In the Media

Chronicle visits Prof. Skylar Tibbits and the Self-Assembly Lab to see how they are embedding intelligence into the materials around us, including furniture, clothing and buildings. Prof. Caitlin Mueller and graduate student Sandy Curth are digging into eco-friendly construction with programmable mud by “taking a low-cost material and a really fast manufacturing system to make buildings out of very, very low climate impact materials.” Says Tibbits: “MIT is a really wild place, and most people know of it for its technical expertise…But what I am really inspired by is on the creative end, the design spectrum. I think the mix of those two is super special.” He adds: “We can ask the right questions and discover new science, and we can also solve the right problems through engineering.”

Berly McCoy and Sushmita Pathak of NPR’s Short Wave spotlight research by postdoctoral associate Funing Li and his team on tornado occurrence. The researchers used “historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere,” explains McCoy. 

Ben Armstrong, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center, speaks with Marketplace reporter Samantha Fields about the impact of tariffs on manufacturing in the U.S. “Things like magnets, which are really critical for batteries and other core electronic technologies, we’ve really lost the capacity to build in the U.S.” Armstrong adds that it’s possible to build that capacity here, but “it takes a long time, and it takes really significant investment,” likely from the government and from companies.

Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 speaks with ABC News about his work developing the “torpedo bat,” a new baseball bat design that “moves the barrel – or the thickest part – closer than usual to the batter’s hand, putting more wood in the area where the hitter is most likely to hit the ball.” Leanhardt explains: “The world of data analytics, physics, math, etc., can have such a positive impact on the game of baseball and generate so much excitement.”  

Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber spotlights a paper by Prof. David Autor that finds import tariffs have had little effect on job creation and preservation in the U.S., particularly in parts of the country with tariff-protected industries. Autor and his colleagues found “manufacturing employment didn’t increase, though it also didn't fall (other research found that U.S. companies had a hard time selling more products abroad, which may help explain why manufacturers didn't add jobs),” Weber explains. “Worse than that, retaliatory tariffs from trading partners led to job losses, especially in agriculture.”

Chronicle visits MIT to learn more about how the Institute “nurtures groundbreaking efforts, reminding us that creativity and science thrive together, inspiring future advancements in engineering, medicine, and beyond.” Prof. Julien de Wit and Research Scientist Artem Burdanov discuss their planetary defense efforts aimed at identifying small asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth, and Prof. Canan Dağdeviren demonstrates her work developing ultrasound devices to detect the earliest stages of breast cancer. Host Anthony Everett notes that: “Big ideas have a way of breaking out of conventional boundaries, just part of what makes MIT one giant laboratory of groundbreaking ideas."

E&E News reporter Christa Marshall writes that the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance will “scale sustainable energy systems across the globe” and advance breakthrough low-carbon technologies.

MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Jared Diamond spotlights how Aaron Leanhardt PhD ’03 went from an MIT graduate student who was part of a research team that “cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history” to inventor of the torpedo baseball bat, “perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.” Leanhardt’s new baseball bat design is aimed at helping “batters make more contact at a time when strikeouts are at an all-time high,” Diamond explains. “The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball.”

Prof. Pulkit Agrawal speaks with NPR Short Wave host Regina Barber and science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel about his work developing a new technique that allows robots to train in simulations of scanned home environments. “The power of simulation is that we can collect very large amounts of data,” explains Agrawal. “For example, in three hours' worth of simulation, we can collect 100 days' worth of data.” 

Scientific American reporter Nic Flemming spotlights research by Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and his team, which explores the impact of fasting on intestinal stem cells. “Both caloric restriction and fasting improved intestinal stem-cell activity and health, but the mechanisms involved are very different,” says Yilmaz. 

Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 has designed a new baseball bat, dubbed the torpedo bat, in which wood is moved “lower down the barrel after the label, and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin,” reports the Associated Press. “At the end of the day it’s about the batter not the bat,” says Leanhardt. “It’s about the hitter and their hitting coaches. I’m happy to always help those guys get a little bit better but ultimately it’s up to them to put good swings and grind it out every day. So, credit to those guys.”

Prof. David Pritchard speaks with NBC News reporter David K. Li about his former student Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 and his work developing the “torpedo” baseball bat. “It just takes some outsiders, like Aaron, who has a Ph.D. from MIT and really understands physics and knows what's going on, to be the sort of guy who drives something under the radar and see if it works," says Pritchard. 

USA Today reporter Steve Gardner spotlights the “torpedo bat” – a baseball bat developed by Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03. The new design moves “more of the wood toward the sweet spot of the bat, where players try to make contact and where the bat will produce optimal results,” explains Gardner. 

Using his background in physics, Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 redesigned the modern baseball bat to “improve the frequency and quality of contact, based on where the batters most frequently hit the ball,” reports Alex Speier for The Boston Globe.