School of Science

Prof. Emerita Nancy Hopkins speaks with ABC News about her work advocating for gender equality in academia and "The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” a new book by Kate Zernike, a journalist who originally covered Hopkins’ efforts for The Boston Globe. Hopkins notes that when Zernike’s article was published, “this deluge happened. I mean, it was just overwhelming. And women were writing from all over the country and the world and saying, thank you. Thank you for telling the story. It's my story.”

Boston Globe reporter Ryan Cross spotlights Chroma Medicine, a biotech startup co-founded by MIT researchers that is “developing a new class of gene editing technologies that could control how our genetic code is read without changing the code itself.” Cross explains that Chroma Medicine’s technology could “have broad applications for treating both rare and common diseases.”

Prof. Josh McDermott co-authored a study that explores how music and podcasts can impact a person’s mood, reports Charlotte Hu for Popular Science. “There’s this big cultural shift in the way that we consume music and other audio that really happened over the last decade,” says McDermott. “It’s just changed the way that people live and probably has a lot of important effects.”

Prof. Kerry Emanuel and First Street Foundation have found that based on warming climate conditions and patterns, future storms will increase in intensity and travel farther north up the East Coast, reports Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston for Bloomberg.

Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with CNN reporters Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon about future hurricane trends. “The bottom line is the models that are being used by the existing [catastrophe] modeling industry are based strictly on historical statistics,” says Emanuel. “The historical record isn’t very long, and it isn’t very good when you get back to before 1970.”

Undergraduate student Sasha Horokh speaks with GBH reporters Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel about the ongoing war in Ukraine. “I think it's important that we do not get used to this, and to keep supporting Ukraine,” says Horokh.

Former U.S. Representative John Olver PhD '61, has died at age 86, reports Steve LeBlanc for the Associated Press. “[Olver’s] quiet demeanor and wry sense of humor concealed a razor-sharp understanding of the issues facing the American people and a deep faith in our ability to solve them together,” says Democratic U.S. Representative James McGovern.

Aera Therapeutics, founded by Prof. Feng Zhang, is working to “debut a type of protein nanoparticle that it believes can be used to ferry all sorts of genetic medicines around the body,” reports Lisa Jarvis for Bloomberg.

Prof. Feng Zhang founded Aera Therapeutics, a startup working to deliver curative genetic medicine to hard-to-reach parts of the body, reports Ryan Cross for The Boston Globe. “If Aera’s approach works in people, it could broaden the reach of genetic therapies, which currently have limited clinical applications – partly because there aren’t enough methods for getting those medicines to hone in on the right cells,” writes Cross.  

Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights several MIT startups that are using AI to generate 3-D environments. Common Sense Machines, an MIT startup, is “trying to enhance the creativity of its app by adding a bit of, well, common sense,” writes Pressman. “Human babies form an understanding of the world by developing abstract models. Common Sense Machines is trying to add similar models to its 3D world builder.”

MIT scientists have developed a new way of colliding ultracold molecules while controlling the rate at which they react, reports Martijn Boerkamp for Physics World. “Our work is a step to achieve quantum control over molecular collisions and reactions and to map out more broadly the collisional properties of these molecules with the goal of finding a deeper understanding,” explains Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle.

Ronald McNair PhD ’76 was a part of NASA’s class of 1978, which was the first group of astronauts to include women, people of color, and scientists, reports Alexandra Witze for Nature. The class of 1978 “was a time of huge change for NASA,” writes Witze. “It was time for a new type of astronaut for a new type of spaceship.”

Prof. Sara Seager and her colleagues write for Physics Today about how the SpaceX Starship could help transform astrophysics missions. “Assuming it is successful, Starship will dramatically enhance our space capabilities in ways that will qualitatively alter how astrophysics missions can be built,” write Seager and her colleagues.

Research scientist Mary Knapp and her collaborators are working on a concept for The Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (Go-LoW), a space-based observatory comprised of small satellites aimed at making low-frequency radio waves visible, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “I learned back in my undergrad days that there was this part of the spectrum we couldn’t see,” Knapp explains. “It really just struck me that there was this unexplored part of the universe, and I want to explore this part of the sky for the first time.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have studied the mind of polyglots and uncovered how language-specific regions of the brain respond to different and familiar languages, reports Natalia Mesa for Science. The researchers found that “the activity in the brain’s language network fluctuated based on how well participants understood a language. The more familiar the language, the larger the response,” writes Mesa. “There was one exception to the rule: when participants heard their native tongue, their language networks were actually quieter than when they heard other familiar languages.”