In an article about how the social messaging app WhatsApp could have a large influence on the upcoming election in India, the Financial Times spotlights postdoctoral associate Kiran Garimella’s work examining how misinformation spreads in India through platforms such as WhatsApp.
In an article for Bloomberg News, Noah Smith highlights a study by MIT researchers that examines the factors influencing the decline in solar prices. The researchers found that, “from 1980 to 2001, government-funded research and development was the main factor in bringing down costs, but from 2001 to 2012, the biggest factor was economies of scale,” Smith explains.
Fast Company reporter Jeremy Deaton highlights Prof. Jessika Trancik’s research showing that electric vehicles are often cheaper than comparable gas-powered vehicles. “The reason is that the lower fuel costs of EVs relative to gasoline-fueled cars compensate for the higher vehicle costs of EVs,” Trancik explains.
New York Times reporter Brad Plumer writes that a study by MIT researchers examines what forces contributed to the declining cost of solar panels. “We can cut emissions more quickly if we’re strategic about how we design energy policies and invest in R&D,” explains Prof. Jessika Trancik. “And one way to do that is to learn from past successes and figure out exactly why they happened.”
Writing for Ars Technica, Megan Geuss examines a new MIT study that finds, “government and private R&D spending contributed the most to cost-per-watt declines for solar panels since 1980. This spending spurred the low-level efficiency improvements that were important for the solar industry on a technical level.”
Financial Times reporter Ed Crooks highlights a new study by MIT researchers identifying the key factors leading to the declining cost of solar power. The study highlights “the critical role played by government policy to help grow markets around the world.”
Vox reporter David Roberts writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining what factors contributed to bringing down the cost of solar panels. Roberts writes that the researchers found “policies that create incentives for private investors to develop and deploy solar panels are responsible for well over half of the decline in solar PV costs.”
Writing for Science, Prof. Richard Larson writes about his decision to enter semiretirement as a professor, post-tenure, a position at MIT aimed at creating more positions for rising academics. Larson writes that after investigating the impacts of eliminating the mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty he realized he was inadvertently “blocking the way of many young scholars who seek academic careers.”
MIT researchers have developed a language translation model that operates without human annotations and guidance, reports Liangyu for Xinhua news agency. The system, which may enable computer-based translations of the thousands of languages spoken worldwide, is “a step toward one of the major goals of machine translation, which is fully unsupervised word alignment,” Liangyu explains.
Axios reporter Ben Geman writes that MIT researchers have found the most effective way to reduce emissions from electricity sources is to use a mix of renewable and other low-carbon tech options. “It’s not about specific technologies. It’s about those key roles that we need filled on the low-carbon team,” explains study co-author Jesse Jenkins.
In an article for Salon, Associate Prof. Noelle Eckley Selin and postdoc Sae Yun Kwon discuss their latest research, which examined emissions in China. They write that although mercury pollution is often associated with fish consumption, “China’s future emissions trajectory can have a measurable influence on the country’s rice methylmercury” levels, as well.
Using several comparative models, a new study led by MIT researchers reveals that China’s pledge to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 could cut down on as many as 160,000 premature deaths. “Politically, the research confirms why Chinese officials have their own internal reasons to cut CO2 even though the U.S. is abandoning Paris and disengaging internationally on climate,” writes Ben Geman for Axios.
A new study finds that a 4% reduction in China's carbon emissions by 2030 could save a total of $464.5 billion in healthcare costs, writes Chase Purdy for Quartz. “We have all these policy goals for a transition toward a more sustainable society,” says Associate Prof. Noelle Selin. “Mitigating air pollution, a leading cause of death, is one of them, and avoiding dangerous climate change is another.”
In a letter to The Financial Times, Prof. Jessika Trancik, postdoc Geoffrey Supran, and graduate student Marco Miotti clarify results from a study the lab released last year that compares emissions of gas and electric vehicles. “Not only do electric cars usually emit less than petrol ones already, but over time, as the carbon footprint of electricity continues to fall, that gap will widen,” the researchers explain.
A paper from MIT researchers suggests that small towns will be more negatively impacted by automation than larger cities, writes Ari Gaskell for HuffPost. The researchers found that, “automation is more likely in roles with repetitive tasks playing a major part, and such lower skilled roles tend to be concentrated more in smaller towns than larger cities.”