MIT alumna Ally Huang speaks with WCVB-TV’s Mike Wankum about BioBits, educational biology kits developed in the lab of Prof. James Collins that allow students hands-on experience experimenting with DNA. “Biobits was created to show the students visually how DNA goes to RNA goes to protein, what DNA is, what protein is,” Huang explains.
A new book co-authored by Prof. Daron Acemoglu examines how countries become “prosperous, stable, well-governed, law-abiding, democratic and free societies.” “Their simple answer is: it is hard,” writes Martin Wolf for the Financial Times. “Their deep answer is: ‘Liberty originates from a delicate balance of power between state and society.’”
MIT researchers have identified a brain circuit that suppresses distracting information and in doing so, “started to take baby steps toward a better understanding of how body and mind — through automatic sensory experiences, physical movements and higher-level consciousness — are deeply and inextricably intertwined,” writes Jordana Cepelewicz for Quanta Magazine.
Forbes contributor Geri Stengel writes about how MIT alumna Laurel Taylor founded a company aimed at helping students and their parents with student debt “by assisting them in consolidating the management of their loans and lowering the interest rates so they could get out of debt faster.”
TechCrunch reporter Jonathan Shieber spotlights MIT startup VideaHealth, which is developing machine learning technology aimed at creating a standard of care across dental practices. VideaHealth CEO and MIT alumnus Florian Hillen explains that by applying AI technologies to dentistry, “we support the dentist to detect diseases more reliably, more accurately, and earlier.”
Boston Globe reporter Peter Keough spotlights “Augmented,” a new documentary that explores Prof. Hugh Herr’s work “to develop bionic prosthetic limbs that would be available for all who need them.”
Writing for Wired, research scientist Stephanie Thien Hang Nguyen argues that a push to regulate design features on websites could have unintended consequences. “For the sake of users, politicians, researchers, and technology companies alike must remember that design cannot be reduced to binary categorizations of dark or light—there is nuance,” Nguyen notes.
Prof. Josh Tenenbaum has been selected as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, reports Danny McDonald for The Boston Globe. The MacArthur Foundation noted that Tenenbaum is one of the “first to develop and apply probabilistic and statistical modeling to the studying of human learning, reasoning, and perception.”
Forbes contributor Daniel D’ambrosio highlights research affiliate Nan-wei Gong’s startup Figur8, which develops sensors that can help people better understand how they move. “We built a comprehensive platform to look at all the bio-markers that are affected by how you move,” Gong said.
Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard memorializes the life of alumnus Martin Trust, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who helped found the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. “We would not have been able to get started without his generous gift, and we would not have been able to reach the heights we have today without his continued support,” says Prof. Bill Aulet, managing director of the Trust Center.
MIT researchers have found that the ability to detect musical octaves is gained through exposure, reports Eva Amsen for Forbes. The researchers found to “match a note to the same note in a different octave, is not really all that natural. It’s a skill we got from being surrounded by music in which the octave is an important element.”
Axios reporter Kaveh Waddell writes that a working paper by postdoctoral fellow Baobao Zhang examined whether informing people of the impacts of automation on the labor market could shift views on immigration and trade. Zhang found, “even when presented with evidence that automation was by far the more salient risk to jobs, people continued to hold anti-immigration, anti-trade views.”
Writing for Forbes, Prof. David Mindell writes about the MIT Task Force on the Future of Work’s new report, which “shows that technologies evolve within social and economic contexts, and we have great influence over whether they replace workers or augment their skills.”
Prof. Joseph Formaggio speaks with Clara Moskowitz of Scientific American about how an international team of researchers (including MIT scientists) has found that a neutrino cannot weigh more than one electron volt. “Neutrinos seem to have broken our understanding of what the Standard Model was supposed to be,” says Formaggio.
Ruth Lehmann, a former member of the Whitehead Institute and faculty member at MIT, has been selected as the new head of the Whitehead Institute, reports Jonathan Saltzman for The Boston Globe. Lehmann is a “renowned biologist who is considered a world authority on the cells that give rise to sperm and egg.”