Research

In honor of the 25^th anniversary of the International Space Station (ISS), Earth.com reporter Derek Davis spotlights the contributions of a number of MIT-trained astronauts and engineers, who played pivotal roles in the ISS’ history. 

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Science Friday host Flora Lichtman about her work studying endometriosis. “I did a lot of things in the regenerative medicine space. But I had an epiphany that there’s so many chronic and inflammatory disease that we don’t know how to treat so I started building models of human organs and tissues in the lab using what we called microfluidic chips,” Griffith explains. “When I got asked about endometriosis, it was actually a perfect application for this kind of approach because we really need to study the lesions very carefully in the lab in ways that is very hard to study in patients.” 

Forbes reporter Gemma Allen spotlights Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, and her work revolutionizing the field of robotics by bringing “empathy into engineering and proving that responsibility is as radical and as commercially attractive as unguarded innovation.” Rus says of her vision for the future of robotics and AI: “With robots, we can amplify strength and precision. With AI, we can amplify cognition, creativity, empathy, and foresight. These tools should help us become better versions of ourselves."

Prof. Laura Lewis and her colleagues have discovered that momentary lapses in attention that often follow a bad night’s sleep are caused by the brain attempting to flush fluid out of its system, a process that normally occurs during sleep, reports Carissa Wong for New Scientist. “If you don’t have these waves [of fluid flowing] at night because you’re kept awake all night, then your brain starts to kind of sneak them in during the daytime, but they come with this cost of attention,” says Lewis. 

Researchers at MIT have found that momentary lapses in attention, often described as zoning out, coincide with waves of fluid flowing out of the brain, reports Ian Sample for The Guardian. “The moment somebody’s attention fails is the moment this wave of fluid starts to pulse,” says Prof. Laura Lewis. “It’s not just that your neurons aren’t paying attention to the world, there’s this big change in fluid in the brain at the same time.”

The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) launched the Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund earlier this year as part of an effort aimed at improving women’s health, reports Zoë Corbyn for The Guardian. “This is frontier science,” says Prof. Linda Griffith. Corbyn also spotlights how Ridhi Tariyal MS '10 has co-founded NextGen Jane, a women’s healthcare startup that aims to gain better insight into women’s reproductive health by studying menstruation.

Wired reporter Steven Levy spotlights Research Scientist Sarah Schwettmann PhD '21 and her work investigating the unknown behaviors of AI agents. Schwettmann has co-founded Transluce, a nonprofit interpretability startup “to further study such phenomena,” writes Levy.

“Made to Measure,” a permanent exhibit at the MIT Museum, offers visitors a peek at the science of measurement, showcasing instruments that have been central to scientific research and discovery at MIT and beyond, reports Mark Feeney for The Boston Globe. The exhibit’s displays explore strength, temperature, length and more. The "How Far?" display “includes a taffrail log (used by sailors to measure distance), pedometers, a surveyor’s tape, a transit theodolite, several rulers, and a Smoot bar," Feeney explains, “a unit of measurement based on the height of MIT undergraduate Oliver Smoot.” 

At a recent conference, Prof. Sergey Ovchinnikov and his colleagues presented a paper demonstrating how they have used advanced versions of ChatGPT to “generate amino acid sequences that code for biologically active proteins with a structural feature called a four-helix bundle,” reports Jeffrey Brainard for Science. “To Ovchinnikov’s surprise, ChatGPT produced gene sequences without further refinement of his team’s query,” writes Brainard. “Still, the application of ChatGPT to this task needs refinement, Ovchinnikov found. Most of the sequences his team produced did not garner 'high confidence' on a score predicting whether they would form the desired protein structure.” 

Prof. Christopher Palmer speaks with Marketplace reporter Carla Javier about the rise in auto loan delinquencies, noting that defaulting on a car payment is usually a borrower’s last resort, since people often need cars to get to work, so they’re more likely to not pay other bills first. “That could include not paying their mortgages or their rent, in part because it takes a long time to evict someone or to foreclose on a house,” Palmer explains.

Prof. Linda Griffith and her colleagues have “developed a model of the human gut to study how the organ’s microbes interact with immune cells and regulate inflammation,” reports Gemma Conroy for Nature. Griffith and her team “have also created models for endometriosis and pancreatic cancer,” writes Conroy. 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn speaks with The Guardian reporter Madeleine Aggeler about the impact of AI on human relationships. “If you converse more and more with the AI instead of going to talk to your parents or your friends, the social fabric degrades,” says Pataranutaporn. “You will not develop the skills to go and talk to real humans.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks New York Times reporter Karen Weise about workplace automation at Amazon. “Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” Acemoglu. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.” 

George Smoot '66, PhD '70, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, has died at the age of 80, reports Katrina Miller for The New York Times. Smoot’s work as a physicist “helped elucidate the story of cosmic creation, providing evidence of what he called the primordial seeds that grew into galaxies and galaxy clusters,” writes Miller. 

Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Kay Lazar about his recent study examining how Americans are preparing for their later years. “I’m hoping this is a kick-start moment, to start having people realize that it’s more than money,” says Coughlin. “It is more than my blood pressure and my cholesterol level, and that I need to start thinking about other dimensions.”