Month: January 2020

The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation today released the findings from a thorough review of MIT’s engagements with Jeffrey Epstein. The review, conducted by the law firm Goodwin Procter, sheds light on the Institute’s actions pertaining to 10 Epstein donations, totaling $850,000, that MIT received between 2002 and 2017, as well as multiple visits that Epstein made to campus. The report concludes that President L. Rafael Reif was not aware that the Institute was accepting donations from a…

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As food demand rises due to growing and changing populations around the world, increasing crop production has been a vital target for agriculture and food systems researchers who are working to ensure there is enough food to meet global need in the coming years. One MIT research group mobilizing around this challenge is the Voigt lab in the Department of Biological Engineering, led by Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor of Advanced Biotechnology at MIT. For the past…

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A new MIT study finds “health knowledge graphs,” which show relationships between symptoms and diseases and are intended to help with clinical diagnosis, can fall short for certain conditions and patient populations. The results also suggest ways to boost their performance. Health knowledge graphs have typically been compiled manually by expert clinicians, but that can be a laborious process. Recently, researchers have experimented with automatically generating these knowledge graphs from patient data. The MIT team has been studying how…

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A molecular engineer, Julia Ortony performs a contemporary version of alchemy. “I take powder made up of disorganized, tiny molecules, and after mixing it up with water, the material in the solution zips itself up into threads 5 nanometers thick — about 100 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light,” says Ortony, the Finmeccanica Career Development Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “Every time we make one of these nanofibers, I am amazed…

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When it comes to fulfilling ambitious energy and climate commitments, few nations successfully walk their talk. A case in point is the Paris Agreement initiated four years ago. Nearly 200 signatory nations submitted voluntary pledges to cut their contribution to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but many are not on track to fulfill these pledges. Moreover, only a small number of countries are now pursuing climate policies consistent with keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius,…

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Dana Stalder Contributor Share on Twitter Dana Stalder is a partner at Matrix Partners, where he invests predominantly in fintech, consumer marketplaces and enterprise software. More posts by this contributor 2019 looks to continue another lights-out year for fintech startups Financial technology startups emerged as serious challengers to financial services in 2017 Jake Jolis Contributor Share on Twitter Jake Jolis is a partner at Matrix Partners and invests in seed and Series A technology companies including marketplaces and software….

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Bux, the Amsterdam-based fintech that wants to make investing more accessible, has acquired the European “social” cryptocurrency investment platform Blockport. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Bux says the move paves the way for the company to launch its own branded cryptocurrency investment app. Dubbed “BUX Crypto,” it will be available in the 9 countries Bux operates in and is planned to go live in Q1 this year. In addition, we are told the founders and core team…

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The new health care practice of “hotspotting” — in which providers identify very high-cost patients and attempt to reduce their medical spending while improving care — has virtually no impact on patient outcomes, according to a new study led by MIT economists.  The finding underscores the challenge of reducing spending on “superutilizers” of health care, the roughly 5 percent of patients in the U.S. who account for half the nation’s health care costs. The concept of hotspotting, a little…

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Among the newly selected 2020 class of fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) are three members of the MIT community: Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Chair Professor in the MT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Richard Lippmann and Daniel Rabideau, members of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization, confers the rank of fellow on senior members whose work has advanced innovation in their respective…

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Throughout most of 2016, a significant percentage of the American public believed that the winner of the November 2016 presidential election would be a woman — Hillary Clinton. Strikingly, a new study from cognitive scientists and linguists at MIT, the University of Potsdam, and the University of California at San Diego shows that despite those beliefs, people rarely used the pronoun “she” when referring to the next U.S. president before the election. Furthermore, when reading about the future president,…

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Jeanne Guillemin, a medical anthropologist and biological warfare expert, died on Nov. 15, 2019, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 76. Guillemin received her bachelor’s degree in social psychology from Harvard University in 1968 and her doctorate in sociology and anthropology from Brandeis University in 1973. She was a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston College, where she taught for 33 years. From 2006 until her death, she served as a senior advisor to the…

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Revolutions are monumental social upheavals that can remake whole nations, dismantling — often violently — old paradigms. But the stories of the epic struggles that leave their mark on the world’s history are frequently fragile, precarious, and idiosyncratic in their details, leaving some key questions only partially understood: Why and how do peoples overthrow their governments? Why do some revolutions succeed and others fail? These are not simple questions, and, for 12 years, MIT students and faculty have set…

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