New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy spotlights Prof. Nancy Leveson’s research into accident prevention. Coy writes that Leveson’s approach “doesn’t focus on identifying individual faulty components or singling out blundering people. Instead she looks at how accidents can be caused by unforeseen interactions between various components of a complex system.”
Writing for the Financial Times, research fellow Laura Grego examines why China is developing new nuclear delivery systems and modernizing its weapons arsenal. “One core driver is to make clear to an unconvinced United States that it is vulnerable to Chinese nuclear retaliation despite enormous investments in missile defenses,” writes Grego. “Many of the technologies China is pursuing, including those believed to have been tested this summer, are designed to overwhelm or evade such defenses.”
Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, speaks with Steven Zeitchik at The Washington Post about our changing understanding of the traditional office setting. “There are many jobs where physical presence is required, of course,” says Malone. “But where it isn’t, I just can’t see any reason we’ll be returning to a traditional office.”
Using an integrative modeling technique, MIT researchers compared dozens of machine learning algorithms to brain scans as part of an effort to better understand how the brain processes language. The researchers found that “neural networks and computational science might, in fact, be critical tools in providing insight into the great mystery of how the brain processes information of all kinds,” writes Anna Blaustein for Scientific American.
Gizmodo reporter Tom McKay explores a new report co-authored by Prof. Antoinette Schoar and Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics, which reveals that 10,000 individual investors control one-third of the Bitcoins in circulation. This “inherent concentration makes Bitcoin susceptible to systemic risk and also implies that the majority of the gains from further adoption are likely to fall disproportionately to a small set of participants,” the researchers explain.
Prof. Danielle Wood and her team are developing new techniques to use satellite data to monitor and manage environmental problems in remote areas, including an invasive weed growing in parts of Africa, to help inform local decision making, reports Ramin Skibba for Wired. “Our goal is to make it an affordable and operationally feasible thing for them to have this ongoing view, with data from space, data from the air, and data from the water,” says Wood.
An MIT initiative called “Real Talk for Change” launched a new online portal of more than 200 audio stories collected from Boston residents as part of an effort to “help prompt future community dialogues about the lived experiences of everyday Bostonians, particularly those in marginalized communities,” reports Meghan E. Irons for The Boston Globe. “It’s about lifting up the experience as a fundamental piece of what we need to understand [people’s lives], to make better public policy decisions, and to think about who we want to be in leadership roles,’' says Prof. Ceasar McDowell.
Nth Cycle, a company co-founded by Prof. Desiree Plata, has developed an extraction device that uses electric signals to identify valuable metals or black mass leftover from discarded electric batteries. “This modular system is easy to move and adapt and is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than the traditional methods of smelting or using a chemical wash to sort out the metals from the gunk,” writes Jon Chesto and Larry Edelman for The Boston Globe.
Hidden Brain podcaster Shankar Vedantam speaks with NGO leader and Maldives native, Hassan Maniku, who is working with researchers from the MIT Self-Assembly Lab to find a natural process to quickly build islands to combat the growing effects of rising sea levels on coastal communities. “People in the Maldives know they can’t stop the ocean from rising, they have to adapt to that reality and over the last several years, that is exactly what they have started to do,” says Vedantam.
Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, speaks with Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance about climate change, the path to net-zero emissions and COP26. “What is extremely important is to send the clear signal that this policy [the Paris Climate Agreement] is going to stay,” says Paltsev of his hopes for COP26. “Because what the investors need, what the companies need, they need to see that these targets are solid, that we are not going to give away and give up, even though we are not there in terms of the emission reduction.”
Brady Knight '16, Michael Farid '16, Kale Rogers '16, and Luke Schlueter '16 co-founded Spyce, an automated health food restaurant, reports Alie Ward for The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. “I started thinking about how we are going to make healthy food more accessible, more affordable and more available and we had this idea that if we used automation, we could help make it a lot more efficient therefore more accessible,” says Faird.
Biobot Analytics, a startup founded by Mariana Matus ‘18 and Newsha Ghaeli ‘17, has raised $20 million in funding for its work with wastewater epidemiology, reports Carey Goldberg and Janet Wu for Bloomberg News. “This past year, wastewater epidemiology changed from being an obscure niche area of science to becoming a central pillar of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Matus. “And now, in the later stages of the pandemic, it’s becoming a central pillar of preparing for the next pandemic.”
Prof. Taylor Perron, a recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur fellowships, speaks with Callie Crossley of GBH’s Under the Radar about his work studying the mechanisms that shape landscapes on Earth and other planets. “We try to figure out how we can look at landscapes and read them, and try to figure out what happened in the past and also anticipate what might happen in the future,” says Perron of his work as a geomorphologist.
Forbes contributor Bruce Dorminey writes that a new study by MIT scientists finds that the surfaces of carbonaceous asteroids may be much more rocky than previously thought. “This news is important for planetary science because we need to sample asteroids to answer fundamental questions such as how the solar system formed and how life came to be on Earth, says postdoctoral fellow Saverio Cambioni.
TechCrunch reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spotlights Adam Marcus ’12 and Nitesh Banta, the co-founders of B12, a digital platform designed to establish, run and grow professional services firms online. B12 is focused on helping “smaller professional service organizations such as law and accounting firms or mortgage brokerages more easily accept online payments and build a digital presence in general,” writes Ann Azevedo.