Writing for Nature, Marinko Sarunic and Cynthia Toth memorialize the life and work of Joseph A. Izatt PhD '91, who “had a special gift, and commitment, to reaching out and working with students and clinicians to create transformative technology." After undergraduate studies at MIT, Izatt focused on applied optics for his graduate work, with his mentors Prof. Michael Feld and Prof. James Fujimoto.
PBS Space Time host Matt O’Dowd highlights research by Prof. David Kaiser and graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve delving into the composition of primordial black holes and potentially confirming the existence of color-charged black holes. “It may stand to reason, that colorful black holes were once the most natural thing in the world,” O’Dowd muses.
New York Times reporter David Gelles spotlights David Keith PhD '91 who “believes that by “intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.” “There’s plenty of uncertainty about climate responses,” says Keith. “But it’s pretty hard to imagine if you do a limited amount of hemispherically balanced solar geo that you don’t reduce temperatures everywhere.”
CNN’s Ashley Strickland reports on the discovery of an exoplanet on the path to becoming a “hot Jupiter,” providing clues about the evolution of these massive Jupiter-like planets closely orbiting their host stars. As Prof. Sarah Millholland explains: “This system highlights how incredibly diverse exoplanets can be. They are mysterious other worlds that can have wild orbits that tell a story of how they got that way and where they’re going.”
Prof. David Kaiser joins Grammy winning producer Jack Antonoff and host Matt White of Sing for Science to discuss the nature and perception of time. Kaiser helps illustrate, “the idea that we're experiencing things that can seem to take a long time or short time, and that has to do with our state in the world, and not only about what the clock is saying on the wall.”
Researchers from MIT have developed “sustainable, offshore, hydrodynamic,” artificial reef structures capable of dissipating “more than 95% of an incoming wave’s total energy,” reports Nick Warburton for Materials World. The design “comprises vertical cylinders with four rudder-like slats attached to them, so that water can flow through the structure to generate 'swirling masses of water' or large eddies,” explains Warburton.
MIT researchers have improved upon the diffusion models used in AI image generation, reports Alok Jha for The Economist. Working with electrically charged particles, the team created “Poisson flow generative models,” which “generate images of equal or better quality than state-of-the-art diffusion models, while being less error-prone and requiring between ten and 20 times fewer computational steps,” Jha explains.
Researchers at MIT have discovered the composition of primordial black holes, “potentially discovering an entirely new type of exotic black hole in the process,” reports Jacopo Prisco for CNN. “We were making use of Stephen Hawking’s famous calculations about black holes, especially his important result about the radiation that black holes emit,” says Prof. David Kaiser. “These exotic black holes emerge from trying to address the dark matter problem — they are a byproduct of explaining dark matter.”
Postdoctoral associate Adam Forrest Kay’s book “Escape From Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory,” is reviewed by Andrew Crumey for The Wall Street Journal. “Consistently interesting” and “energetically written,” the book, “eloquently explains the history behind hydrodynamic quantum analogs,” writes Crumey.
Researchers at MIT have “analyzed how primordial black holes with a trait known as color charge could have formed in the soup of particles that composed the early universe,” reports Leah Crane for New Scientist. “They’re not really colors,” explains Prof. David Kaiser. “If we zoomed in with a microscope we wouldn’t see colors with our eyes, but it’s a way of accounting for the fact that nature seems to only allow color-neutral combinations.”
Prof. Sara Seager, Prof. Robert Langer and Prof. Nancy Kanwisher have been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize for their work in the three award categories: astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience, respectively, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. According to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, this award honors scientists with outstanding research “that has broadened our understanding of the big, the small and the complex,” writes Nietzel.
Harrison White '50, PhD '55, “a theoretical physicist-turned-sociologist who upended the study of human relations and society” has died at age 94, reports Michael Rosenwald for The New York Times. “With his background in physics, Professor White viewed humans as nodes within social networks,” writes Rosenwald. “Those networks operated in complex ways that shaped economic mobility, financial markets, language and other social phenomena.”
Prof. Netta Engelhardt talks to New Scientist’s Thomas Lawton about the possibility of singularities existing outside black holes. Theorists can now probe singularities from a deeper perspective, using insights into the possible quantum foundations of gravity. This new approach “flips the script” on how we think about singularities, says Engelhardt.
Prof. Anna Frebel joins Arun Rath of WGBH’s All Things Considered to discuss her recent discovery of some of the universe’s oldest stars, an out-of-this-world identification made the help of MIT undergraduates Hillary Andales, Ananda Santos and Casey Fienberg. “When you meet someone new, you want to know what their name is, how old they are, maybe where they live and what they do, right?” says Frebel. “We do the same with all the astronomical objects in the sky.”
For the first time ever, researchers at MIT have observed electrons form “fractional quasiparticles without enabling the influence of a magnetic field,” reports Daniel Garisto for Quanta Magazine. This discovery “may carry the seeds of long-sought quasiparticles with stable memories that could underpin a new and powerful approach to quantum computing.”