Mark Shanahan writes for The Boston Globe that the organizers of HUBweek, an innovation-themed festival designed to showcase Boston’s leadership in education, medicine, technology and the arts, gathered at a launch party last week. As part of HUBweek, MIT will host “Solve,” an event designed to bring together leaders in a variety of areas to tackle global challenges.
In a Scientific American podcast, Cynthia Graber examines MIT research showing typing speed can indicate if a person is fatigued and can help diagnose certain diseases. Typing speed could be used as a “safety feature on software programs for night shifts” or could diagnose Parkinson’s “by tracking changes in someone’s ability to manipulate the common keyboard.”
Jillian Eugenios writes for CNN Money about Evaptainers, a startup conceptualized in an MIT course that has developed a refrigerator that runs on water and sunlight. The refrigerator was created in an effort to improve the food production and storage process in developing countries by cutting down on spoilage.
Conor Gaffey writes for Newsweek about new body armor being developed by researchers at MIT and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The design is based on fish scales and “mimics the overlapping layers of hard scales and soft tissues found in certain fish, using 3D printers,” reports Gaffey.
BetaBoston reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes about how graduate student Steven Keating's thirst for knowledge may have saved his life. After experiencing phantom odors, Keating urged his doctors to perform a brain scan, which revealed a tumor. Since then, Keating has “open-sourced” his illness, and become a “champion of a movement to provide patients with more information about their health.”
A team of researchers from MIT and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has designed a flexible body armor inspired by fish scales, reports Kelsey D. Atherton for Popular Science. “The researchers were able to greatly increase the strength of the armor while only modestly reducing its flexibility,” writes Atherton.
Lisa Cohen writes for The New York Times Style Magazine about the work of MIT Professor Emerita Joan Jonas, who has been selected to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. “If the idiosyncratic qualities of Jonas’s work have made it inscrutable to some, its power is undeniable,” writes Cohen.
Norman Leventhal, an MIT alumnus, life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation and real estate developer, died Sunday, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. Leventhal is known for building and renovating some of Boston’s most renowned landmarks, including Center Plaza and South Station.
BetaBoston reporter Sophie Chamas writes about MIT alumna Hala Fadel and her work founding the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Pan-Arab Region in an effort to nurture entrepreneurial growth in the Middle East. “I wanted to create a forum for people to meet and learn from others,” Fadel explains.
Researchers at MIT have developed software that tracks typing speed in order to help diagnose Parkinson’s disease, writes Alexandra Ossola for Popular Science. Ossola explains that the researchers "hope that this type test could eventually lead to earlier diagnoses of Parkinson’s.”
A new MIT-Harvard study examining two years of edX courses found that nearly 40 percent of online learners are teachers, reports Kirk Carapezza for the PBS NewsHour. The findings have researchers wondering how to better design online courses "to meet teachers’ needs.”
MIT and Harvard have released a comprehensive new report examining MOOCS offered by edX over a two-year period, reports Carl Straumsheim for Inside Higher Ed. The researchers found that while more than half of total enrollment was in edX computer science courses, “learner demographics and intent vary by the courses they take.”
Steve Lohr of The New York Times writes about how allowing patients like brain cancer survivor and MIT graduate student Steven Keating greater access to their medical records can not only improve patient health, but also benefit medical research. The sharing of medical records could be a “huge crowdsourcing opportunity for research,” Keating explains.
Brett Smith reports for redOrbit on a new study by Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa on the development of human language. Miyagawa explains his finds that the brain “at some point 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, hit a critical point, and all the resources that nature had provided came together in a Big Bang and language emerged pretty much as we know it today.”
A study examining courses offered through edX, the nonprofit learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, found that teachers are enrolling in MOOCS in large numbers, reports Casey Fabris for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Of the 200,000 participants who responded to a survey about teaching, “39 percent of them said they were current or former teachers.”