MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
June 24, 2016
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

For second time, LIGO detects gravitational waves

Signal was produced by two black holes colliding 1.4 billion light years away.

Why do women leave engineering?

Study: Group dynamics of teamwork and internships deter many women in the profession.

Artificial intelligence produces realistic sounds that fool humans

Video-trained system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab could help robots understand how objects interact with the world.

Researchers discover new way to turn electricity into light, using graphene

By slowing down light to a speed slower than flowing electrons, researchers create a kind of optical “sonic boom.”

Need hair? Press “print”

With fur, brushes, and bristles, Media Lab’s technique opens new frontier in 3-D printing.

Eye-tracking system uses ordinary cellphone camera

Crowd-sourced data yields system that determines where mobile-device users are looking.

In the Media

Umair Irfan of ClimateWire writes that a new paper by Prof. Jessika Trancik finds that renewable energy storage can be a good investment, and provides insight on which storage technologies are the most economically feasible. “One of the major technology challenges of scaling up renewables is developing economically feasible energy storage," says Jessika Trancik.

In an article for the Financial Times, Laura Noonan highlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work investigating how the theories of financial engineering could be used to fight cancer. “In cancer drug development, because the risks of failure are so high, the probability of success goes up quite dramatically if you create a portfolio,” says Lo.

A study by MIT researchers finds that by adjusting grid operations, China could increase its usage of wind power, reports Chelsea Harvey for The Washington Post. Prof. Valerie Karplus explains that the study “considers the operation of the electric grid and how wind interacts with other sources of generation, particularly coal generation.”

In an article for New Scientist, Lisa Grossman writes that for the second time the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected gravitational waves. “This gives us confidence,” says MIT research scientist Salvatore Vitale. “It was not just a lucky accident. Seeing a second one tells us clearly that there is a population of black holes there.”