Lydia Bourouiba, an MIT professor and director of the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, writes that our current six-foot safety zone is based on decades-old work in a laboratory and that might be putting health-care providers at risk. Read more.
MIT
By adamg - 3/15/20 - 2:49 pm
The MIT radio station announced it shut down at 2 p.m. today:
While this was a difficult decision for us to make, we are prioritising the health and safety of our members. We are continuing to work with MIT as a part of their response to COVID-19.
By adamg - 3/9/20 - 1:36 pm
Science reports that a Chinese development company is giving a consortium of Boston-area researchers $115 million to investigate Covid-19 and figure out how to fight it. Read more.
By adamg - 3/6/20 - 11:06 am
Some news on the Robot Overlords front from local researchers: Dexai Robotics of Somerville has raised $5.5 million for its robotic sous-chef replacement, called Alfred. Read more.
By adamg - 3/5/20 - 10:09 pm
MIT announced today it's "suspending all international travel on MIT business or with MIT programs, for all faculty, students, postdocs and staff" - and is taking a series of other steps to limit any potential Covid-19 spread, including banning all campus meetings of more than 150 people and asking MIT students and staffers who travel out of state, even just to another part of the US on spring break, to log their destinations in a confidential MIT travel registry. Read more.
By adamg - 2/14/20 - 9:16 am
Rudolph with your butt so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight? Image by MIT News.
By adamg - 1/13/20 - 2:20 pm
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and Brookline resident, charges the New York Times committed "clickbait defamation" in a headline and lead paragraph that made it sound he was condoning MIT professors and administrators taking money from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when, he says, he wasn't. Read more.
By adamg - 1/10/20 - 4:07 pm
Some MIT researchers and officials caused "significant harm" to the school by taking money from Jeffrey Epstein and arranging frequent campus visits for him even after his conviction for procuring an underage prostitute, despite repeated warnings from people on campus who knew better and who told them, as late as 2017, to stop it, a law firm hired by the school to look at its Epstein connections concludes. Read more.
By adamg - 12/17/19 - 5:56 pm
The Zoning Board of Appeal today rejected a proposed new roof deck as part of an overall rehab of a Beacon Street frat house after a neighbor worried about noise and the neighborhood association groused about the dangerous precedent the deck could set. Read more.
By adamg - 9/20/19 - 8:57 am
WBUR reports state environmental officials are looking into allegations that the lab dumped polluted wastewater into a well in Middleton as part of its attempts to build "food computers," a program already under fire for other reasons, such as that the "computers" didn't work.
By adamg - 9/13/19 - 4:05 pm
Protesters call on MIT president to resign over Epstein. Photo by Greg Cook.
Richard Stallman, founder of Cambridge's Free Software Foundation and a visiting scientist at MIT, argues that Jeffrey Epstein's victims were likely "entirely willing" and to stop besmirching the good name of deceased MIT AI guru Marvin Minsky just because he might have "had sex with one of Epstein’s harem." Read more.
By adamg - 9/12/19 - 2:39 pm
A review by an outside law firm of MIT's ties with disgraced, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein turned up a letter thanking him for a contribution signed by the school's president, L. Rafael Rief. Read more.
By adamg - 9/7/19 - 12:23 am
UPDATE: Media Lab Director Joi Ito has resigned
The New Yorker reports the Media Lab relied heavily on disgraced and now dead molester Jeffrey Epstein that went far beyond the $800,000 in donations MIT acknowledges it received from him.
By adamg - 8/22/19 - 8:33 pm
MIT President L. Rafael Reif made the pledge today in an open letter to the MIT community after two days of publicity about professors leaving the MIT Media Lab in disgust over the money - and shmoozing - it accepted from the now dead convicted sex offender. Read more.
By adamg - 8/2/19 - 11:59 am
The Harvard Crimson has the details in the dispute over who discovered a particular gene-changing technique first; Berkeley is using words like "pattern of deception" and "cherry-picked data" in a complaint filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Harvard and MIT volleys back with words like "baseless."
By adamg - 3/6/19 - 11:33 am
Gideon Litchfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, recounts how the other day, they got an angry message from some guy about how they'd used his photo to illustrate an article about research at Brandeis that tried to explain "the hipster effect" - how non-conformists often wind up looking the same. Read more.
By adamg - 1/8/19 - 3:35 pm
An MIT fraternity in Kenmore Square found itself hauled before the Boston Licensing Board today to face police citations for allowing underage drinking and vaping at a party in which way more people were stuffed into the building than allowed by its Boston-issued licenses. Read more.
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