Prof. William Deringer speaks with David Westin on Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week about the power of early spreadsheet programs in the 1980s financial services world. When asked to compare today’s AI in the context of workplace automation fears, he says “one thing we know from the history of technology - and certainly the history of calculation tools that I like to study – is that the automation of some of these calculations…doesn’t necessarily lead to less work.”
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.
Prof. Sherry Turkle shares the benefits of being polite when interacting with AI technologies, reports Webb Wright for Scientific American, underscoring the risks of becoming habituated to using crass, disrespectful and dictatorial language. “We have to protect ourselves,” says Turkle. “Because we’re the only ones that have to form relationships with real people.”
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.”
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.”
Ms. Magazine reporter Kalindi Vora spotlights Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller and the legacy of her work in the field of science. “Through her work, [Keller] showed that objectivity, the key value of the sciences, is in fact always partially subjective,” writes Vora. “Her legacy demonstrates that diversifying the sciences will improve research and discovery.”
Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, whose “studies on gender and science, the role of language in shaping how we see and study the world,” and analysis of key concepts in modern biology contributed to the history and philosophy of modern biology, has died at age 87, reports Marga Vicedo for Nature. Keller “proposed abandoning the idea that genes are master molecules that provide the blueprints for and direct the development of an organism,” writes Vicedo. Keller also showed how language, including people’s choice of metaphors, influences the directions of scientific research.”
Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, “scientist, feminist scholar, and author of influential publications on genetics, developmental biology and scientific language,” has died at 87, reports Angela N. H. Creager for Science. “After training in physics and working in mathematical biology, Evelyn turned her attention to understanding how societal constructs, especially gender, guide science,” writes Creager. “She brought feminist insights into the history and philosophy of biology and sparked broader interdisciplinary conversations about the role of metaphor and rhetoric in science.”
Professor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, a MacArthur genius grant recipient, “theoretical physicist, philosopher and writer who viewed science through a feminist lens,” has died at 87, reports Georgina Ferry for The Guardian. Keller’s work explored “how the practice of science had come to be perceived as intrinsically masculine, and to think about what a gender-neutral science might look like,” writes Ferry.
Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, a MacArthur genius grant winner who brought attention to gender bias in science has died at 87, writes Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “She was an icon,” says Prof. Sherry Turkle. Turkle notes that Keller’s “analysis was profound because you realized that the very words that you used to talk about doing an experiment — or learning, or what it meant to understand — was deeply gendered.”
Prof. David Kaiser discussed the significance of Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger’s research conducting experiments concerning quantum entanglement, for which they were honored with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. “Clauser got a lot of pushback from scientists who didn’t think this was even part of science,” said Kaiser. “He had to have a lot of stick-to-itiveness to publish his result.”
The new MIT Museum opens to the public this weekend in its new location in Kendall Square, which is “quite significant because this is the heart of innovation,” notes GBH’s Jared Bowen. Museum visitors will not only get a sense of MIT’s long history of innovation, but also get a sense of the scientific process, with exhibits featuring “part of the machinery that was used to help sequence the human genome, [and] the star shade petal that allowed NASA to photograph exoplanets,” Bowen explains.
Prof. Emeritus Leo Marx - "a pioneering student and then teacher of American studies” - died on March 8 at the age of 102, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. Marquard notes that Marx was “a professor so thoroughly engaged with his students that he took delight when, on occasion, one nudged him aside to offer an alternative view.”
Isabella Cueto, a Cuban American journalist who has worked as a newspaper and radio reporter in Florida, South Carolina, and California, has been named the first recipient of the Sharon Begley-STAT Science Reporting Fellowship, reports STAT. “Named in honor of Begley, an award-winning science writer for STAT who died in January from complications of lung cancer, the fellowship combines a paid reporting position at STAT with an educational component provided through the prestigious Knight Science Journalism program.”
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.”