MIT grad student and NFL player John Urschel speaks with USA Today reporter Charlotte Wilder. Urschel, who occasionally practices with the MIT football team, says that what impresses him about the MIT team is that they play “because they love it. That is something so refreshing and amazing, it’s like no other football team I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
KEYE-TV’s Adam Winkler spotlights incoming MIT freshman Trey Roberts’ work in the classroom and on the baseball field. Roberts, who attends Leander High School in Texas, says he enjoys his classes so much, especially chemistry, that he thinks, “Wow, I would not mind spending the rest of my life doing something like this.”
ELLE reporter Chloe Schama speaks with the organizers of the MIT breast pump hackathon about the need for a better breast pump. "There are a lot of women who are internalizing failures," says Alexis Hope, one of the organizers of the MIT hackathon, "when these are really problems with public policy or with pumps."
Steve Annear writes for The Boston Globe about how grad student Lydia Krasilnikova created graphs and charts illustrating the color underwear MIT students select, based off self-reported information from dorm mailing lists. “It’s a different type of picture of MIT’s dorm culture,” says Krasilnikova. “I absolutely love it, and it was so much fun to put together.”
Popular Science reporter Kelsey Atherton describes how MIT researchers have developed a mini robotic cheetah to study how bumbling and bouncing machines move best.
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.”