In the Media

Reporting for The Boston Globe, Hanna Kreuger highlights a graph documenting the atmospheric conditions of the exoplanet WASP-96b, which NASA included in its first release of images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Describing it as “perhaps the image that showcases Webb’s greatest triumph,” Krueger notes that the graph was created using an equation developed by Prof. Sara Seager. Seager and her team will use the telescope to peer into TRAPPIST-1e, an exoplanet widely considered to be potentially Earth-like and habitable, adds Krueger.

Prof. Robert Simcoe and his team will receive 100 hours with the new James Webb Space Telescope to look at some of the first stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang, reports David Bienick for WCVB. “I’m tremendously excited,” says Simcoe. “We have been preparing for this moment since 2016, knowing that we were going to have time and starting to prepare our observations, and waiting for the telescope to be ready.”

As the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released on Tuesday, showcasing the deepest view of the universe ever, CBS Boston spoke with Prof. Julien de Wit about the importance of the moment. “It’s groundbreaking. It’s like going from listening to the radio to suddenly being able to watch television,” says de Wit. “Further down the road, we may be able to see if planets are habitable, if some of these planets have signs of life one way or the other. There are so many things we’re going to discover thanks to it.”

Prof. Craig Steven Wilder is a featured expert in a new documentary titled “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America,” reports WBUR. “For me, the term ‘driving while black’ isn’t just a slogan, it isn’t just a part of our political rhetoric, it’s not just something we say to remind ourselves of the persistence of racism in the United States. It’s a very personal experience of remembering, in fact, the anxiety, the fear,” says Wilder.

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Bloomberg Washington Correspondent Joe Mathieu about Affordable Care Act funding and the future of healthcare. It’s both about making these premiums more affordable for the lowest income people and giving middle-income people access to this important government program, says Gruber.

Forbes contributor Laurence Kotlikoff spotlights the work of Institute Prof. Peter Diamond. Diamond’s work, notes Kotlikoff, clarified “that there are many levels of employment at which supply equals demand, including many that are very low.”

Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi oversaw a study which found that people of color were given significantly less supplemental oxygen than white people because of inaccuracies in pulse oximeter readings, reports Nancy Lapid for Reuters. “Nurses and doctors make the wrong decisions and end up giving less oxygen to people of color because they are fooled [by incorrect readings from pulse oximeters],” says Celi.

Prof. Benjamin Weiss speaks with Forbes contributor Bruce Dorminey about his latest co-authored paper detailing new paleomagnetic measurements of samples of Antarctic meteorites. “Our study shows that the solar nebula – the cloud of gas and dust out of which our solar system formed, dissipated very quickly (within less than 1.5 million years) after having lasted for 3 million years,” Weiss tells Dorminey. 

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was “perhaps the most transformational politician in Japan’s post-World War II history,” reports David E. Sanger for The New York Times. “We didn’t know what we were going to get when Abe came to [our] office with this hard nationalist reputation,” recalls Prof. Richard Samuels, director of the Center for International Studies. “What we got was a pragmatic realistic who understood the limits of Japan’s power, and who knew it wasn’t going to be able to balance China’s rise on its own. So, he designed a new system.”

Researchers at MIT have found that due to the ongoing circulation of dust, sea salt, and organic matter produced by vegetation, even eliminating all human-caused pollution would still leave half of the world’s population exposed to particulate levels deemed unsafe by the World Health Organization, writes David Wallace-Wells for The New York Times. “When pollution combines with extreme heat, researchers have found, overall mortality risk can grow by more than 20 percent.”

Researchers at MIT have created a knit textile containing pressure sensors called 3DKnITS which can be used to predict a person’s movements, reports Charlotte Hu for Popular Science. “Smart textiles that can sense how users are moving could be useful in healthcare, for example, for monitoring gait or movement after an injury,” writes Hu.

Prof. Richard Samuels speaks with Hill reporter Tobias Burns about the legacy of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Abe “sought to shift the center of gravity in Japanese political culture away from the pacifism that characterized most of the early to mid post-war period to a place that was, in his view, more normal,” explains Samuels.

A new analysis by Prof. Anna Stansbury and University of Michigan graduate student Richard Schultz finds that two thirds of U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics have a parent with a graduate degree, reports Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. Stansbury notes that she worries some of the terminology used in courses like Econ 101 “like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive. And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”

Ariel Ekblaw, director of the Space Exploration Initiative and founder of the Aurelia Institute, speaks with Fast Company reporter Rachael Zisk about accessibility needs for human spaceflight and the next generation of space stations. “The goal of democratizing access to space is to allow more people around the world to see themselves in that future,” says Ekblaw. 

TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that a new report by MIT researchers finds that in order to successfully transition to a renewable energy grid, the federal government must intervene to help build green energy storage at a scale that will meet the nation’s needs. “The federal government has the means both to subsidize the utilization of existing storage options and to fund intensive research into new and promising ones,” writes Coldewey of the report’s findings.