In the Media

In a forthcoming book, photographer Jessica Wynne spotlights the chalkboards of mathematicians, including Professor Alexei Borodin’s and Associate Professor Ankur Moitra’s, reports Clara Moskowitz for Scientific American. 

A new climate clock developed by a team from the MIT D-Lab is being projected onto the side of the Green Building, reports Arianna MacNeill for Boston.com. “The MIT community, whether it’s students, faculty, staff or alumni, is already seeking ways to face the climate challenge,” according to the D-Lab team. “Our team created the MIT Climate Clock to signal the urgency of climate action to our community and beyond.”

Boston Globe reporter Anissa Gardizy writes that Apple has announced it will be leasing office space in Kendall Square. “Big tech companies have long wanted to be close to MIT,” writes Gardizy. “This area of Cambridge is home to offices for Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, and MIT’s new building is across the street from another under-construction building mostly occupied by Google.”

Gizmodo reporter Victoria Song writes that a new study by researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) finds that “not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership.”

In an article for The Boston Globe, Prof. Rafi Segal and Lecturer Marisa Morán Jahn explore how architecture can play a role in long-term care solutions. “As we rebuild our nation’s care infrastructure in this moment of economic recovery, we need to consider how the design of our cities and homes can enable the active participation of caregivers, elders, and people with disabilities in our democracy,” they write.

Writing for The New York Times, senior lecturer Robert Pozen and Alexandra Samuel explore how to create a hybrid workplace. “There is no single right way to design a hybrid workplace. But asking the right questions can help each team shape what we call the Goldilocks plan — with not too much or too little remote work,” they write.

Boston Globe reporter Matt Berg spotlights how a team from the MIT D-Lab has created a climate clock, which is currently being projected on the exterior of the Green Building at MIT in an effort to showcase key data about climate change. “The display highlights goals of the fight against climate change, such as limiting the annual temperature increases to no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit,” writes Berg.

Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a robotic dog outfitted with a tablet that allows doctors to visit with emergency room patients remotely. “The robot could therefore avoid the risk of exposure to Covid-19 by healthcare professionals and help save the personal protective equipment necessary for each visit,” writes Ruggiero Corcella of Corriere della Sera.

Profs. Elsa Olivetti and Christopher Knittel speak with J.D. Allen of WSHU about the future of renewable energy in New England. Olivetti notes that the MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium is aimed at “looking at the role of industry in helping to accelerate the transition to reduce carbon emissions, and the idea is that by convening a set of cross economy, leading companies with the MIT community, we can identify pathways towards decarbonization particularly focused on those industries outside of the energy producing sector.”

Writing for Science, Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, explores the growth of science journalism. Blum notes that in her view the most important contribution for science reporters is “to portray research accurately in both its rights and its wrongs and stand unflinchingly for the integrity of the story.”

Michael Hecht of MIT’s Haystack Observatory speaks with GBH’s Edgar Herwick about how the MIT-designed MOXIE instrument has successfully extracted oxygen out of Martian air. “I've been using the expression ‘a small breath for man, a giant leap for humankind,'” says Hecht, who served as the PI for MOXIE.

Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights how MIT researchers have showed that “an AI program trained to verify that code will run safely can be deceived by making a few careful changes, like substituting certain variables, to create a harmful program.”

Boston Globe reporter Charlie McKenna spotlights how MOXIE, an MIT-designed instrument onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, has successfully produced oxygen on Mars. “What’s amazing to me is that this instrument has been through two years of kind of brutal treatment, right? And it’s behaving as if nothing happened, as if we just turned it off and turned it on again right away,” says Michael Hecht of MIT’s Haystack Observatory.

Josué Velázquez Martínez, director of the MIT Sustainable Logistic Initiative, speaks with Tim Heffernan of The New York Times Wirecutter about how offering online shoppers the option to select slower shipping times in an effort to reduce carbon emissions could help make e-commerce a more environmentally-friendly option. 

In an article for New Scientist, Vijaysree Venkatraman reviews a new book by Kate Darling of the Media Lab, which explores whether we should think of robots as more like animals than humans. “Unlike animals, robots are designed, peddled and controlled by people, Darling reminds us. Her timely book urges us to focus on the legal, ethical and social issues regarding consumer robotics to make sure the robotic future works well for all of us,” writes Venkatraman.