Jason Margolis of PRI’s The World chronicles how MIT alumnus Sorin Grama’s first attempt at a startup paved the way for him to found Promethean Power Systems, which produces milk chillers for regions of India with unreliable power. Margolis notes that this fall Grama will serve as an entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT with a focus on the developing world.
A study by Prof. David Atkin finds that migrants are willing to pay more, and consume less, to continue eating the traditional cuisine of their homeland, reports Donald McNeil Jr. for The New York Times. Atkin found that “poor migrants within India stuck with their dietary preferences even when they were nearly malnourished.”
MIT, Tata Trusts & Tata Inst. of Social Science announced the creation of a new digital education platform known as the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx). Aveek Datta for Forbes India writes that the program seeks to “create new learning experiences and educational opportunities for secondary school students in India.”
Prof. Ramesh Raskar is leading the development of a new platform aimed at maintaining order and calm during the Kumbh Mela festival, the AP reports. "We want to see how we can take this amazing challenge in crowds and food and security and housing and transportation ... and see how we can make this a tech-savvy Kumbh Mela,” says Raskar.
Eleanor Goldberg writes for The Huffington Post that a team of MIT researchers has developed a solar-powered desalination system that could help bring clean drinking water to rural areas. The researchers hope to eventually release a model that could provide clean drinking water for an entire village, Goldberg reports.
Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick writes that a team of MIT engineers has won the Desal Prize for a solar-powered desalination system they developed. “The system, when fully operational, can supply the basic water needs of a village of between 2,000 and 5,000 people,” Warrick explains.
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray writes about how Prof. Amos Winter and graduate student Natasha Wright are testing their solar-powered desalination system in a competition aimed at finding cheaper and more efficient ways to provide clean water to the developing world. “It’s a two-billion-person problem,” says Winter. “That’s a pretty motivating problem.”
Carey Goldberg reports for NPR on Project Prakash, Prof. Pawan Sinha's non-profit that provides cataract operations for children in India. Sinha explains that by examining how a child reacts to gaining vision, “you have a ringside seat into the process of visual development.”
Washington Post reporter Annie Gowen writes about how MIT researchers have found that India’s latest swine flu outbreak may have mutated into a more dangerous strain. The researchers found “new mutations in the protein known to make the virus more virulent.”
Professor Ram Sasisekharan and research scientist Kannan Tharakaraman have found that a strain of H1N1 influenza in India is more virulent than health authorities have indicated, writes Rishi Lyengar of Time. “They found mutations in the Indian strains in a protein called hemagglutinin, which binds with receptors on the human body’s respiratory cells,” Lyengar writes.
Laura Santhanam writes for the PBS NewsHour that MIT researchers have found that a strain of swine flu in India is more dangerous than originally thought. The researchers found that “a mutation in the new H1N1 strain allows this form of swine flu to attack an infected person’s respiratory cells more virulently.”
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston reports that MIT researchers have proposed a new solar-powered, desalination system for purifying groundwater. “Wright and Winter argue that for the low levels of salt in the groundwater in up to 60 percent of rural India, they can extract enough power from solar panels to run their electrodialysis setup,” writes Subbaraman.