A new study by researchers from MIT and Tulane finds that the MBTA subway network faces the threat of flooding caused by rising sea levels over the new 50 years, reports the Associated Press. “A 100-year storm would completely inundate the Blue Line and large portions of the Red and Orange lines by 2030, researchers found. By 2070, a 100-year storm would flood nearly the entire network.”
A new study by researchers from MIT and Tulane University finds that rising seas have the potential to inundate the MBTA’s network and underscores the importance of fortifying the system’s infrastructure, reports Andrew Brinker for The Boston Globe. “Severe flooding is a grave challenge for the T,” explains graduate student Michael Martello.
A new paper co-authored by Prof. James Poterba finds that not all projects to enhance infrastructure are worth investing in, reports David Harrison for The Wall Street Journal. “If we are going to commit a significant amount of resources to new infrastructure projects or to maintain our existing infrastructure, bringing some discipline to the way we decide what we’re spending on is an important element of this,” says Poterba.
Provost Marty Schmidt speaks with TopUniversities.com reporter Chloe Lane about how MIT has maintained its position as the top university in the world on the QS World University Rankings for 10 consecutive years. “I am honored to have been a part of the MIT community for almost 40 years,” says Schmidt. “It’s a truly interdisciplinary, collaborative, thought-provoking place that encourages experimentation and pushes you to expand your mind. I think it’s a wonderful place to call home.”
Writing for The Conversation, MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub Co-Director Randolph Kirchain and postdoctoral associate Hessam AzariJafari explore how building lighter-colored, more reflective roads could potentially help lower air temperatures and reduce heat waves. “As cities consider ways to combat the effects of climate change, we believe strategically optimizing pavement is a smart option that can make urban cores more livable,” they write.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that air pollution can enhance lightning sparked by wildfires, reports Nikk Ogasa for Science. Ogasa notes that the researchers “also found that air pollution did more than enhance lightning; wildfire smoke more than tripled the intensity of thundershowers.”
MIT researchers have created 3D models of spiderwebs to help transform the web’s vibrations into sounds that humans can hear, writes Angela Moore for Reuters. “Spiders utilize vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders,” says Prof. Markus Buehler. “We have recorded these vibrations from spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, basically learning the spider’s language.”
In a new data sonification project, a team of MIT researchers have translated the vibrations of a spider’s web into music, writes Maddie Bender for Motherboard. The team "used the physics of spiderwebs to assign audible tones to a given string’s unique tension and vibration," writes Bender. "Summing up every string’s tone created an interactive model of a web that could produce sound through manipulation or VR navigation."
A team of MIT researchers have translated the vibrations of a spider’s web into music, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. “Spiders live in this vibrational universe,” says Prof. Markus Buehler. “They live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now access. One of the things we can do with this instrument with this approach is we can, for the first time, begin to feel a little bit like a spider or experience the world like the spider does.”
Forbes contributor Andrea Morris spotlights how MIT researchers have created a virtual reality experience that allows people to experience a spider web’s vibrations as music. "The team is working on a study exploring the boundaries between the kinds of compositions we humans create from synthetic instruments and our own conventional tuning, and compositions created from instruments that have been crafted and tuned by other biological beings, like spiders," writes Morris.
MIT researchers have created a new audio-visual virtual reality that can provide a sense of what it’s like to be a spider by converting a spider web’s vibrations into sounds that humans can hear, reports Ian Morse for New Scientist. “The spider web can be viewed as an extension of the body of the spider, in that it lives within it, but also uses it as a sensor,” says Prof. Markus Buehler. “When you go into the virtual reality world and you dive inside the web, being able to hear what’s going on allows you to understand what you see.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with CNN’s Zachary Wolf about how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected supply chains, impacting the supply of ketchup packets and causing delays in computer chips. “During the pandemic many industries reduced their orders and suppliers reduced their orders and capacity even further (because they anticipated that future orders will also be reduced),” says Sheffi. “When the economy came back, there was no capacity to snap right back.”
Visiting scientist Judah Cohen speaks with Lindsey Carnett of the San Antonio Report about whether climate change may have contributed to extreme winter weather in Texas. “As the Arctic gets warmer than [it normally is] – the risk of severe winter weather increases very linearly,” says Cohen. “When the Arctic is at its warmest, it’s a huge jump in the likelihood or the probability of getting severe winter weather to many eastern U.S. cities.”
Forbes contributor Sharon Goldman spotlights Prof. Yossi Sheffi’s new book, “The New (Ab)Normal,” which examines how companies shifted their operations during the Covid-19 pandemic. Goldman writes that in the book, Sheffi “details how businesses grappled with the chaos of the pandemic, and explores what enterprises are likely to do to survive and thrive in 2021 and beyond, after the pandemic starts to subside.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with Wall Street Journal reporters Sarah Krouse, Jared S. Hopkins and Ana Wilde Mathews about the challenges posed by distributing the Covid-19 vaccine across the country. “Everything has to come together—the packaging, the dry ice, the vials, the material itself. It all has to come together to the same place and have enough of it and exactly the right people there ready to take it,” says Sheffi. “Right now, there’s no conductor to the symphony,” just many parts that each need to work.