La República reporter David Luna speaks with 15 MIT researchers, postdoctoral fellows and students from Colombia about their work and experience at MIT. Luna writes that “what sets the Institute apart is its commitment to open, borderless, shared learning,” adding that “MIT understands the true meaning of education: mind and hand to move forward.”
In an article for The New York Times, Prof. David Rand examines what makes people susceptible to believing false or misleading information. Rand and his co-author write that their research “suggests that the solution to politically charged misinformation should involve devoting resources to the spread of accurate information and to training or encouraging people to think more critically.”
Popular Mechanics reporter David Grossman writes that MIT researchers have developed a new imaging technique that allows entire neural circuits in the brain to be explored at speeds 1,000 times faster than currently available methods. The new technique could allow scientists to “spot where brain diseases originate or even the basics of how behavior works.”
Quartz reporter Dan Kopf writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how the lack of jobs for workers without college degrees in American cities is contributing to income inequality. “Gentrification in some major cities may be as much a result of the decline in opportunities for people without college degrees as it is an influx of highly educated, highly paid workers,” writes Kopf.
MIT researchers have developed a new high-resolution technique to image the brain that could be used to create more precise maps of the brain and identify the causes of brain disease, reports Megan Thielking for STAT. “If we can figure out exactly where diseases begin,” explains Prof. Edward Boyden, “that could be pretty powerful.”
MIT researchers have found that a small gelatinous structure, called the tectorial membrane, gives the human ear its extraordinary ability to detect faint sounds, reports the Xinhua news agency. The findings “could help devise ways to treat hearing impairment via medical interventions that alter the pores or the properties of the fluid in the membrane.”
HealthDay reporter Robert Preidt writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that long stays in space can cause spinal muscles to shrink and become fatty. “As NASA plans for future missions to Mars and beyond, these results can be used to guide future countermeasures,” says graduate student Katelyn Burkhart.
Prof. David Autor speaks with Greg Rosalsky of NPR’s Planet Money about his new research on employment trends in the U.S. showing that cities are no longer meccas of opportunity for workers without college degrees. “We need to carefully examine our assumptions that superstar cities are the land of opportunity for everyone,” says Autor.
Writing for the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff highlights Prof. David Autor’s research showing the bleak economic outlook for Americans without college degrees. Aronoff argues the most important less from this work is that, “the economic issue that matters most — maybe the only issue that really matters at all — is education.”
New York Times reporters Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui highlight Prof. David Autor’s new research that shows cities do not offer workers without college educations the same economic opportunities that they did in the past. Autor found that the declining urban wage premium has been caused by the “disappearance of ‘middle-skill jobs’ in production but also in clerical, administrative and sales work.”
Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt highlights Prof. Emeritus Olivier Blanchard’s address to the American Economic Association, in which he argued that governments are overly concerned with debt. “Blanchard’s case revolves around the fact that economic growth rates in modern times are usually higher than interest rates. This pattern means that governments can often repay their debts more easily than people expect,” Leonhardt explains.
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that researchers determined how fast a supermassive black hole spins by measuring a star being swallowed by the black hole. Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham explains that, “this measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant.”
Astronomers from MIT have detected echoes in X-ray flares emitted by a black hole consuming stellar material, writes Charles Q. Choi for Space.com. The findings “might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes,” writes Choi, “but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.”