Writing for The Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee writes that 2015 “was a banner year for great artists and curators who just happened to be women.” In his article, Smee highlights the work of Prof. Emeritus Joan Jonas, who represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale this year.
Prof. Jeremiah Johnson has been named one of STAT's people to watch in Kendall Square in 2016. "The focus in Kendall square tends to be on commercializing discoveries, but Johnson is one of many scientists whose work shows basic research still has a home in the neighborhood," writes reporter Andrew Joseph.
Boston Globe reporter Amy Sutherland speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her love of books and the importance of reading. “If you don’t read you lose the capacity for sustained concentration,” says Turkle. “We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books.”
In an article for The Boston Globe’s special section about the 2015 Bostonians of the Year, Sharon Begley writes about the work of Prof. Feng Zhang. Begley writes that Zhang, "is one of the world’s most creative and influential biological engineers, able to see possibilities where others don’t.”
Prof. David Singer weighs in on the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise its target interest rate in this article for The Conversation. Singer writes that, “a less appreciated facet of liftoff is that the Fed’s balance sheet is now so large that raising interest rates is logistically and mechanically challenging.”
In a letter to The Boston Globe, a number of MIT faculty members argue that much more is known about climate change than a skeptic admitted in a recent opinion piece for the Globe. The authors write that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “presents strong evidence that more than half of the climate change seen in recent decades is human-driven.”
BetaBoston reporter Elizabeth Preston writes that MIT graduate students are explaining complex aerospace engineering topics to a class of fifth grader students in Georgia. Teacher Alana Davis says of the MIT students that, “I don’t think they realize what a difference they’re making in these kids’ lives.”
“MIT professor emerita Joan Jonas, who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, has been named the next visual arts mentor for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative,” writes Meredith Goldstein for The Boston Globe. Jonas was named to the initiative along with five other artists.
Nancy Szokan of The Washington Post reviews Prof. Thomas Levenson’s new book “The Hunt For Vulcan.” “At heart, this is a story about how science advances, one insight at a time,” writes Szokan. “But the immediacy, almost romance, of Levenson’s writing makes it almost novelistic.”
On NPR’s All Things Considered, Prof. Thomas Levenson speaks about his book on the 50-year search for a non-existent planet, an example, he explains, of how science really works. “It takes a great leap of the imagination to get from what you really know you know to the wacky thing that turns out to be more true.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour about her book, which explores how technology is impacting relationships. Turkle argues that people need to put down their phones and talk to each other “because it’s in conversation…that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.”
Prof. Thomas Levenson writes for The Boston Globe about the MRI Prof. Rebecca Saxe’s created of herself and her infant son. “Art does many things, but certainly one of them is to give us images that confront us with shards of the strange experience of being human,” writes Levenson. “Science, an artful craft, can do the same — as it does here.”
Matthew Price of The Boston Globe reviews “The Hunt for Vulcan” by Prof. Thomas Levenson, which chronicles the history of the search for the non-existent planet Vulcan. “The key question, as Levenson puts it, is ‘what happens when a prediction fails to find its match in nature?’” writes Price.
Prof. Rebecca Saxe writes for Smithsonian about an MRI she created of herself and her infant son. Saxe writes that while maternal values are "venerated, they are usually viewed in opposition to other values: inquiry and intellect, progress and power. But I am a neuroscientist, and I worked to create this image; and I am also the mother in it.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Nancy Shohet West highlights Prof. Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine’s paper sculptures, which are on display at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts. “We started getting interested a number of years ago in curve creases and what was possible mathematically,” explains Prof. Demaine. “We started making models and then turned those into sculpture.”