Professor Karilyn Crockett speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about the impact of The “Big Dig” – Boston’s highway project – on the city, its people and urban planning. Crockett “argues that despite all the incentives to build, build, build, the costs of that building would eventually force city residents to think the unthinkable,” says Coss. “So the anti-highway fight becomes a moment of imagining possibilities,” says Crockett.
MIT has been named to Times Higher Education’s 2024 World’s Best Universities list, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. “The largest edition of the World University Rankings 2024 includes 1,904 universities—up from 1,799 last year—from 108 countries and regions, assessing research-intensive universities across 18 performance indicators covering their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and internationalization,” writes Rodriguez.
Forbes contributor Michael Nietzel spotlights how MIT was named among the top universities in the U.S. for the economic value it returns to its students, according to a new ranking by Degreechoices. “At MIT, students earn $111,222 on average ten years after attending, and it takes those receiving federal aid under a year, on average, to pay back their total cost of attendance,” writes Nietzel. “Those numbers are consistent with MIT’s reputation for producing a large number of STEM graduates with very strong earning power.”
Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul writes that MIT researchers have developed a new long-range, low-power underwater communication system. Installing underwater communication networks “could help continuously measure a variety of oceanic datasets such as pressure, CO2, and temperature to refine climate change modeling,” writes Paul, “as well as analyze the efficacy of certain carbon capture technologies.”
In the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking, MIT has been honored as one of the best colleges in the United States, reports Emily Sweeney for The Boston Globe. This year’s ranking put a new emphasis “on student outcomes, such as graduation rates and graduate salaries,” explains Sweeney.
MIT has been named one of the top colleges in America in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking, report Kevin McAllister and Tom Corrigan for The Wall Street Journal. “The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking emphasizes how much a college improves its students’ chances of graduating on time, and how much it boosts the salaries they earn after graduation,” explain McAllister and Corrigan.
MIT AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin speaks with New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo about why the tech industry tends to ignore older people. “The market is aging,” says Coughlin. “The market is numerous. The market has got more money than the people they have been building products for.”
Olivier Faber MArch ’23, Tim Cousin MArch ’23 and Eytan Levi MArch/MSRED ’21 co-founded Roofscapes Studio – an MIT startup that is transforming rooftops into green roofs to provide outdoor spaces in cities and combat the effects of climate change, reports Julia Chatterley for CNN.
MIT has been named one of America’s Top Colleges in Forbes’ annual roundup, reports Emma Whitford and Janet Novack for Forbes. The annual list “showcases 500 of the finest U.S. colleges, ranked using data on student success, return on investment and alumni influence,” explain Whitford and Novack.
Prof. Tod Machover speaks with Boston Globe reporter A.Z. Madonna about the restaging of his opera ‘VALIS’ at MIT, which features an AI-assisted musical instrument developed by Nina Masuelli ’23. “In all my career, I’ve never seen anything change as fast as AI is changing right now, period,” said Machover. “So to figure out how to steer it towards something productive and useful is a really important question right now.”
Prof. Carlo Ratti co-authors an article for The Boston Globe that examines the “power and pitfalls of condensing cities into small, specialized utopias,” like Barbie Land and Los Alamos. “To see diversity at work, we need look no further than Barbenheimer itself,” they write. “This accidental double feature turned our empty movie theaters into pop-up cities, tiny but diverse, with two tentpole films like adjacent storefronts on the street.”
Gus Solomons Jr. '61, a “groundbreaking force in modern dance” has died at 84, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “Teacher, student, dancer, and choreographer, [Solomons Jr.] was based in New York City and commuted to Boston to spend each Tuesday teaching,” writes Marquard. “Performances with numerous dance groups in both cities packed his calendar, even before he made history as the first Black member of the legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company.”
Gus Solomons Jr. ’61, “a leading figure in modern and postmodern dance,” has died at 84, reports Gia Kourlas for The New York Times. Solomons began dancing at age 4, but didn’t begin training until he was a first year student at MIT, where he earned a degree in architecture. “Over his long career, Mr. Solomons danced with many companies and many choreographers, including Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham,” Kourlas notes. “He broke ground as the first Black dancer to join the Cunningham company.”
Nature reporter Andrew Robinson spotlights “Atlas of the Senseable City” a new book co-authored by Prof. Carlo Ratti. The book is a “highly illustrated collection of digital maps,” Robinson notes, adding that it “analyzes four essential urban dimensions: motion, connection, circulation and experience.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a wearable ultrasound device that can be used to detect early signs of breast cancer, reports Rachel Keller and Bob Dumas for Boston 25 News. “This technology will be able to let you know if there’s a question mark, if there’s an anomaly, in your breast tissue,” says Prof. Canan Dagdeviren.