Writing for Forbes, Jeff Kart highlights how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to process samples of bacteria and gauge whether the bacteria can produce electricity. “The vision is to harness the most-powerful bacteria for tasks like running fuel cells or purifying sewage water,” Kart explains.
Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Thomas Kochan examines how lessons learned from labor negotiations could be applied to resolving the government shutdown. “A skilled labor mediation team would use a strategy that allows each party to hold to their publicly stated commitments and positions while engaging in private off-the-record conversations that actually ignore what they said in public,” Kochan explains.
In an article for The Washington Post, graduate student Sara Plana examines the feasibility of creating a safe zone for civilians in Syria. Plana writes that, “no safe-zone option meets every criterion the United States has for a safe zone at the moment — one that protects the Kurds, requires no U.S. ground troops and avoids confrontation with Turkey.”
Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner highlights the RealityVirtually event that took place at MIT, bringing together nearly 450 people from 35 countries around the world to create new software for virtual and augmented reality headsets. Kirsner writes that the event “offered an incredible glimpse into the nascent medium’s potential and possibilities.”
MIT researchers have found that the Rekognition facial recognition system has more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services, reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini said “the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations,” writes Singer.
Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Institute, which aims to help companies create good jobs, particularly for service and retail workers. Hill notes that one of Ton’s principles is, “scheduling ‘slack’ into the system so that staff can come up with new ideas and innovations.”
MIT researchers developed a new technique to make a more effective and precise CRISPR gene editing system, reports Eileen Drage O’Reilly for Axios. The system uses the new enzyme Cas12b, which has a “small size and precise targeting [that] will enable it to be used for in vivo applications in primary human cells,” O’Reilly explains.
New Yorker contributor Caroline Lester writes about the Moral Machine, an online platform developed by MIT researchers to crowdsource public opinion on the ethical issues posed by autonomous vehicles.
MIT alumna Leila Pirhaji has been named a 2019 TED Fellow for her work developing ReviveMed, a company that uses “AI to develop personal drug therapies to treat difficult diseases,” reports Eillie Anzilotti for Fast Company.
Writing for The Washington Post, Stephen A. Schwarzman - chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone – describes the need to infuse ethics into the development of new AI technologies. “If we want to realize AI’s incredible potential, we must also advance AI in a way that increases the public’s confidence that AI benefits society,” says Schwarzman, who provided foundational funding for MIT’s new college of computing.
John Reilly, co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, writes for Fortune about the key components needed to create a Green New Deal. “A steady and slow buildup of spending would allow more time to select and evaluate green infrastructure options that have a reasonable chance of working,” writes Reilly. “We need the right size of government spending for the long term.”
In an article for Bloomberg Opinion, Noah Smith highlights Prof. David Autor’s recent lecture at the American Education Association. Autor shows that, “the urban-rural education gap has widened — in 1970, an American in a rural area was only 5 percent less likely to have a college degree as someone in an urban area, but by 2015 that gap had grown to 20 points.”
Prof. John E. Fernández, director of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, writes in a letter to The Boston Globe that the Trump administration should make an investment in rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Fernández writes that President Trump’s desire to build is good, “for local economies, job creation, and protection from emerging threats such as climate change.”
Wired reporter Matt Jancer writes about Embr Wave, a wearable device developed by several MIT alumni, which helps users regulate their body temperature. Jancer notes that a button on the Wave “turns it hotter or colder, and when it heats up or cools, your inner wrist you feel as if you turned on a personal thermostat only for you.”
HealthDay reporter Steven Reinberg writes that a new study by Prof. Siqi Zheng finds that air pollution can make people unhappy. Zheng found that, “On days with high levels of pollution, people are more likely to engage in impulsive and risky behavior that they may later regret, possibly because of short-term depression and anxiety,” writes Reinberg.