Boston.com reporter Natalie Gale spotlights the upcoming MIT Sustainability Summit, which will be held this year on April 26. The event, called ‘Systems Change,’ “aims to help bridge the ‘collaboration gap’ on climate solutions, bringing together ideas from different sectors like science, business, and policy making speed up solutions,” writes Gale.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Stuart Madnick explains the growing risk of cybersecurity attacks and how to address them. “In many cases, companies fall victim to these attacks because they aren’t aware of the risks that they are taking, such as not confirming the quality of a vendor’s security or monitoring whether their outgoing data traffic is being transferred to improper destinations,” writes Madnick. “Organizations can, and must, do these things better to stop the continued rise in data breaches.”
Emily Calandrelli SM '13 speaks with NPR host Adam Bearne about using her science background to encourage children to explore the world of science. Calandrelli has just published a new book of family friendly experiments called, “Stay Curious and Keep Exploring: Next Level.”
Harry Rein '15, MEng '16 and Chris Tinsley MBA '20 co-founded ShopMy, a marketing platform designed to connect content creators with brands and monetize their content, reports Laruen Forristal for TechCrunch. “ShopMy’s marketing platform equips creators with the tools they need to earn from their product recommendations, like building digital storefronts, accessing a catalog of millions of products, making commissionable links and chatting directly with companies via mobile app,” explains Forristal.
Radia – a startup founded by Mark Lundstrom '91, SM '93, MBA '93 – has unveiled the “WindRunner,” a large cargo plane equipped with wind turbine blades aimed at transforming wind energy across the United States, reports Jennifer Hiller and Brian McGill for The Washington Post. “Radia estimates the larger turbines could reduce the cost of energy by up to 35% and increase the consistency of power generation by 20% compared with today’s onshore turbines,” they write.
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that high exposure to implausible and outlandish false claims can increase the belief in more ambiguous-seeming ones, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Scientific American. The researchers “conducted five experiments with nearly 5,500 participants in all in which they asked these individuals to read or evaluate news headlines,” writes Stokel-Walker. “Across all the experiments, participants exposed to blatantly false claims were more likely to believe unrelated, more ambiguous falsehoods.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, and Jeffrey Proudfoot, a research affiliate with Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, make the case that while board members are increasingly being tasked with a company’s cybersecurity strategy, they are often not prepared to deal with attacks. “With the increasing mandate on boards to serve as the strategic cybersecurity guards of their companies, more needs to be done to guard the guards themselves,” they write.
Reflex Robotics, a startup co-founded by several MIT alumni, has developed a remotely-operated humanoid robot capable of handling tasks such as grabbing an item off a shelf, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. The robot’s hardware “is an in-house design, featuring a ‘torso’ mounted to a base that allows the arms and sensors to dynamically move up and down,” explains Heater. “It makes for a surprisingly dexterous robot that can access shelves at a variety of heights, while maneuvering tight spaces. The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.”
Prof. Pulkit Agrawal and graduate student Gabriel Margolis speak with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the simulation research and technology used in developing intelligent machines. “Simulation is a digital twin of reality,” says Agrawal. “But simulation still doesn’t have data, it is a digital twin of the environment. So, what we do is something called reinforcement learning which is learning by trial and error which means that we can try out many different combinations.”
Birago Jones SM '12 and Karthik Dinakar SM '12, PhD '17 co-founded Pienso – an AI platform that “lets users build and deploy models without having to write code,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Pienso’s flexible, no-code interface allows teams to train models directly using their own company’s data,” says Jones. “This alleviates the privacy concerns of using … models, and also is more accurate, capturing the nuances of each individual company.”
Paris Smalls PhD '22 founded Eden GeoPower – a startup that uses “a new kind of fracking that uses jolts of electricity, rather than blasts of water, to shatter underground rocks,” reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “While the process can work for extracting oil and natural gas, Smalls mainly wants to tap into a squeaky-clean energy source — the natural heat of the planet’s crust,” writes Bray.
MIT’s new Climate Policy Center, directed by Prof. Christopher Knittel, will aim to produce “policy-relevant research on shorter timescales, while also pursuing more typical, long-term peer-reviewed work,” reports Andrew Freeman for Axios.
Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with NPR reporter Juliana Kim about airline safety and the risks associated with flying. According to Barnett, "from 2018 to 2022, the chances of a passenger being killed on a flight anywhere in the world was 1 in 13.4 million. Between 1968 to 1977, the chance was 1 in 350,000,” writes Kim.
Prof. Mike Stonebraker co-founded DBOS, a serverless software platform, that aims to “put a database system at the bottom of the technology stack as close to the bare metal as possible where the operating system usually sits,” reports Ron Miller for TechCrunch. “Bare metal is a term used to describe the pure hardware layer where no software exists. Flipping the OS and the database is a bold and revolutionary idea,” explains Miller.
Will Dunham at Reuters writes about new research from Prof. Evelina Fedorenko and others, which found that polyglots “who spoke between five and 54 languages” used less brain activity when processing their native language. "We think this is because when you process a language that you know well, you can engage the full suite of linguistic operations - the operations that the language system in your brain supports," says Fedorenko.