Writing for The Guardian, Prof. Kate Brown argues that a better understanding of the health ramifications of radioactivity is needed before nuclear power is expanded. “Before we enter a new nuclear age, the declassified Chernobyl health records raise questions that have been left unanswered about the impact of chronic low doses of radioactivity on human health,” writes Brown.
In a letter to The Boston Globe, Prof. Malick Ghachem argues that Haiti’s history cannot be defined as a story of poverty. Ghachem writes that under colonial slavery, many people in Haiti “produced a great deal of riches for the rest of the world, and the single-minded pursuit of these riches is what accounts for the poverty of the many.”
Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Kenneth Cukier on the Economist Radio podcast Babbage about her new book “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future.” “In many ways we all live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, or Chernobyl,” says Brown, “and that’s what I’d like us to be more conscious of as we talk about these issues now.”
Axios reporter Steve LeVine highlights how MIT is offering a new edX course focused on the future of work. The course will “track technological history going back to the 19th century, income inequality, labor groups, automation, German manufacturing and more,” LeVine explains.
An excerpt published in National Geographic from a book by Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, examines how Henry Heinz’s push to improve the quality of his company’s ketchup helped usher in new food safety regulations. Blum writes that Heinz realized “consumer distrust of the food supply would be far more expensive to manufacturers like him than the cost of improving the food itself.”
Writing for Atlas Obscura, Abigail Cain spotlights how Jana Dambrogio, a conservator at MIT Libraries, is building a dictionary cataloging the historical practice of letterlocking. Dambrogio explains that to accurately recreate some of the more intricate locks requires “looking at thousands of artifacts and having the ability to remember them.”
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Michael Floreak about her book exploring the origins of food regulation in the U.S. The book, “reminded me why these rules are so important and what a thin line they are between us and the bad old days of the 19th century when cookbook authors had to warn their readers about fake food,” she explains.
Writing for the American History Magazine, Sarah Richardson highlights the trailblazing path of Ellen Swallow Richards. Richardson notes that Swallow Richards was a “one-woman parade of firsts: first female student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first female fellow of the American Association of Mining and Metallurgy, first female professor at MIT.”
On this episode of BBC’s Witness podcast, Prof. Ioannis Yannas speaks about his work developing artificial skin made of collagen. Used to cover burns too large for skin grafts, the collagen membrane kept infection out and “solved the problem of having the patient grow back their own skin organ, which was unheard of at that time,” explains Yannas.
NBC Boston reporter Frank Holland visits MIT to discuss the Institute’s ties to slavery, which is the subject of a new undergraduate research course. “MIT and Slavery class is pushing us into a national conversation. A conversation that’s well underway in the rest of country regarding the role of slavery and institutions of higher learning,” said Dean Melissa Nobles.
Prof. Junot Díaz spoke to students at the University of Missouri about how sexual violence and slavery is responsible for the mixing of races. “My work, among many of the things that it wrestles with, wrestles with the kind of, the often invisible and vigorously disavowed, long shadow of enslavement,” Díaz explains to Carolina Moren of Huffington Post.
In an article for the Financial Times about the best economics books of 2017, Martin Wolf highlights new works by Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Peter Temin. Wolf writes that in Temin’s “important and provocative book, [he] argues that the US is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with ever fewer households in the middle.”
WBUR’s Bruce Gellerman profiles Nobel laureate Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, noting that his “stories of accomplishments and failure are legendary at MIT.” Prof. Peter Fisher, head of the Physics Department, says that Weiss, "is a tremendously intelligent man, but he’s got more perseverance, I think, than anyone else.”
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz spotlights the work of Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, who was named one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the “decades of determination” he invested in detecting gravitational waves. Moskowitz writes that Weiss is still, “as energized as ever by the thrill of scientific discovery.”
Forbes reporter Ethan Siegel writes about how Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss and two of his colleagues were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work detecting gravitational waves, “the culmination of theoretical and experimental work dating all the way back to Einstein.” Siegel adds that the detection of gravitational waves, “has transformed our idea of what's possible in astronomy.”