Writing for The Boston Globe, AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin and Research Associate Luke Yoquinto explore how Greater Boston could serve as an innovation hub for aging populations. “By making groundbreaking creativity and inventiveness for older adults both seen and felt, Greater Boston and New England will be able to offer the world a new vision of old age,” they write.
Graduate student Carmelo Ignaccolo speaks with Forbes contributor Rebecca Ann Hughes about his decision to move back to his hometown in Sicily during the Covid-19 pandemic and his work helping a local organization map networks of remote working hubs, as part of an effort to help support the local economy. “It was a nice idea of combining work but also local support for communities which have been left behind, especially in southern Italy,” says Ignaccolo.
Postdoc Shriya Srinivasan has devised a new way to perform amputation surgery that would reconnect dangling nerves to the skin and help restore a patient’s sense of touch, reports Anissa Gardizy for The Boston Globe. “I would hope that in the next 10 years, people are offered the ability to have these advanced techniques incorporated into their initial surgery,” she said.
Mashable spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new type of amputation surgery that could “help amputees better control their residual muscles and sense where their ‘phantom limb’ is in space.”
New York Times reporter Ana Swanson highlights how MIT alumna Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81 has been named the new director-general of the WTO. Okonjo-Iweala will be the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. “It’s been a long and tough road, full of uncertainty, but now it’s the dawn of a new day and the real work can begin,” she said.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that political beliefs can help bring people together on social media networks, reports Brooke Crothers for Fox News. On both sides, users were roughly three times more likely to form social ties with strangers who identify with the same party, compared to "counter-partisans.”
Mario Draghj PhD ’76 has been named the new Italian prime minister, reports Giovanni Legorano and Marcus Walker for The Wall Street Journal. “His obsession with the importance of education is rooted in his personal experience. His studies paid off for the next 40 years,” said Mario Baldassarri PhD ‘77, a fellow MIT alumnus.
Institute Professor Emeritus Isadore Singer, who became “one of the most important mathematicians of his era,” has died at age 96, reports Julie Rehmeyer for The New York Times. “Dr. Singer created a bridge between two seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics and then used it to build a further bridge, into theoretical physics,” writes Rehmeyer. “The achievement created the foundation for a blossoming of mathematical physics unseen since the time of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
TIME reporter Justin Worland writes about the selection of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, an MIT graduate and the former finance minister of Nigeria, as the new director-general of the WTO. Okono-Iweala believe that “global trade can help ease the COVID-19 pandemic, tackle climate change and restore faith in the system of cooperation that has faltered in recent years,” writes Worland.
Alumna Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, a former Nigerian finance minister, has been named the new director- general of the World Trade Organization, reports William Wallace for the Financial Times. “Okonjo-Iweala sees an opportunity for the organization to rediscover some of its original purpose of raising living standards across the board and to bring its outdated rule book up to date at a time of accelerating change,” notes Wallace.
Scientific American reporter Leslie Nemo spotlights postdoctoral fellow Matheus Victor’s photograph of a petri dish full of neurons. Nemo writes that Victor and his colleagues hope the “rudimentary brain tissue will reveal why a new therapy might alleviate Alzheimer’s symptoms.”
Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham spotlights a study co-authored by research affiliate Christos Makridis that finds communities with higher levels of interconnectedness and communal trust experienced less severe Covid-19 outbreaks in 2020. Makridis and his co-authors found “when individuals have a greater concern for others, they are more willing to follow hygienic practices and social distancing.”
CNN reporter Ivana Kottasová writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds there has been a significant drop in CFC emissions and a resumption in the recovery of the ozone layer. Prof. Ronald Prinn, director of the Center for Global Change Science at MIT, said that the results were “tremendously encouraging,” adding that “global monitoring networks really caught this spike in time, and subsequent actions have lowered emissions before they became a real threat to recovery of the ozone layer.”
Second-year student Darren Lim speaks with KUOW about his work developing a website aimed at making it easier for Washington state residents to book appointment for Covid-19 vaccines. The website “shows which providers in Washington state have vaccines available, and then allows you to click through to their websites to make an appointment.”
Boston Globe reporter Tim Logan writes about how MIT has submitted design plans for the next phase of its proposal to transform the Volpe Transportation Center into a dynamic mixed-use development, including “eight office and residential towers on the 14-acre site north of Broadway.”