ShareAmerica reporter Lauren Monsen spotlights Prof. Dina Katabi for her work in advancing medicine with artificial intelligence. “Katabi develops AI tools to monitor patients’ breathing patterns, hear rate, sleep quality, and movements,” writes Monsen. “This data informs treatment for patients with diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), as well as Rett syndrome, a rare neurological disorder.”
Researchers at MIT have discovered that “light in the visible spectrum is enough to knock water molecules loose at the surface where it meets air and send them floating away,” reports Michael Franco for New Atlas. “While the distinction between light-caused evaporation and heat-caused evaporation might not seem like a big one, the researchers say it could not only have a big impact on the way future evaporative projects are executed, but that it could also explain a long-standing discrepancy involving clouds,” writes Franco.
MIT researchers have “discovered hitherto unknown space molecule while investigating a relatively nearby region of intense star birth,” reports Robert Lea for Space.com. This discovery “revealed the presence of a complex molecule known as 2-methoxyethanol, which had never been seen before in the natural world, though its properties had been simulated in labs on Earth,” writes Lea.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that a sequence of rocks from the Isua Supracrustal Belt in Greenland contain “an ironclad record of the early Earth’s magnetic field,” reports Keith Cooper for Space.com. “The new results from the Greenland rocks are considered more reliable because, for the first time, they are based on entire iron-bearing rocks (rather than individual mineral crystals) to derive the primordial field strength,” explains Cooper. “Therefore, the sample offers the first solid measure of not only the strength of Earth's ancient magnetic field, but also of the timing of when the magnetic field originally appeared.”
Interesting Engineering reporter Rizwan Choudhury spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds light can cause evaporation of water from a surface without the need for heat. The photomolecular effect “presents exciting practical possibilities,” writes Choudhury. “Solar desalination systems and industrial drying processes are prime candidates for harnessing this effect. Since drying consumes significant industrial energy, optimizing this process using light holds immense promise.”
Writing for Project Syndicate, Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson draw upon the work of economist David Ricardo and his insights on the Industrial Revolution to explore how to respond to the challenge posed by AI to good jobs. “It is still possible to have pro-worker AI, but only if we can change the direction of innovation in the tech industry and introduce new regulations and institutions,” they write.
Writing for MIT Technology Review, Georgina Gustin chronicles the research journey of Polina Anikeeva, the MIT scientist and engineer who developed flexible brain probes to stimulate neurons and potentially treat neurological disorders. In 2017, Anikeeva became fascinated by the hypothesis that Parkinson’s might be linked to pathogens in the digestive system. Today she and her team use specialized devices to explore the brain-gut connection. “This is a new frontier,” Anikeeva says.
MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning accelerator chip to make health-monitoring apps more secure, reports Aman Tripathi for Interesting Engineering. “The researchers subjected this new chip to intensive testing, simulating real-world hacking attempts, and the results were impressive,” explains Tripathi. “Even after millions of attempts, they were unable to recover any private information. In contrast, stealing data from an unprotected chip took only a few thousand samples.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a new measure called “outdoor days,” which describes the number of days per year in which temperatures are comfortable enough for outdoor activities in specific locations around the world, reports Lebawit Lily Girma for Bloomberg News. “Changes in the number of outdoor days will impact directly how people around the world feel climate change,” says Prof. Elfatih Eltahir.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Parmy Olson spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds AI chatbots can be highly persuasive when reinforced with facts and could potentially be used to help tackle conspiracy theories. “The scientists invited more than 2,000 people who believed in different conspiracy theories to summarize their positions to a chatbot — powered by OpenAI’s latest publicly available language model — and briefly debate them with the bot,” Olson writes. “On average, participants subsequently described themselves as 20% less confident in the conspiracy theory; their views remained softened even two months later.”
Prof. Esther Duflo will present her research on poverty reduction and her “proposal for a global minimum tax on billionaires and increased corporate levies to G-20 finance chiefs,” reports Andrew Rosati for Bloomberg. “The plan calls for redistributing the revenues to low- and middle-income nations to compensate for lives lost due to a warming planet,” writes Rosati. “It also adds to growing calls to raise taxes on the world’s wealthiest to help its most needy.”
MIT scientists have uncovered evidence that the different layers of the brain’s cortex generate different brain waves, reports Simon Makin for Scientific American. “The findings may have implications for understanding—and even treating—neuropsychiatric conditions,” Makin explains.
Prof. David Autor speaks with Nature reporter Dalmeet Singh Chawla about the long-term impact of his research on policy documents. Autor’s work from November 2003 “is now the third most cited in policy documents worldwide,” writes Chawla. “Autor thinks his study stands out because his paper was different from what other economists were writing at the time. It suggested that ‘middle-skill’ work, typically done in offices or factories by people who haven’t attended university, was going to be largely automated, leaving workers with either highly skilled jobs or manual work.”
Prof. Kieran Setiya speaks Sean Illing, host of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast, about how philosophy can be used as a tool when handling midlife crises. “There’s a real continuity between the literary and human description of phenomena like grief and philosophical reflection,” says Setiya. “Because often what philosophical reflection provides is less a proof that you should live this way and more concepts with which to articulate your experience and then structure and guide how you relate to reality. And seen that way, we can understand how philosophy can operate as self-help.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. S.P. Kothari and Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen explain why U.S. consumers “continue to feel they are suffering from inflation, although the annual rate of inflation dropped sharply during 2023.” “The answer is that consumers have a broader time horizon,” they write. “[Consumers] are looking at the rate of price increases over the past three years. From January 2021 to January 2024, the consumer price index for all items rose by 17.96%.”