Writing for The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray spotlights Accion Systems, an MIT startup that makes “small thrusters that use an electric current to turn a liquid propellant into a stream of ionized gas. The result is gentle but effective thrust that can be used to adjust a satellite’s orbit or slow it down at the end of its life, so it can fall harmlessly back to earth.”
Boston Globe reporter Kevin Lewis highlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds “voter turnout increased by several percentage points among municipal employees in New York City whose hourly wages were affected by increases in the minimum wage.”
Boston.com reporter Erin Kuschner spotlights Umamicart, an online grocery store specializing in products from Asian American- and immigrant-led businesses that was founded by alumna Andrea Xu ‘20. Xu called Umamicart the “culmination of what I’ve lived through my life.” She added that: “My parents are Chinese, and they moved to Spain in their early 20s. They worked in Chinese restaurants and [opened] their own Chinese restaurants and just worked hard for their entire life. So that’s the entrepreneurial inspiration for me.”
New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz spotlights a study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that demonstrated how Medicaid coverage could improve Americans’ financial health. “It’s a misnomer — it’s not just to insure your health,” says Finkelstein. “It’s actually to protect you economically in the event of poor health.”
TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater writes about Inkbit, a CSAIL spinout, which is developing self-correcting 3D printing technology. “Its primary differentiator from the slew of existing 3D printers is a vision and AI system designed to identify and correct mistakes during the printing process,” writes Heater.
Ariel Ekblaw, founder and director of MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, speaks with 7 News about the Blue Origins spaceflight. “We are at that cusp now of interplanetary civilization,” she said. “As the economy grows around space exploration, it will become more accessible and prices will drop, and that will become a huge success for everyone involved.”
MIT researchers have developed a new type of stent based on kirigami, the Japanese art of folding and cutting paper, which is “designed to improve localized drug delivery for diseases that affect tubular organs such as the oesophagus and bowel,” writes Cynthia Keen for Physics World. “We view these approaches as having the capacity to transform the patient experience by reducing the need to take medications and thereby significantly improving drug adherence,” says Prof. Giovanni Traverso.
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights Venti Technologies, an MIT startup developing self-driving cargo trucks for seaports. “The trucks can automatically transport containers to dockside, where cranes can load them onto ships,” writes Bray. “Or they can pick up containers as they’re unloaded, and move them to staging areas where they can be transferred to other ships.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, research scientist Lisa D’Ambrosio emphasizes how “caregiving faces an innovation gap. Although there is plenty of inventive energy pouring into some caregiving needs, the core tasks of caregiving — the ones requiring the most intensive, even laborious attention — appear to be last in line for a technological helping hand.”
Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, emphasizes the importance of reaching net-zero emissions as fast as possible. “By pushing natural gas—which is indeed cleaner than coal, but it’s still a fossil fuel that releases a lot of CO2 and more importantly, a lot of methane—we are actually hurting renewables,” says Paltsev.
MIT researchers are developing an electronic skin that can withstand sweating, reports Karen Kwon for Inside Science. The researchers “punched holes on the e-skin to match the size of sweat pores and the distance between them. Then, inspired by kirigami, the team cut away even more material between two holes in an alternating pattern,” writes Kwon. The resulting pattern “could tolerate bending and stretching more than the conventional e-skin with simple holes.”
Salon reporter Amanda Marcotte spotlights a study by MIT researchers that finds correcting misinformation on social media platforms often leads to people sharing more misinformation. Research affiliate Mohsen Mosleh explains that after being corrected Twitter users " retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language."
Professor Danielle Wood joins Bloomberg Markets: The Close to discuss billionaires travelling to space and the sustainability and ethics of space travel. “Do we want to reproduce some of the same mistakes…on places like the moon and Mars that we’ve done on Earth,” says Wood. “Or would we rather preserve and conserve the natural beauty of these environments from the beginning of human activity?”
Paul Page at The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study co-authored by researchers at MIT, which shows that despite the pandemic, companies were largely able to maintain their supply-chain sustainability goals and increase their focus on social welfare. “It was surprising to see the focus on social issues,” said research scientist David Correll. “The notion of social issues as part of sustainability goals is something we didn’t expect to see generally accepted, but in fact there was an increase in interest in the respondents.”
A new paper co-authored by Prof. James Poterba finds that not all projects to enhance infrastructure are worth investing in, reports David Harrison for The Wall Street Journal. “If we are going to commit a significant amount of resources to new infrastructure projects or to maintain our existing infrastructure, bringing some discipline to the way we decide what we’re spending on is an important element of this,” says Poterba.