Postdoctoral Fellow Lydia Harrington and Boston University Postdoctoral Associate Chloe Bordewich speak with WBUR reporter Yasmin Amer about their exhibit at the MIT Rotch Library on Boston's former Little Syria neighborhood. “We want to show very positive things that Syrians brought with them, as well as their contributions to Boston,” says Harrington. “We wanted to show things in the exhibit that showed everyday life and well-known people in the neighborhood.”
Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed “Sybil” – an artificial intelligence tool that can predict the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years, reports Mallika Marshall for CBS Boston.
Prof. Sara Seager and her colleagues write for Physics Today about how the SpaceX Starship could help transform astrophysics missions. “Assuming it is successful, Starship will dramatically enhance our space capabilities in ways that will qualitatively alter how astrophysics missions can be built,” write Seager and her colleagues.
MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin writes for Forbes that Tom Brady’s second retirement from the NFL demonstrates how those planning for retirement “need to plan for longevity, not the one-and-done retirement we think of today.” Coughlin adds: “Planning for your retirement years means identifying the many different retirements you may have in what has been incorrectly defined as a single life stage and experience. Maybe it will be a traditional retirement, but maybe it won’t.”
CSAIL researchers are developing a drone that could be used to assist humans in search and rescue operations, reports Mashable. “If you are trying to detect someone in an avalanche and you can maybe just send a drone, and if they can find them out and then fly towards them and send a help signal. It would be probably be something that would be beneficial to people as an immediate application.”
Researchers at MIT have developed underwater robotic structures that can contort into different shapes, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “This ability is key in submersible robots, since it allows them to move through the water much more efficiently, as countless varieties of fish do in rivers, lakes, and the open ocean,” explains Paul.
Visiting scientist Judah Cohen speaks with Boston.com reporter Eli Curwin about how a combination of more accurate data collection, precise weather models, and accessible forecast predictions make it unlikely that Massachusetts residents would be surprised again by a storm like the infamous Blizzard of ‘78. “The satellites, the ships, the weather stations, weather balloons used to integrate and assimilate all that data are much better than they used to be,” says Cohen.
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors explore their research demonstrating that “the biggest shift when a chief executive with a business degree takes charge is a decline in wages and the share of revenues going to labor.” Acemoglu and his co-authors note that while many business schools have updated their offerings to include more ethics courses, they emphasize the importance of “being aware of what managers with business degrees used to do is an important step in reflecting on how we can build better programs.”
MIT researchers have developed a new system for creating deformable underwater robots that can be used to build robots of varying shapes and sizes with both hard and soft elements, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The robot is largely hollow, built of modular voxels that can be assembled to create systems that are rigid in certain directions and soft in others,” Heater explains.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu about the field of artificial intelligence, explaining the difference between AI, robotics and machine learning, and exploring the future of AI. “[AI algorithms] can do really extraordinary things much faster than we can. But the way to think about it is that they’re tools that are supposed to augment and enhance how we operate,” says Rus. “And like any other tools, these solutions are not inherently good or bad. They are what we choose to do with them.”
Research scientist Mary Knapp and her collaborators are working on a concept for The Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (Go-LoW), a space-based observatory comprised of small satellites aimed at making low-frequency radio waves visible, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “I learned back in my undergrad days that there was this part of the spectrum we couldn’t see,” Knapp explains. “It really just struck me that there was this unexplored part of the universe, and I want to explore this part of the sky for the first time.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have studied the mind of polyglots and uncovered how language-specific regions of the brain respond to different and familiar languages, reports Natalia Mesa for Science. The researchers found that “the activity in the brain’s language network fluctuated based on how well participants understood a language. The more familiar the language, the larger the response,” writes Mesa. “There was one exception to the rule: when participants heard their native tongue, their language networks were actually quieter than when they heard other familiar languages.”
MIT researchers have found that air pollution can impact the performance of chess players, reports Sharon Udasin for The Hill. "With just a modest rise in pollution levels, the researchers saw that a player’s probability of making an error increased by 2.1 percentage points,” Udasin writes.
Researchers at MIT have discovered what makes ancient Roman concrete “exponentially more durable than modern concrete,” reports Jim Morrison for Wired. “Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure,” writes Morrison.