National Geographic reporter Wendy Koch writes that colleges are developing ways to produce their own energy, highlighting MIT's efforts to become energy independent and reduce emissions. “There’s an emerging movement in higher education toward resiliency,” says Julie Newman, director of MIT’s Office of Sustainability. MIT’s plans will enable the university to “withstand anything that happens around us.”
At a recent seminar at MIT, alumnus J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, managing culinary director for SeriousEats.com, demonstrated how to sear a piece of steak, writes Peggy Hernandez for The Boston Globe. “Lopez-Alt’s ‘Searing and Roasting’ presentation last week was part of a symposium complementing MIT’s ‘Kitchen Chemistry’ course,” explains Hernandez.
Alumna Tish Scolnik, CEO of GRIT, speaks with Justine Hofherr of Boston.com about how an MIT class inspired her career. Scolnik explains that the idea for GRIT, an MIT startup that produces wheelchairs that allows users to traverse rugged terrain, “started back at MIT as a class project.”
In an article for CNN about Instagram accounts that highlight scientific developments, Esra Gurkan features the MIT account. Gurkan writes that the MIT Instagram account combines “both science and beauty, providing unique views of the amazing architecture found on their campus and, of course, the quirks and ingenuity of being a student there.”
In an article posted by Scientific American, Sara Reardon writes that MIT researchers have shown that patients with Alzheimer’s can still form new memories and that lost memories could potentially be recalled using optogenetics. The findings “may allow more targeted stimulation, especially once researchers understand what happens to memories after they leave the hippocampus.”
Huffington Post reporter Ann Brenoff writes about a new MIT study that finds that Alzheimer’s patients may one day be able to recover lost memories using optogenetics. “The findings raise the hope — and possibility — that future treatments might indeed reverse some of the memory loss in early-stage Alzheimer’s patients.”
As part of their Women in Politics: College Edition series, MSNBC highlights undergraduate Sophia Liu’s work in student government at MIT. Liu explains that she was drawn to student government because she wanted “to meet more MIT students, and because I hoped to start giving back to a community that I treasured and believed was incredibly special.”
Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha writes that MIT researchers have found evidence that memories lost due to Alzheimer’s disease could potentially be recalled using optogenetics. Cha writes that the research “raises the hope of future treatments that could reverse some of the ravages of the disease on memory.”
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee write for The New York Times about the significance of AlphaGo, an AI system, beating the human champion of the strategy game Go. AlphaGo’s victories, “illustrate the power of a new approach in which instead of trying to program smart strategies into a computer, we instead build systems that can learn winning strategies almost entirely on their own.”
CBS Boston reports on a new study by MIT researchers that shows that memories lost due to Alzheimer’s disease may be recovered. The research shows “that while it may be hard for people with early Alzheimer’s to access memories, they are still retrievable.”
MIT researchers have found that cell stimulation may one day be a tool in helping Alzheimer’s patients recall lost memories, according to The Guardian. The findings raise “the possibility of future treatments that reverse memory loss in early stages of the disease.”
In this BBC News video, postdoc Brad Hayes explains how his algorithm uses transcripts of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speeches to compose tweets. “The real reason why this works is because Donald Trump tends to use these very short, imperative statements,” Hayes says.
In an article for BloombergView, Noah Smith highlights a paper by Prof. Deborah Lucas that found that “federal lending did as much as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to stimulate demand and keep the economy from crashing.”
New Scientist reporter Rebecca Boyle writes that MIT researchers have found that taking a longer route in and out of the city decreases road congestion by 30 percent. “If we are able to remove a couple of cars from the morning commute, that’s going to save everyone else a lot of time,” explains graduate student Serdar Çolak.
MIT researchers have developed an environmentally-friendly method of generating electricity, reports Michael Casey for FOX News. Casey writes that the “breakthrough is critical because most of the batteries that power everything from smartphones to computers are made of toxic materials like lithium.”