Postdoc Heather Lee speaks with NPR’s Maria Godoy about how a law that allowed Chinese business owners to travel to China and bring back employees fueled a rise in the number of Chinese restaurants in America. "The number of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubles from 1910 to 1920, and doubles again from 1920 to 1930," explains Lee.
Wall Street Journal reporter Brenda Cronin writes that MIT researchers have identified a group of consumers that routinely buy products that fail. “You’ve got to think about who’s buying” the product, explains Prof. Duncan Simester. “If it’s these harbingers buying them….and if they keep buying them…then you’ve got a problem.”
CNBC’s John Schoen writes that MIT researchers have identified a group of consumers that repeatedly buy unpopular products. "You might have thought this was a category-specific effect — someone who buys the wrong makeup," explains Prof. Catherine Tucker. "But the strongest effects were going across category.”
MIT researchers have found that certain consumers are more prone to buying products that end up failing, reports Peter Coy for Bloomberg Business. “It's not just that certain people try out new products that turn out to be unsuccessful,” writes Coy. “It's that they keep going back for more of them.”
Boston Herald reporter Jessica Van Sack writes that Grove, an MIT startup dedicated to enabling people to grow their own produce, will award five of its indoor garden/fish tank systems to local schools. “When you have a full ecological system, it becomes more than just planting seeds and watching them grow,” explains co-founder Gabe Blanchet.
Research scientist Caleb Harper speaks with Steph Yin of Popular Science about his work developing personal food computers, and the vegetables he grew for Thanksgiving using this technology with students in Boston-area schools. Harper says that food computers can help “kids understand the production of food.”
Emily Price writes for The Guardian about MIT research scientist Caleb Harper’s work to develop sustainable, urban agriculture. “Depending on how you eat, about 30-40% of your diet could be produced urban or peri-urban and would be a lot better for you if it was,” says Harper.
Ryan Duffy reports for The Huffington Post on research scientist Caleb Harper’s food computer, designed to improve food-production efficiency. "The math is simple and staggering: we need to produce at least 50 percent more food to feed nine billion people by 2050," explains Duffy.
MIT spinoff C2Sense has developed a chip that gives computers a sense of smell and could be used to detect spoiling food, reports Klint Finley for Wired. The company’s goal is to make “wireless sensor chips so cheap that they could be built into a product’s packaging.”
New York Times reporter Emily Weinstein writes about MIT graduate J. Kenji López-Alt’s new cookbook, “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.” Weinstein writes that López-Alt is “a gifted explainer, making difficult concepts easy to grasp for those of us with a lifelong lack of aptitude for the sciences.”
Prof. John Lienhard and Dr. Kenneth Strzepek write for The New York Times about the need for Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to successfully share water from the Nile. “The world needs to get good at sharing water, and right away,” they write. “The alternative is frequent regional conflicts of unknowable proportions.”
Washington Post reporter Matt McFarland writes that researchers in the CityFARM group, which is devoted to developing scalable urban farming systems, hope to start an open-source movement for vertical farming. Caleb Harper, founder of CityFARM, explains that his focus “is on getting the tools out there.”
In an article for Nautilus, Elizabeth Preston writes about Prof. Lydia Bourouiba’s work examining how rain can spread crop diseases. Through a close examination of high-speed images, Bourouiba found that how raindrops bounce off different plant leaves “is really at the root” of the spread of pathogens among plants.
In an article for Fortune, Senior Lecturer Jason Jay writes that innovation is needed to satisfy growing global food demand. “Advanced information technology, improved communications systems, robotics, drones, and other new technologies have the potential to boost agricultural yields and reduce waste while tempering environmental degradation," writes Jay.
A group of experts convened by MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Laboratory recently published a report on plans for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, reports William Davison of Bloomberg News. The report’s authors urge greater coordination between Egypt and Ethiopia “to ensure water is shared fairly during periods of reduced flows.”