If this is representative of press releases from universities it's no wonder that people can't tell the difference between free energy scams and real physics.
Sounds like nonsense to me but the article is so badly written that it's hard to tell. In fact it is hard to be sure whether they have actually created a prototype or merely simulated it.
> If this is representative of press releases from universities
If you want reporting that accurately represent science, in my experience, the university press releases are even worse than the worst mainstream shit-tier media.
It's super sad. My boss was once at the center of one of these big press release splashes at the university I worked. She said it was almost more of a burden than a boon, because the attention it attracted was almost all of the wrong kind. And among the right kind of people, she had to spend time and effort excusing the embarassing and ridiculous press release.
I wonder if universities understand that they're sometimes harming their own people with these things.
At some point it tarnish the reputation of the university. If your university get famous for sending ridiculous press releases, I hope that eventually the journalist will notice and just forward them to The Onion.
MIT has a reputation for super sketchy press releases, but their research reputation is fine still. Even with the whole epstein scandal. I wonder how much it takes to actually tarnish their reputation.
There's no shortage of reasons to criticize at MIT but I'm not sure Epstein is one of them.
AFAICT the administration did not turn a blind eye to Epstein, and in fact barred him. And the scandal is that Joi knew that he was persona non grata and therefore took steps to hide Epstein's funding. That is unquestionably terrible but in my mind doesn't tar the Institute.
I'm certainly not defending (or criticizing) MIT as an institute (there are bigger problems than the dreadful press releases from the publicity office). But if my understanding is correct, Epstein, while lurid, might not be a useful line of attack.
Well sure, but the point is the institution put a stop mechanism in place, when it was found out that someone had worked around it then a group of them were canned too. The media lab is a tiny part of the smallest school in a very large institution and the sums were correspondingly trivial compared to the institute's annual budget. (even all of education is a small fraction of that budget).
It's as if Google's parking valets were found to be running a car theft ring (made up example): unless Google seemed to think it below their notice, I would have a hard time considering that should be grounds for condemning Google.
I'm not defending MIT (or conflating car theft with sexual abuse) I'm merely saying that if you want to attack MIT consider something more substantive like its slow progress in recruiting and retaining female scientists; it's intimate ties with the government and military (despite various fig leaves assembled over the decades), or its treatment of undergraduates which at best is neglect. Don't waste your efforts on a small, if noisy, lab that has produced negligible research of consequence.
That point is too far in the future for anyone currently in power to care. If that point is ever reached it would require larger numbers of the population to be scientifically literate. I don't see that happening, everything is clickbaity now.
It's kind of funny that the person writing the press release thought it was their job to just spice up the headline a little bit by claiming they'd discovered a source of unlimited clean energy.
In all honesty funding is given by institutions and people who evaluate the goal they spend there money on. So this sort of attention gathering, should be pre-filtered out by all serious sources of funding.
So what remains is a prestige, attention metric of the university.
Sounds like nonsense to me but the article is so badly written that it's hard to tell. In fact it is hard to be sure whether they have actually created a prototype or merely simulated it.