In the Media

The Public Option: Parks and Libraries Soar - The new MIT Media Lab Extension is listed as one of Wall Street Journal's most notable architectural structures of 2010.

"Lawrence David and Eric Alm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mapped the evolutionary history of 3983 gene families that occur in a wide range of modern species. They were able to show that 27 per cent of these gene families appeared in a short evolutionary burst which began about 3.3 billion years ago."

"About 27 percent of all gene families that exist today were born between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, two researchers from MIT report online December 19 in Nature." - This article originally ran in Science News.

"At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one experimental camera has no lens at all: it uses reflected light, computer processing and other tools to let it see around corners."

"A striking study led by an MIT Sloan School of Management professor shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of the team’s individual members."

"Dr. Weinberg and colleagues at MIT's Whitehead Institute are collaborating with researcher Eric Lander at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University in one effort to hunt for potential cancer stem cell killers."

"Deciphering an unknown language is a challenge even for veteran linguists. But in July, MIT computer scientist Regina Barzilay proved that a computer can do the job well and with astonishing speed." - #51 on the 'Top 100 Stories of 2010'

"In April neuroscientist Liane Young and her colleagues at MIT and Harvard University reported that they had altered people’s moral judgments using transcranial magnetic stimulation, a procedure that briefly disrupts neural processing with a magnetic field induced by electric current." - #80 on the 'Top 100 Stories of 2010'

Sprinkle Guns, Egg Washers, and Other Food Contraptions - The Atlantic runs an article on this year's 2.009 product design course at MIT, which is taught by David Wallace.

"To build such a cloak you need a material that will bend the incoming and outgoing light rays by different amounts — determined by the dimensions of the object underneath, explains Baile Zhang, an optical engineer at the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre in Singapore, who designed one of the cloaks."

"Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are providing an early look at what they describe as groundbreaking work -- the first lifecycle assessments of building and paving materials to consider economic as well as environmental factors." - This article originally ran in Greener World Media.

"Photography can perform many tricks. Until now, though, looking round corners has not been one of them. Ramesh Raskar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to change that. He and his students, Ahmed Kirmani and Andreas Velten, have developed a camera that can see what other cameras cannot."

"Ryuma Niiyama of MIT's Robot Locomotion Group wants to build a bot that runs as much like a human as possible, right down to the black nylon running shorts."

"Social networks could provide the key to redrawing the regional map of Britain, producing areas with strong social cohesion." - Research led by the MIT Senseable City Lab

Planet in the Sky With Diamonds - "This surprise invites new theories for how planets form, says astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan, a Princeton University astrophysicist who participated in the research while at MIT."