In the Media

In an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times, Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, Ellen Sigal of the Friends of Cancer Research and Sherry Lansing of the Sherry Lansing Foundation underscore the importance of selecting an effective leader for the FDA. “In order to restore trust in the FDA, and restore morale within, a permanent leader with expansive experience, medical expertise and the confidence of agency staff and the American public needs to be nominated in short order,” they write.

Mario Draghi PhD ’76 has been invited to form a new government by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, writes Colleen Barry and David McHugh for the AP. Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief, “is credited with helping to save the euro has now been tapped to lead Italy, the eurozone’s third-largest economy, out of the pandemic and the worst recession since World War II.”

Alumna Tiera Fletcher ’17, a structural design engineer working on building NASA’s Space Launch System, and her husband Myron Fletcher speak with the hosts of The Real about what inspired them to pursue careers in aerospace engineering and their organization Rocket with the Fletchers, which is aimed at introducing underprivileged youth to the field of aerodynamics.

Writing for STAT, Prof. Emeritus Jeffrey Harris explores how community health centers “can play a crucial role in reducing the burden of the Covid-19 epidemic in the difficult winter months to come. They can serve as critical safety valves at a time when acute care hospitals and emergency rooms are saturated with patients.”

Prof. Earl Miller speaks with Edgar Herwick III of GBH Radio about multitasking. "You can only think of a very small bit of information, one train of thought at a time," explains Miller. "So when you think you’re multitasking, what you’re actually doing is task switching. You’re switching back and forth. The result is you have decreased productivity, increased mistakes, and a decrease of quality of thought.”

MIT researchers have developed a way to embed spinach leaves with sensors, which would allow them to serve as sensors that could monitor groundwater for contaminates, reports The Guardian. “Plants are very environmentally responsive,” explains Prof. Michael Strano. “If we tap into those chemical signaling pathways, there is a wealth of information to access.”

Axios reporter Erica Pandey spotlights Prof. Thomas Kochan’s research that finds interest in unions has been steadily rising among workers. Kochan found that “the share of non-union U.S. workers who would vote to join one jumped from 32% in 1995 to 48% in 2017.”

Forbes contributor Elizabeth Brownfield spotlights Lovebox, an MIT startup, which has created an electronic love note messenger. “When the heart on the outside of the wooden box spins, it means a love note has arrived. When the lid is lifted, a message is displayed on the screen,” Brownfield explains.

Reporting for CBS News, Sophie Lewis spotlights how MIT astronomers have uncovered evidence of what may be one of the earliest incidences of galactic cannibalism in a dwarf galaxy called Tucana II. “The findings suggest that the earliest galaxies in the universe were much more massive than previously believed,” writes Lewis. 

CNN reporter Ashley Strickland writes that astronomers have identified an extended dark matter halo around Tucana II, an ancient dwarf galaxy. "This probably also means that the earliest galaxies formed in much larger dark matter halos than previously thought," says Prof. Anna Frebel. "We have thought that the first galaxies were the tiniest, wimpiest galaxies. But they actually may have been several times larger than we thought, and not so tiny after all." 

Two high school students and their mentor, MIT postdoc Tansu Daylan, have discovered four new exoplanets located about 200 light years from Earth, reports Nora McGreevy for Smithsonian. The students were participating in the Student Research Mentoring Program, which pairs young astronomers with scientists at MIT and Harvard. “[The students] are so good at finding things that may skip your eyes, basically. It’s fun. And I really like the exchange of ideas,” Daylan adds. 

Astronomers have uncovered evidence of an extended dark matter halo around an ancient galaxy located about 163,000 light years from Earth, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. “We know [dark matter] is there because in order for galaxies to remain bound, there must be more matter than what we see visibly, from starlight,” explains graduate student Anirudh Chiti. “That led to the hypothesis of dark matter existing as an ingredient that holds galaxies together.” 

UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that MIT researchers have discovered an extended dark matter halo encircling an ancient dwarf galaxy about 163,000 light years from Earth. “The findings suggest many more of the cosmos' earliest galaxies may have formed within expansive dark matter halos,” writes Hays. 

Mashable spotlights how two high school students, who were part of Student Research Mentoring Program (SRMP) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and MIT, have discovered four new exoplanets. “Both the students took guidance from mentor Tansu Daylan, a postdoc at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and helped the students study and analyze data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).” 

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Jesse Remedios of WBUR about her new study that identifies locations where electric vehicle charging stations would have the most impact and help increase the adoption of electric vehicles. “It's important to make sure that chargers are placed where people can charge without having to delay their activities,” Trancik says.