The Associated Press spotlights the work of Prof. Joshua Angrist, one of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Economics. Angrist was honored “for working out the methodological issues that allow economists to draw solid conclusions about cause and effect even where they cannot carry out studies according to strict scientific methods.” Of winning a Nobel prize, Angrist said, “I can hardly believe it. It's only been a few hours and I am still trying to absorb it."
Prof. Joshua Angrist, Prof. David Card of the University of California at Berkeley and Prof. Guido Imbens of Stanford have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for “pioneering ‘natural experiments’ to show real-world economic impacts,” reports Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollard for Reuters. “The Nobel committee noted that natural experiments were difficult to interpret, but that Angrist and Imbens had, in the mid-1990s, solved methodological problems to show that precise conclusions about cause and effect could be drawn from them,” write Johnson and Pollard.
New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek explores the work of Prof. Joshua Angrist, who was honored as a recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work developing “research tools that help economists use real-life situations to test big theories, like how additional education affects earnings.” Angrist and his fellow recipients David Card and Guido Imbens “ushered in a new phase in labor economics that has now reached all fields of the profession,” said Prof. Trevon D. Logan of Ohio State.
Prof. Joshua Angrist was named a winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Economics for “a body of work stretching across decades that has sought to answer the complex questions at the crux of modern political discussion through the lens of proven research,” writes Andrew Brinker for The Boston Globe. “It’s just the greatest honor a person could have,” said Angrist. “It’s a high point of my life.”
Noubar Afeyan ’87, a member of the MIT Corporation, speaks to Guy Raz of NPR’s How I Built This podcast about his journey toward co-founding Moderna and becoming a part of history through the rapid creation and production of vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic. “The reality is when you have a pandemic and you’re a public company and you have material data, our sense was that we at a high level had to put that [information] out there,” says Afeyan. “One of these things we learned, because none of us had been in this situation before, is that we are going to get criticized no matter what we did. So, we just had to do what we thought was right.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with David Pogue of CBS Sunday Morning about what’s causing the current supply chain breakdowns. "The underlying cause of all of this is actually a huge increase in demand,” says Sheffi. “People did not spend during the pandemic. And then, all the government help came; trillions of dollars went to households. So, they order stuff. They order more and more stuff. And the whole global markets were not ready for this."
Ayr Muir ’00, SM ’01 speaks with Washington Post reporter Trisha Pasricha about how the goal behind his plant-based restaurants, Clover Foods Labs, is to use plant-based foods to help mitigate the climate crisis. “The overarching mission is global warming. And what we’re trying to do is help meat-lovers eat more meals that have no meat in them,” Muir said. “The more success we have with that, the greater impact we have on the environment.”
Forbes contributor David Bressan writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that images taken by the Perseverance rover show that Mars’ Jezero crater was once a lake. “The fine-grained clay and carbonate layers deposited in the fossil lake are capped by a diamict, a sedimentary rock consisting of a mix of large and small boulders,” writes Bressan. “Scientists think the boulders were picked up tens of miles upstream and deposited into the former lakebed by episodic flash floods, suggesting a catastrophic climate change in Mars' distant past.”
Prof. Tanja Bosak and Prof. Benjamin Weiss speak with Popular Science reporter Kate Baggaley about how their analysis of images captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover found that the Jezero crater was once a lake and river delta. “The geological history of the Jezero crater could help scientists understand how the Red Planet changed from being wet and possibly habitable into a harsh desert world,” writes Baggaley. “Definitely we hit the jackpot here,” says Weiss,
MIT has been named one of the top 20 universities in the world for studying cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, reports Taylor Locke for CNBC.
Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Brendan Murray and Enda Curran spotlight the MIT Beer Game, a role-playing exercise that is an annual rite-of-passage for first-year Sloan MBA students that “models the supply-and-demand dynamics among a brewery, distributor, wholesaler, and retailer.” “The pandemic revealed flaws that were latent all along our globalized supply chains,” says Prof. John Sterman. “It’s urgent that we figure out how to improve them so we are prepared for the next shocks, whether another pandemic, civil unrest, climate change—or all of the above.”
TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater spotlights RFusion, a fully-integrated robotic arm developed by MIT researchers that “uses an RF antenna and camera mounted to an arm to find lost objects.”
Gizmodo reporter Andrew Liszewski writes that MIT researchers “used a high-resolution video camera with excellent low-light performance (the amount of sensor noise has to be as minimal as possible) to capture enough footage of a blank well that special processing techniques were able to not only see the shadow’s movements, but extrapolate who was creating them.”
Researchers from MIT and other institutions analyzed images captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover and found that Mars’ Jezero crater was a lake 3.7 billion years ago, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “The new information shows the importance of sending rovers to explore the surface of Mars,” writes Strickland. “Previous images captured by orbiters had shown that this outcrop resembled the kind of fan-shaped river deltas we have on Earth. Perseverance's images show definitive proof of the river delta's existence.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that a new study co-authored by MIT scientists finds that the Jezero crater on Mars previously hosted a big lake and river delta. “The newly analyzed photos may provide an intriguing glimpse” into Mars’ transformation to a dry landscape,” writes Wall.