Graduate student Lydia Krasilnikova speaks with the Metro’s Spencer Buell about the visualizations she compiled on what color underwear MIT students wear, based on information reported to dorm mailing lists. “I think the pictures in the pie charts kind of provide a sort of visualization of dorm culture in a different perspective than you usually get,” explains Krasilnikova.
BetaBoston reporter Amanda Burke writes that three MIT student inventors have been named winners of the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. Burke writes that the MIT students were honored for creating, “a camera that is sharper than the human eye, an electric car transmission, and a fully automatic health-food restaurant.”
Grad student Michael Stepner speaks with Peter O’Dowd of Here & Now about his research examining how the life expectancy gap between the rich and poor has grown. Stepner explains the research suggests an opportunity for local “policies to address these gaps and improve life expectancies for low-income Americans.”
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.”
Katie Lobosco writes for CNN Money that a new survey has found that MIT provides one of the best returns on investment for students. Lobosco notes that, “Many MIT grads land high-paying engineering and computer science jobs.”
Boston.com reporter Justine Hofherr writes that in a new survey MIT has been ranked one of the top universities for return on investment, “based on the difference between a schools cost of attendance and the income the average student earns in the 20 years after graduation.”
Boston Magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme writes that a team of MIT students has developed an app that provides shoppers with a nutrition receipt for grocery store purchases. The app is based on an algorithm that could “parse through data from the USDA’s National Nutrient Database, assessing the nutritional value of each item in the shopper’s cart.”
Lisa Boone of The Los Angeles Times highlights Sprout plantable pencils, which were designed by three MIT students. Boone explains that after planting, “a dissolvable seed capsule at the end of the pencil will proceed to germinate in a few weeks, transforming the pencil in to one of 12 edible plants.”
As part of their Women in Politics: College Edition series, MSNBC highlights undergraduate Sophia Liu’s work in student government at MIT. Liu explains that she was drawn to student government because she wanted “to meet more MIT students, and because I hoped to start giving back to a community that I treasured and believed was incredibly special.”
CBS News reporter Brian Mastroianni writes about how social media users celebrated Pi Day this year, highlighting two of MIT’s Facebook posts. One of the MIT Pi Day posts featured MIT students writing down as many digits of π as possible from memory, while the other wished Albert Einstein a happy birthday.
MIT admission’s office released a “Star Wars”-themed video to announce that admissions decisions would be released on Pi Day, writes Amanda Hoover for Boston.com. Hoover explains that, “In true MIT fashion, the university released their admission decisions for the class of 2020 on Pi Day (March 14) at 6:28 p.m., which is known as Tau, or two-times pi.”
Christian Science Monitor reporter Jack Detsch writes about the “Cambridge 2 Cambridge” hackathon, which brought together students from MIT and Cambridge University to hack websites and discover built-in vulnerabilities. “It’s not a law of nature that machines are insecure,” says CSAIL’s Howard Shrobe. This hackathon “is the first step of piquing curiosity to fix it.”
Steve Annear writes for The Boston Globe about the video MIT Admissions created to announce that admissions decisions will be released on March 14, “Pi Day.” Annear writes that in the video, “a robot the school is calling a ‘Decisions Droid’…emerges from the school’s personal robots lab and makes its way to Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill’s office.”