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In the Media

The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal reporter Jared Diamond spotlights how Aaron Leanhardt PhD ’03 went from an MIT graduate student who was part of a research team that “cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history” to inventor of the torpedo baseball bat, “perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.” Leanhardt’s new baseball bat design is aimed at helping “batters make more contact at a time when strikeouts are at an all-time high,” Diamond explains. “The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball.”

Chronicle

Chronicle visits Prof. Skylar Tibbits and the Self-Assembly Lab to see how they are embedding intelligence into the materials around us, including furniture, clothing and buildings. Prof. Caitlin Mueller and graduate student Sandy Curth are digging into eco-friendly construction with programmable mud by “taking a low-cost material and a really fast manufacturing system to make buildings out of very, very low climate impact materials.” Says Tibbits: “MIT is a really wild place, and most people know of it for its technical expertise…But what I am really inspired by is on the creative end, the design spectrum. I think the mix of those two is super special.” He adds: “We can ask the right questions and discover new science, and we can also solve the right problems through engineering.”

Michigan Farm News

MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”

Chronicle

“AT MIT innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-earth creativity,” notes Chronicle during a visit to campus to peek behind the scenes at the innovations underway at the Institute. Classes taught by Prof. Erik Demaine are a “mix of rigorous math and creative collaboration,” host Anthony Everett explains, highlighting how Demaine’s work in computational origami has found its way into practical applications in such fields as medicine, architecture and space exploration. “I think origami provides a really powerful tool for making transformable shapes,” Demaine relates. 

NPR

Berly McCoy and Sushmita Pathak of NPR’s Short Wave spotlight research by postdoctoral associate Funing Li and his team on tornado occurrence. The researchers used “historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere,” explains McCoy. 

The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber spotlights a paper by Prof. David Autor that finds import tariffs have had little effect on job creation and preservation in the U.S., particularly in parts of the country with tariff-protected industries. Autor and his colleagues found “manufacturing employment didn’t increase, though it also didn't fall (other research found that U.S. companies had a hard time selling more products abroad, which may help explain why manufacturers didn't add jobs),” Weber explains. “Worse than that, retaliatory tariffs from trading partners led to job losses, especially in agriculture.”

Marketplace

Ben Armstrong, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center, speaks with Marketplace reporter Samantha Fields about the impact of tariffs on manufacturing in the U.S. “Things like magnets, which are really critical for batteries and other core electronic technologies, we’ve really lost the capacity to build in the U.S.” Armstrong adds that it’s possible to build that capacity here, but “it takes a long time, and it takes really significant investment,” likely from the government and from companies.

Scientific American

Rachel Feltman of Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” podcast visits MIT.nano to learn more about MIT’s “clean laboratory facility that is critical to nanoscale research, from microelectronics to medical nanotechnology.” Prof. Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano, explains: “Maybe a fifth of all of M.I.T.’s research depends on this facility…from microelectronics to nanotechnology for medicine to different ways of rethinking what will [the] next quantum computation look like. Any of these are really important elements of what we need to discover, but we need all of them to be explored at the nanoscale to get that ultimate performance.” 

The New York Times

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Catherine Wolfram and Columbia Prof. Glenn Hubbard make the case that to help end the war between Russia and Ukraine, the U.S. should “impose sanctions on any company or individual – in any country – involved in a Russian oil and gas sale.” They write: “Ideally, the policy would pressure Russia into negotiations, where its removal could be part of a deal. If not, the United States would still collect billions annually, which could help fund Mr. Trump’s proposed tax cuts.” 

Forbes

Prof. David Sontag, Monica Agrawal PhD '23, Luke Murray SM '22, and Divya Gopinath '19, MEng '20 co-founded Layer Health - an AI healthcare startup that is applying large language models (LLMs) to help clinicians with medical chart reviews and data abstraction, reports Seth Joseph for Forbes. “The same chart review problem we’re solving with our clinical registry module is faced by clinicians at the point of care,” says Sontag. “For example, one of our next modules will focus on real-time clinical decision support to help automate clinical care pathways, leading to more reliable, high-quality care."

Community Updates

Featured Multimedia

Christopher Palmer is an Associate Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an Affiliate with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, based here at MIT. He studies consumer credit, and household financial decision making. In this episode, President Kornbluth and Palmer discuss household financial decision making around mortgages, car loans, and how best to save for retirement.

In the new Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers course, students design, build, and test an electric rocket engine turbopump, preparing them for a career at the forefront of the aerospace industry. In just 13 weeks, students design, build, and test a laboratory-scale electric turbopump, the type of pump used in liquid rocket propulsion systems to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber under high pressure.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed an all-in-one 3D printing approach called “Xstrings.” Part design tool, part fabrication method, Xstrings can embed all the pieces together and produce a cable-driven device, saving time when assembling bionic robots, creating art installations, or working on dynamic fashion designs.

The SeaPerch underwater robot, a “do-it-yourself” maker project, is a popular educational tool for middle and high school students. Developed by MIT Sea Grant, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) teaches hand fabrication processes, electronics techniques, and STEM concepts, while encouraging exploration of structures, electronics, and underwater dynamics. SeaPerch II builds on the original program, adding robotics and elements of marine and climate science.

Liam Hines is excited about the practical and societal benefits of his work, about pinpointing the challenges posed by existing technologies and finding tangible solutions toward energy sustainability. Liam is a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. He works on advanced fission systems and waste management with Professors Koroush Shirvan and Haruko Wainwright.

Neuroscientist Sidney Diamond is a researcher in Pawan Sinha’s Lab in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where, at 99 years old, he studies the science of visual learning and helps to decode the mysteries of brain development. In addition to the invaluable decades of experience Sid brings to his work, he serves as a mentor and inspiration to his colleagues.

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