Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham write for The Washington Post about a study by MIT researchers that examines how poverty impacts life expectancies across the country. “What's especially striking is that the poor live even shorter lives in some places than others. They have longer life expectancies in affluent, cities with highly educated populations,” they explain.
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that people who live in expensive, well-educated cities tend to live longer, reports Jim Zarroli for NPR. Zarroli explains that “the study suggests that the relationship between life expectancy and income is not iron-clad, and changes at the local level can make a big difference.”
Bloomberg News reporter John Tozzi writes about a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds a growing disparity between the life expectancies of rich and poor Americans. The researchers found that, “top earning Americans gained 2 to 3 years of life expectancy between 2001 and 2014, while those at the bottom gained little or nothing.”
The Washington Post's Courtney Kueppers writes about the importance of disconnecting from technology, even if only briefly. She quotes Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book to emphasize her point: “To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, at least some of the time.”
In an article for New Scientist, Liz Else writes about Prof. Sherry Turkle’s new book, in which she calls for people to put down their phones and talk to one another in person. Else writes that Turkle “is really making a passionate bid for us to remain human in the way we always have been.”
Boston Globe reporter Amy Sutherland speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her love of books and the importance of reading. “If you don’t read you lose the capacity for sustained concentration,” says Turkle. “We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour about her book, which explores how technology is impacting relationships. Turkle argues that people need to put down their phones and talk to each other “because it’s in conversation…that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.”
A new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Joseph Doyle found that juveniles who were incarcerated were less likely to return to school and more likely to return to jail as adults, reports Chris Sweeney for Boston Magazine. “If you want to be tough on crime, locking up juvenile offenders is counterproductive,” says Doyle.
Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College found that collaborative groups containing more women showed higher collective intelligence, writes Geoff Colvin for Fortune. The findings indicate that because on average women score higher on social sensitivity, the greater proportion of women in a group, the better.
In a piece for The New York Times, Prof. Michel DeGraff and Molly Ruggles write of the need for Haitian students to learn in their native Creole, as opposed to French. “Creole holds the potential to democratize knowledge, and thus liberate the masses from extreme poverty,” DeGraff and Ruggles explain.
Jena McGregor reports for The Washington Post on a paper coauthored by MIT graduate student Jason Sheltzer that indicates that women are under represented in life sciences laboratories run by elite male scientists. The numbers were significantly less than those in labs headed by females.
In a piece for Slate, Jane Hu examines a new study that finds that elite male faculty members in the life sciences tend to hire fewer women than their female counterparts. “Fifty-two percent of biology Ph.D.s are women, but their representation shrinks to 39 percent at the postdoc level, and only 18 percent at the tenured professor level,” Hu reports.
Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney examines a new study that highlights gender bias in elite research labs. “We do think that maybe this shows the need for elite faculty members to make a stronger, more proactive effort to reach out to talented women,” says graduate student Jason Sheltzer.
“The study suggests that when female trainees are shut out of the top labs, they don’t get access to the resources, networking, and other opportunities that are critical to advancing their careers in academic science,” The Chronicle of Higher Education writes of a new study on gender bias in elite research labs.
“Of particular concern, men who have achieved elite status by virtue of awards they have won -- in other words, the men whose labs may be the best launching pads for careers -- are the least likely to hire women who are grad students and postdocs,” writes Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed.