Allison Katz speaks with WBUR’s Pamela Reynolds about her new exhibit, “Diary w/o Dates,” which is on display through July 29th at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. As Katz explains, the work is about “calibrating various ways of internalizing time,” particularly compared to “the evenly-paced grid of the calendar/clock/grid model.”
Xinhua news agency reports that MIT researchers have developed a robotic glider based on an albatross that can skim along the water’s surface “while surfing the waves like a sailboat.” “The researchers hope that in the near future, such compact and speedy robotic water-skimmers may be deployed in teams to survey large swaths of the ocean.”
MIT researchers are using virtual reality to train autonomous drones to fly in a variety of environments, writes Steven Melendez for Fast Company. Future tests may train the drone to fly safely around humans “as if they were in the same area, enabling it to practice sharing a space without actually endangering any human lives,” Melendez notes.
The Economist reports on a new method for retirement income developed by Prof. Robert Merton and his colleague at France’s EDHEC Business School.
WBUR’s Carey Goldberg recommends a video with neuroscientists at the McGovern Institute “for a quick, light and smart explanation” of the ‘Yanny vs. Laurel’ debate. “The same acoustic information is hitting everyone’s ears,” says graduate student Kevin Sitek. “But the brain is then going to interpret that differently, based on experience.”
Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have designed a kit that allows scientists to develop diagnostic tests quickly and cheaply. The kit, “uses modular blocks that can be connected in different patterns to replicate the function that would typically be built into a manufactured test for pregnancy, glucose, or an infection or other disease.”
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, writes for Forbes about challenges facing the children of Baby Boomers, who will eventually need to care for their parents. “[W]hile the Baby Boomers may be aging, they are far from done,” writes Coughlin. “It may be our best gift to our children to develop care plans, options, savings, and innovations today to care for us tomorrow.”
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith profiles Prof. Parag Pathak, who was recently awarded the John Bates Clark medal for his work using economic theory to improve the allocation of students to New York City public schools. “Pathak isn’t just a theorist,” writes Smith, “in keeping with economics’ age of data, he also does a lot of empirical work.”
Using LiDAR sensors, MIT researchers have developed an autonomous vehicle navigation system for rural roads with “no detailed, three-dimensional map for the vehicle to reference,” reports Rob Verger of Popular Science. “The solution for urban mapping really doesn’t scale very well to a huge portion of the country,” explains graduate student Teddy Ort.
MIT researchers have developed a method for turning plant leaves into a light source by injecting light-emitting nanoparticles into the leaves, reports Mark Ellwood for The Wall Street Journal. “Currently, researchers are able to make plants such as spinach, kale and watercress emit a dim light for about 4 hours,” says Ellwood, “up from 45 minutes when the project began in 2015.”
Prof. Daniel Jackson, MIT student Haley Cope and alumna Caterina Colon discuss the book “Portraits of Resilience” on Greater Boston with Jim Braude. According to Jackson, the hope is that by compiling the students’ stories and photographs into a book “people who were suffering could read these stories, look at these faces, and realize they were not alone.”
Co-founded by Prof. Feng Zheng, Beam Therapeutics, which uses CRISPR to treat disease, has secured $87 million in initial funding, reports Clive Cookson for Financial Times. Beam is the first company to use base editing, which changes the chemical “letters” of genetic code without cutting it, similar to “moving from scissors-and-paste to editing text with a sharp pencil,” explains Cookson.
Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour sits down with Prof. Daniel Jackson and students to discuss “Portraits of Resilience,” a collection of portraits and essays about individual experiences with mental health issues. “I hoped to capture the personality and charisma of the person that I was interviewing, the strength and the vulnerability,” says Jackson.
Coryanne Hicks of U.S. News & World Report highlights research by Prof. Andrew Lo and graduate student Pablo Azar in an article about using Twitter to spot financial trends. The study predicted market shifts based on the emotional context of tweets, finding that "when people start to get nervous, you can detect that very clearly," says Lo.
MapLite, a system developed by CSAIL researchers, allows autonomous vehicles to drive on roads they’ve never driven before without 3D maps, writes Andrew Hawkins of The Verge. If it becomes commercial, MapLite could ensure “that the safety benefits from autonomous driving [are] extended to residents in rural communities,” suggests Hawkins.