The Human Cell Atlas, compiled by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has released its first batch of data with details of 530,000 immune system cells, writes Jason Daley of Smithsonian. New computational methods “allowed scientists to tackle… about 100 times as many cells as most cell-sequencing experiments handle,” explains Daley.
Gary Gensler, a top financial regulator in both the public and private sector, spoke with Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times about virtual currencies and the need for regulation. This fall, Gensler will hold dual appointments at Sloan and the Media Lab, “where he will write and teach about the potential he sees for blockchains to change the financial world.”
NASA has successfully launched its “planet-hunting” Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, more than a decade after MIT scientists first proposed the idea of a mission like TESS, reports Ashley Stickland for CNN. “NASA believes that TESS will build on Kepler’s momentum and open the study of exoplanets in unprecedented ways,” writes Strickland.
Ashley Nunes, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, contributed this perspective on pilot qualification standards to The Washington Post. Nunes questions the effectiveness of a rule mandating pilots have at least 1,500 hours of flying experience.
60 Minutes previews an upcoming episode where Scott Pelley visits the MIT Media Lab “and finds a crystal ball full of technologies that may someday become a part of our everyday lives.” Pelley highlights the history of the lab, started in 1985, and showcases some of the new projects being developed there.
After launching into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, “NASA's newest planet-hunter, the TESS space telescope, will observe roughly 85 percent of the sky to find planets orbiting bright, nearby stars,” writes Jay Bennett of Popular Mechanics. "Never underestimate how ingenious nature actually is," said MIT’s George Ricker, who is the principal investigator on TESS.
Writing in The Boston Globe, technology reporter Hiawatha Bray examines a bracelet designed by three MIT alumni that “functions like a personal thermostat, cooling you off when you’re hot or warming you up when it’s chilly.” Called Embr Wave, it offers a “sudden surge of heat or cold that makes us feel better, even though our core temperature has hardly changed,” Bray explains.
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey profiles ReviveMed, a biotech startup out of MIT that turns drug discovery into a big data problem. “ReviveMed’s approach is a fundamentally modern one that wouldn’t be possible just a few years ago, such is the scale of the data involved,” writes Coldeway.
MIT researchers have developed “the first artificial system to mimic the way the brain interprets sound – and it rivals humans in its accuracy,” reports Samia Bouzik for NOVA Next. “The research offers a tantalizing new way to study the brain…[and] could boost some neuroscience research into the fast track,” writes Bouzik.
Rhod Sharp, presenter of Up All Night on BBC Radio 5, talks with Prof. Sara Seager about the functionality of TESS and the details of its orbit. “TESS has a very unique orbit, it’s like a giant ellipse,” says Seager. “The cameras are made to be very stable thermally, so little temperature changes don’t expand or contract different parts of the lens assembly, and thus mess up the image.”
WHDH highlights an MIT Libraries exhibit at the Maihaugen Gallery in memory of Officer Sean Collier. “On display at the exhibit is a collection of items left in the officer’s honor after he was killed in 2013,” 7 News reports. Condolence materials left with the MIT Police in 2013 and 2014 are also included.
Meghna Chakrabarti of WBUR’s Radio Boston talks with Sky & Telescope editor J. Kelly Beatty about what makes the launch of TESS, an MIT-led NASA mission to discover new planets, so exciting. “We should give a nod to the great minds at MIT,” says Chakrabarti, “because they had quite a significant role in the thought behind getting this satellite up in the first place.”
Postdoc Gabriel Leventhal has created a project to track how the microbes in a sourdough starter change as it gets shared around the world, writes Alex Kingsbury of The Boston Globe. To track the starter, “Herman,” each descendant is given a unique name and number before the samples are returned to the lab to track how the microbes evolve, Kingsbury explains.
A recent study co-authored by Assistant Prof. Danielle Li in Sloan found evidence to support the “Peter Principle,” which theorizes that the best employees do not always make the best managers, reports Rodd Wagner, a contributor for Forbes. The researchers concluded that “promoting based on lower-level job skills rather than managerial skills can be extremely costly.”
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will enter an unusual, highly elliptical orbit around the Earth to capture images of about 20,000 new exoplanet candidates, writes Robbie Gonzalez of Wired. "We are setting the stage for the future of exoplanet research—not just for the 21st century, but the 22nd century and beyond," says MIT Kavli Institute senior research scientist George Ricker, leader of the TESS mission.