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.
Boston Globe reporter Kelly Broder spotlights the opening of “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time,” a new exhibit at the MIT Museum. The exhibit features “eighteen immersive pieces [that] will explore the relationship between living organisms and the natural cycle of light and dark,” explains Broder.
“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.”
Prof. Srini Devadas speaks with Fortune reporter Beatrice Nolan about data and privacy concerns surrounding AI assistants. “The challenge is that if you want the AI assistant to be useful, you need to give it access to your data and your privileges, and if attackers can trick the AI assistant, it is as if you were tricked,” says Devadas.
Prof. Alex Shalek and his colleagues developed a deep-learning model called DrugReflector aimed at speeding up the process of drug discovery, reports Heidi Ledford for Nature. “They used DrugReflector to find chemicals that can affect the generation of platelets and red blood cells — a characteristic that could be useful in treating some blood conditions,” explains Ledford. The researchers found that “DrugReflector was up to 17 times more effective at finding relevant compounds than standard, brute-force drug screening that depends on randomly selecting compounds from a chemical library.”
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. 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. 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. 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. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Newsweek reporter Jasmine Laws about catastrophic healthcare plans. "A common conservative criticism of public provision of health insurance is that we should just give folks 'skinny' or 'catastrophic' plans. But what these critics never grapple with is what would be included in these plans,” Gruber explains. “By the time you include anything that would be considered decent insurance – hospital, doctor, drugs, maternity care, mental health care – you are already at 90 percent of the cost of a generous insurance plan. The only way to really make a plan 'skinny' is to charge high deductibles, which many plans on the exchange already do."
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.”
Time reporter Brian Elliott spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s comments at a recent conference regarding the importance of businesses having an employee-focused strategy when implementing new AI tools. “The status quo mindset in leaders is to see labor as a cost to be minimized,” Ton explains. “Exemplary companies think of employees as drivers of customer satisfaction, profitability and growth.”
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.
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab spotlights how researchers from the MIT AgeLab and John Hancock developed a new longevity index. The Index aims to change “how we measure, teach, discuss and think about the future of aging,” explains Coughlin. “The Index measures preparedness across eight critical domains that research shows are fundamental to quality of life in older age: health, finance, care, home, daily activities, social connection, community, and life transitions.
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.”