In the Media

"Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor (MIT's Jonathan Gruber) into Mr. Mandate."

"If we take institutional economics seriously, and I think we should, then one has to wrestle with the utility of 'countervailing institutions'."

"The first volume of a 'book of cancer knowledge' has been published, which scientists say will speed up the search for new cancer drugs."

"As he argued in a piece that appeared Monday in The Times’s Opinion Pages, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at M.I.T., claims that the world’s parking lots are deeply flawed."

"What has been the story of global poverty over the past decade? What role has aid played? What should replace the millennium development goals after 2015?"

"The basic contours of Mitt Romney’s approach to Social Security reform are coming into focus, and the results aren’t pretty."

"Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the majority of solar research was going into improving the performance of cells, and bringing down their cost. Instead, they wanted to find out if the arrangement of the cells could improve their input."

"In a new study, published in Nature, a group of researchers from MIT showed for the first time that it is possible to activate a memory on demand, by stimulating only a few neurons with light, using a technique known as optogenetics."

"This squishy ball, inspired by an equally cute kid’s toy, is a breakthrough in a new class of three-dimensional structures that can buckle reversibly."

"Buckling buildings are normally bad news, but a new a 3D shape dubbed the 'buckliball', created by researchers at MIT and Harvard University, could allow architects to create structures with collapsible ceilings or walls without the need for moving parts."

"Six schools — Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, and University of California, Berkeley — have effectively cornered the market on being 'the best' in academic research, according to the latest reputation survey from Times Higher Education."

"Truth be told, Russia is fairly high tech."

"Ever since George Washington became the first president of the United States, politicians, economists, bankers, philosophers and citizens without titles have been arguing about the deficit and the national debt."

"A group of graduate students from MIT is planning to visit Capitol Hill on Tuesday to deliver a petition with more than 10,000 signatures from people urging Congress to boost federal support for scientific research. The group helped publicize its petition by circulating a YouTube video in which MIT students explain their scientific research and its importance to the national economy."

"The buckliball is the first morphable structure to incorporate buckling as something to be desired, according to MIT. Potential uses include a building with a collapsible roof or wall – perhaps something more high-tech than the retractable roof at Safeco Field where the Seattle Mariners play baseball."