In the Media

CNN reporter Ashley Strickland spotlights first year student Kristoff Misquitta’s work winning the 2020 Genes in Space contest for an experiment aimed at understanding how the human liver functions in space. "We're trying to develop a powerful and efficient workflow to understand the state of the liver in space, and to use that as a basis to understand some of the issues surrounding the way astronauts take medication currently and to remedy issues we find," explains Misquitta. "Hopefully we can use this as a platform to someday develop more advanced and different types of medications."

Forbes contributor Amy Dobson spotlights a new report co-authored by researchers from MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab that “tracks the nearly 8,000 ‘proptech’ firms around the world that serve everything from how people buy, sell and market properties to innovations in building materials and methods.”

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that “a single bitcoin transaction generates the same amount of electronic waste as throwing two iPhones in the bin,” reports Alex Hern for The Guardian.

New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights the origin and history of MIT startup Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company founded with a “shared belief that biology could be made more like computing with reusable code and standard tools instead of the bespoke experiments of traditional biology." Jason Kelly ’03, PhD ’08, one of the founders of MIT startup Ginkgo Bioworks and the company’s chief executive, explains that “the ultimate goal for Ginkgo is to make it as easy to program a cell as it is to program a computer.”

A new study co-authored by Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu finds that countries with older workforces are seeing a larger increase in the use of robots, reports Timothy Aeppel for Reuters. Acemoglu and his colleague Pascual Restrepo of Boston University found that “age alone accounted for 35% of the variation between countries in their adoption of robots, with those having older workers far more likely to adopt the machines.”

Forbes contributor Greg Gardner highlights GPR, an MIT startup developing ground positioning radar for autonomous vehicles. “Ground-penetrating radar can map the road structure beneath a vehicle. That sub-structure is unique and stable, much like a fingerprint,” writes Gardner. “So it can enable vehicles to find their position, no matter how remote, reliably and accurately regardless of the road conditions or visibility of road markings above ground.”

TechCrunch reporter Christine Hall spotlights CodeSignal, a startup o-founded by alumnus Tigran Sloyan that is developing a skills-based assessment platform for hiring. Sloyan "got the idea for the company from an experience his co-founder and friend Aram Shatakhtsyan had while trying to find an engineering job,” writes Hall.

Times Higher Ed reporter Matthew Reisz memorializes Prof. Jing Wang, “a literary scholar who became a leading expert in Chinese literature and digital media.” Prof. Emma Teng remembers Wang as “an innovator, activist and passionate teacher” whose “long career was defined by her intellectual curiosity, drive and energy, and unwavering integrity.”

Here & Now’s Scott Tong speaks with Gideon Gil of STAT about a new technique for amputation surgery developed by researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital that recreates muscle connections and restore the brain’s ability to sense where and how one’s limbs are moving.

Writing for The Boston Globe, Gregg Martin SM ’88, PhD ’92, a retired two-star Army general and former president of the National Defense University, shares his concern for the mental health of Afghanistan war veterans. “While most troops are justifiably proud of what they did at the tactical, local level, they’re now seeing their efforts go up in smoke,” writes Martin. “They’re angry, sad, hurting, and confused, and I fear that the mental health of some of them will unravel so unrelentingly they’ll take their own lives.”

Prof. Mark Bear speaks with NPR’s Jon Hamilton about how injecting tetrodotoxin, a paralyzing nerve toxin found in puffer fish, could allow the brain to rewire in a way that restores vision and help adults with amblyopia or "lazy eye." Bear explains that: “Unexpectedly, in many cases vision recovered in the amblyopic eye, showing that that plasticity could be restored even in the adult.”

Graduate student Joy Buolamwini speaks with Good Morning America about her work uncovering bias in AI systems and how beauty data can marginalize people of color. “We can’t have social justice without algorithmic justice,” says Buolamwini.

Boston Magazine reporter Tom McGrath spotlights Prof. Tim Berners-Lee’s crusade to rethink the Web and build a new platform that can help users control the digital data they share. Berners-Lee’s platform, Solid, is aimed at ensuring that for the “first time ever, we users—not big tech companies—will be in control of our data, which means that websites and apps will be built to benefit us and not them,” writes McGrath. “That, in turn, could mean revolutions in things that really are consequential, from healthcare and education to finance and the World Wide Web itself.”

Alumna Loewen Cavill speaks with Forbes contributor Mary Juetten about her startup AuraBlue, which is creating wearable technology aimed at improving sleep for menopausal women by automatically adjusting room and mattress temperatures. “After hearing again and again how sleep loss from nighttime hot flashes has completely flipped so many women's lives upside down, I had to do something,” says Cavill. “Enabling women to stay on their career path and perform their best at the final part of their career climb is the single most important thing I can do to promote women in leadership.”

MIT has been named the number 2 university in the U.S. in U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings, reports Abigail Hess for CNBC.