teach them, then the city — one of the first, greatest ventures in human history — will be able to continue to invest in a shared, prosperous tomorrow.”
MIT Press has published In The Black Fantastic by Ekow Eshun, reports Nina MacLaughlin for The Boston Globe. Eshun defines the book as “works of speculative fiction that draw from history and myth to conjure new visions of Africa diasporic culture and identity.”
A new study by Prof. Albert Saiz has found that Mexican housing must become denser and better planned in order to provide adequate living options to lower-income parts of the population, reports Kylie Madry for Reuters. “According to Saiz, the prevalence of self-built, one-family homes is a bigger problem than growing numbers of ‘digital nomads’ – remote workers living in Mexico but earning disproportionately large salaries from abroad – which have been the focus of criticism since the coronavirus pandemic took many jobs online,” writes Madry.
Sloan Lecturer Bill Fischer writes for Forbes about the disruption possibilities in new and alternative dairy products, non-prescription hearing augmentation devices and electric vehicle technology. “Disruption is, at least in these three industries, alive and well and posing a considerable threat to formerly successful, incumbent market-leaders,” writes Fischer.
Prof. Hari Balakrishnan speaks with Forbes contributor Stuart Anderson about his decision to leave India to pursue a PhD in computer science in the U.S., his love for teaching students as a professor at MIT and his work co-founding Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a software company that utilizes technology to make roads safer. “Immigration and immigrants make the United States stronger,” said Balakrishnan. “Immigration is the biggest strength that we have. We need to be able to attract and retain talent, no matter where people come from.”
MIT researchers have used the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) to successfully generate oxygen on Mars, reports Martin Finucane for The Boston Globe. “This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” says Prof. Jeffrey Hoffman. “It’s historic in that sense.”
Washington Post reporter Pranshu Verma highlights how MIT researchers have demonstrated that the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) can convert carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen on Mars. “It’s what explorers have done since time immemorial,” explains Prof. Jeffrey Hoffman. “Find out what resources are available where you’re going to and find out how to use them.”
MIT and Harvard startup GiveDirectly, “identifies poor people and villages, usually in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and distributes cash to them directly, usually via cellphone payment, instead of donations like food and livestock,” reports Dylan Matthews for Vox.
CNN reporters Katie Hunt and Ashley Strickland spotlight how the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) has been successfully generating oxygen on Mars during seven experimental test runs in a variety of atmospheric conditions. “A scaled up MOXIE would include larger units that could run continuously and potentially be sent to Mars ahead of a human mission to produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees,” they write. “This would allow the generation -- and storage -- of enough oxygen to both sustain humans once they arrive and fuel a rocket for returning astronauts back to Earth.”
The MIT MOXIE experiment, which traveled to Mars aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, has been able to create oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, reports Sarah Wells for Vice. “This experiment is also the first to successfully harvest and use resources on any planetary body, a process that will be important not only for Martian exploration but future lunar habitats as well,” writes Wells.