In the Media

Writing for The Boston Globe, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif highlights the fundamental contributions made by universities across the United States in the advancement of scientific and technological innovations, and the role of government funding in these sectors. “Since World War II, the ideas born in university research laboratories have helped to make America great,” writes Reif. “Universities’ contributions should be recognized, and the systems that allow them to contribute should not be recklessly derailed.” 

The MIT Chapel was named by Financial Times readers as one of the best places of worship in the world. “The Eero Saarinen-designed chapel at MIT is otherworldly,” they write. “This is what spiritual contemplation probably looks like in another galaxy.” 

“Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning,” the newest exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center, features “an orchestra of sculptures meticulously curated with hidden instruments to create sound,” reports Marianna Orozco for The Boston Globe. The show will be on display through July 2025. 

MIT’s Artfinity festival kicked off with a performance of “SONIC JUBILANCE” at the newly opened Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, reports Maddie Browning for WBUR. The campus-wide festival, which runs through May 2, is open to the public and features student, faculty and staff participation in “concerts, augmented reality experiences, exhibitions, films and more,” writes Browning. Artfinity is an opportunity "to show that the arts are very important and very central to the lives of people at MIT,” said Prof. Marcus Thompson, festival co-lead.

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with GBH’s Boston Public Radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about the CARD Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “There is a legitimate role for credit in our society for those who use it appropriately,” explains Gruber. “And you don’t want to shut that down… We need to really be rethinking how we do regulation in the U.S.”

Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with GBH reporter Robert Goulston about the potential impact of tariffs on imported metals and lumber. “When you place a tariff on an imported good, it’s not just the price of the imports that increase, but it’s also the price of the domestically manufactured products that increase,” explains Knittel. “Obviously the cost of importing steel and aluminum will increase, but domestic manufacturers will also raise their price because they can.”

Steve Mann PhD '97 has been awarded the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for his contributions toward the development of virtual reality, augmented reality, wearable technology, eXtended Reality products and services, reports Thomas Coughlin for Forbes. “Widely regarded as ‘the father of wearable computing,’” Mann “invented, designed, and built the world’s first smartwatch capable of downloading and running a wide variety of apps for health, well-being, and fitness tracking, ushering in a new era of personal health,” explains Coughlin. 

Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney spotlights QuEra, an MIT spinout that uses atoms and lasers to encode quantum bits or “qubits.” Gibney notes that in the QuEra system, “physicists trap an array of rubidium atoms using laser light and store quantum information in the energy levels of their electrons.”

Profs. Richard Binzel, Julien de Wit and Research Scientist Artem Burdanov speak with Boston Globe reporter Sarah Mesdjian about asteroid 2024 YR4 and their work developing a new method to “find and track far-away asteroids that were previously undetectable by using technology they compared to long-exposure images.” Says Binzel: “With improving technology, we are going to be aware of more and more of these objects.” He adds: “It’s a really important learning process what we’re doing right now. So when we find more and more of them, we know how to quickly process them and assess which of them are really worth looking further into.”

Prof. Jeff Gore speaks with WBUR Here & Now host Peter O’Dowd about retiring the U.S. penny. “I think that the primary cost of continuing to mint the penny is the fact that it means we feel we actually have to use it,” explains Gore. “I think that the value of our time that is wasted handling pennies is worth even more than the wasted materials.” 

A new study by researchers at MIT has found that “while highly skilled workers reported a 40% surge in performance when artificial intelligence was used within the boundary of its capabilities, overreliance on AI resulted in a performance drop of 19%,” reports Chris Callagher for USA Today. 

David Zipper, a senior fellow at the Mobility Initiative, speaks with WBUR Here & Now co-host Scott Tong about “car bloat,” the trend of increasingly large SUVs and trucks on the road. “I personally believe that car bloat is a major public health issue, it's a major policy issue, but I'll be candid, I don't think the average American does right now,” explains Zipper. “We need people to understand it and appreciate it. And in my view, that's going to need to happen at the grassroots level before we can expect really anybody in Washington to address this problem in the way that it deserves to be addressed.”

Prof. David Autor speaks with NPR Planet Money host Greg Rosalsky about his working paper exploring “what happened to American communities after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001,” also known as the “China Shock." Autor and his colleagues found that while regions impacted by the China Shock did eventually recover, the people hurt by the China Shock did not. “The China Shock research suggests that classic, free market economic theory blinded many to the reality that free trade can destroy the livelihoods of many people and that they have a hard time adjusting," says Rosalsky.

MIT’s Artfinity Festival kicks off on Saturday, February 15^th with a celebration of the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building and Thomas Tull Concert Hall featuring a free afternoon open house and evening concert, writes A.Z. Madonna for The Boston Globe. “What this building brings to us is support for performance of all different types of music, whether it’s classical or jazz or world music, and then the ability to support various functions with our students,” says Keeril Makan, associate dean of SHASS. 

Cambridge Day reporter Susan Saccoccia spotlights the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, which opens to the public on Saturday, February 15^th, with a celebratory concert called “Sonic Jubilance,” the start of a “monthslong festival of 80 events across the campus, free and open to the public.” Prof. Marcus Thompson notes: “The extent of art-making on the MIT campus is equal to that of a major city. It’s a miracle that it’s all right here, by people in science and technology who are absorbed in creating a new world and who also value the past, present and future of music and the arts.”