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.
The Boston Globe’s Nicole DeFeudis highlights classes at Sloan that focus on workers’ issues in response to an earlier opinion piece for the paper co-authored by two Sloan MBA students suggesting business schools were “neglecting frontline workers.” As one of the co-authors explains, “Part of what drove us to write the article is we feel that Sloan is well-positioned to lead this conversation.”
Greg Walton, an IT service provider and consumer support engineer at MIT, speaks with Chris Emma on NECN about his experience with Year Up, a non-profit organization focused on professional and personal development. “Year Up was one of the first opportunities that helped me get into a position where I could be someone successful,” said Walton. “They helped build that confidence.”
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is developing a Drug Repurposing Hub, which looks to “acquire samples of every drug ever developed to see if they can be used to treat diseases besides those for which they were intended,” writes Jonathan Saltzman for The Boston Globe.
“The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal” is currently on exhibit at the MIT Museum through the end of 2018. The show features drawings by Cajal that “so effectively illustrate now-basic neurological concepts that they are still used in neuroscience textbooks today,” writes Zoë Schlanger for Quartz.
Laney Ruckstuhl of The Boston Globe writes about “Calculated Imagination,” the Course 2.007 Willy Wonka-themed robot competition based on “creativity and innovation.” Students are graded on their work leading up to the competition. “You can earn an ‘A’ with a robot that scores zero points but that demonstrates good engineering and design skills,” Prof. Amos Winter explains.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will visit MIT this Friday “to headline the annual meeting of the school's Solve initiative,” reports the Associated Press. Trudeau’s appearance at Solve, which “connects tech entrepreneurs with leaders in government, business and academia to tackle world problems,” will mark his first visit to Cambridge since becoming prime minister.
MIT’s Course 2.007 Design and Manufacturing I hosted its annual robotic competition with a Willy Wonka-themed course. The event, which involves five “sudden death” rounds, is about “more than just taking home first place,” says WBZ’s Lisa Hughes. “I cannot even explain…how much opportunity this class has given us,” a student shares.
Writing for The New Yorker, Prof. David Kaiser contrasts a new study in Nature, which concludes that “if human will is free, there are physical events… that are intrinsically random, that is, impossible to predict,” with the 19th century writings of Stephen Freeman, who argued that, “human consciousness and our perception of free will must be subject to chains of causation.” The researchers, says Kaiser, “turned Freeman’s formulation on its head.”
Graduate student John Urschel appears on the Scientific American podcast My Favorite Theorem, where he shares his love of a theorem for graph theory developed by Daniel Spielman. Urschel points out that Spielman is “one of the first people to give provable guarantees for algorithms that can solve a Laplacian system of equations in near linear time.”
Kerri Corrado of 7 News Boston reported live from this year’s Course 2.007 robot competition, where students put their homemade robots to the test on a Willy Wonka-themed course. The competition “gets the students into the design process, the manufacturing process, the building process and gets their ideas to reality,” said mechanical engineering student John Taylor Novak.
Research led by postdoc Yevgeni Berzak examined the correlation between eye movement and language proficiency. Sandrine Ceurstemont of New Scientist notes that the team thinks results of the study could be used to “modify” text to a reader’s ability level, “catering to both second language and native speakers.”