CBS Boston’s Liam Martin joined students from the MIT Rocket Team as they celebrated NASA successfully landing a probe on Mars. “Just thinking that this is one step closer to humanity being able to live on Mars, it’s really exciting,” says undergraduate Dayna Erdmann.
MIT has been named one of the top universities for producing the most employable graduates on Times Higher Education’s global employability ranking. “In addition to its world-leading courses, Massachusetts Institute of Technology also offers career-enhancing programmes for undergraduates, industry leaders and the general public,” explains Times Higher Education.
Graduate student James Clark speaks with Boston Globe reporter Andres Picon about his study that provides evidence laser technology could be used to attract aliens. “A laser produces all of its power in one wavelength,” explains Clark, “so the way that it’s detectable is not that it’s more powerful than the sun, but that it’s very distinct from the sun.”
Fast Company reporter Melissa Locker writes that a study by MIT researchers examines the feasibility of harnessing laser technology to try to attract the attention of aliens. Locker explains that the researchers found that if contact was made, “lasers could potentially be used to send Morse code-like message via light pulses.”
Writing for Popular Mechanics, David Grossman highlights a feasibility study by MIT researchers that provides evidence that lasers could be used to try to locate aliens. Grossman explains that the light would be targeted toward “areas like Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, and TRAPPIST-1, a star around 40 light-years away with seven exoplanets in orbit.”
USA Today reporter Brett Molina writes that MIT researchers have found laser technology could be used to attract the attention of aliens. The researchers found “creating a 1- to 2-megawatt laser focused through a telescope aimed toward space could produce a light strong enough to stand out from the energy produced by the sun."
UPI reporter Tauren Dyson writes that a new feasibility study by MIT researchers shows that existing laser technology could be used to create a beacon light that could attract attention from as far as 20,000 light years away.
MIT researchers have found that laser technology could be used to attract attention from alien astronomers, reports Becky Ferreira for Motherboard. The researchers found that amplifying an infrared laser could “produce a signal that would outshine the Sun’s infrared emissions tenfold, an anomaly that would stand out to a smart species observing our solar system from a distant exoplanet.”
Boston Globe reporter Dugan Arnett spotlights MechE senior Alex Hattori, a six-time national yo-yo champion. Hattori, who was originally inspired to attend MIT so that he could take a course where students design and build yo-yos, explains that he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop competing. “I love yo-yoing as much as I did the first day,” he says.
Writing for STAT, Justin Chen spotlights graduate student Eugene Lee’s work mapping the brain of worms in an effort to gain a better understanding of how worms, and animals in general, learn. “With science,” says Lee, “you might not know exactly where the research will take you, but you trust that when you arrive all the effort will have been worth it.”
WGBH reporter Gabrielle Emanuel speaks with Research Affiliate Catherine D’Ignazio about how she launched the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon as a graduate student at MIT, and how the hackathon inspired new innovations in the breast pump industry. “In no other space of technology would the technology provide for such a terrible experience,” says D’Ignazio of the state of the breast pump.
Reporting for Boston 25, Bob Dumas highlights the Warrior-Scholar Project, which introduces soldiers to universities such as MIT in an effort to help them transition back to civilian life. “We want to take our enlisted veterans, many of them first-generation college students, and expose what life would be like for them at a top-tier school,” explains the project’s executive director.
CNBC reporter Courtney Connley spotlights Mareena Robinson Snowden, the first black woman to earn a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT. Snowden’s advisor, Senior Research Scientist Richard Lanza, says that, “Mareena has that rare combination of passion, enthusiasm and technical and policy expertise."
Gigi Levy Weiss writes for Forbes about the importance of social change in tech education. Highlighting MEET (Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow), an MIT-supported non-profit that connects and empowers Palestinian and Israeli students, Weiss notes that alumni of the program “have gone on to study, work and lead in the global tech industry, as well as in NGOs and government roles.”
Researchers have developed a handheld device, inspired by spiders, to allow people to move in zero-gravity, writes Daniel Oberhaus for Motherboard. “I want to be able to move freely in 3D space,” explains Xin Liu, arts curator at the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, “so I design the technologies that allow me to do that.”