Top MIT Stories from March ’18

Catch up with MIT’s most popular new stories in March from the MIT News Office, Slice of MIT, and MIT Technology Review:

MIT News Office

MIT and Newly Formed Company Launch Novel Approach to Fusion Power

Progress toward the long-sought dream of fusion power — potentially an inexhaustible and zero-carbon source of energy — could be about to take a dramatic leap forward.

Study: On Twitter, false News Travels Faster Than True Stories

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

Insulator or Superconductor? Physicists Find Graphene Is Both

Since the discovery of graphene in 2004, scientists have found that the sheet of carbon atoms is not just the thinnest material known in the world, but also incredibly light and flexible, hundreds of times stronger than steel, and more electrically conductive than copper.

Slice of MIT

US News Ranks MIT #1 in 13 Graduate Categories

US News & World Report ranked MIT the top graduate engineering school for the 30th consecutive year, according to its 2019 ranking of best graduate schools. Twelve other MIT graduate schools and departments were top ranked, and 12 more finished in the top 10.

MIT Students Focused on Puerto Rico Recovery

More than 70 current students are Puerto Rico natives and at least 300 MIT alumni call the island home, including current Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló ’01. When hurricanes Maria and Irma left a wake of devastation across the island in September 2017, the community immediately jumped to help.

How to Be a Better Engineer? Talk to People

Through Terrascope, a first-year learning initiative devoted to sustainability issues, students travel to various places in the world to interact with people experiencing a problem, to better create a solution to addressing the problem.

MIT Technology Review

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Turns Out It’s Just Chance.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

A Simple Artificial Heart Could Permanently Replace a Failing Human One

Nearly 4,000 people in the US are waiting for heart transplants. And on average, it takes about six months to get one. Sanjiv Kaul and his team at Oregon Health and Science University are developing an artificial heart with an extremely simple design—it contains a single moving piece with no valves.

Ethereum’s Smart Contracts are Full of Holes

Blockchain-powered computer programs promise to revolutionize the digital economy, but new research suggests they’re far from secure.