A new study by MIT researchers provides evidence that antibiotics can change the body’s chemistry and make it more hospitable to bacteria, reports Melinda Wenner Moyer for Scientific American. “We suspect that the strength of this effect will really depend on the type of infection and types of antibiotics used,” explains postdoc Jason Yang.
MIT researchers have found that a network of neurons compress or stretch their activity in order to control the brain’s timing, reports Alyssa Meyers for The Boston Globe. “Instead of passively waiting for a clock to reach a certain point, the team found the system of neurons changes its state independently based on the action being performed.”
Prof. Thomas Levenson writes for The Boston Globe about the potential impact drug-resistant bacteria could have on the future of surgery. “As more and more bacteria show resistance to antibiotics, the risks change — to the point that doctors and patients alike may soon face agonizing choices about whether or when to take a chance on many of the surgeries we now accept as a matter of course,” says Levenson.
Lester Hio of The Straits Times highlights two new programs led by researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology that recently received funding from the National Research Foundation as “part of an effort to forge collaboration between local and top overseas research institutions.” Profs. Michael Strano and Peter Dedon will lead research on the use of sensors to monitor plant growth and antimicrobial resistance, respectively.
In an interview with Amy Crawford of the Boston Globe, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, discusses new ideas for employment and retirement as the population continues to age. “We need those 50-plus people to provide the working knowledge that keeps our organizations and systems functioning,” Coughlin says.
Prof. Alan Berger writes for The Daily Beast about the findings of a new book he co-edited, Infinite Suburbia, which shows that “the vast majority of American economic and demographic growth continues to take place [in the suburbs].”
MIT students Nick Schwartz, Olivia Zhao, and Liang Zhou are recipients of this year’s Marshall Scholarship, reports The Boston Globe’s J.D. Capelouto. Schwartz, Zhao, and Zhou are among the 43 students from across the country who received the scholarship, which allows them to pursue graduate studies at a British university.
Zeninjor Enwemeka writes for WBUR about two MIT spinoffs, nuTonomy and Optimus Ride, that are conducting autonomous vehicle research in Massachusetts. A recent passenger trial by nuTonomy in Boston, “is perhaps a promising move for companies hoping to bring self-driving vehicles to the state,” writes Enwemeka.
The MIT Museum and MIT List Visual Arts Center were two of 18 Boston-area museums that participated in this year’s #BostonInstaSwap. Each museum sent an employee to another local institution where they were “tasked with snapping and sharing pictures from the scene, highlighting exhibits and giving their followers a different experience,” writes Steve Annear for The Boston Globe.
A new study from Francis O’Sullivan, director of MITEI, and graduate student Justin Montgomery, finds that increases in oil and gas output gains are largely due to “low energy prices, which led drillers to focus on sweet spots where oil and gas are easiest to extract,” rather than advances in fracking technology, reports Jim Polson and Tim Loh of Bloomberg.
MIT Media Lab project, Biota Beats, collects bacteria from different parts of the body and turns it into music, reports Erin Blakemore from The Washington Post. “The team crowdsources swabs from body parts — including mouths, feet, and armpits — then cultures the microorganisms on petri dish-like ‘records,’” Blakemore writes.
Frederick Daso of Forbes highlights MIT alumnus Ryan Robinson, whose startup aims to share unused computational capacity with others who need to perform intensive calculations. This technology will one day “help companies afford cheap, distributed computational power via quantum computing, and allow individuals to make money by loaning out their spare processing power and mining for cryptocurrency,” writes Daso.
Alexa Vazquez of WBUR writes about a new MIT Museum exhibit that uses virtual reality to place visitors face-to-face with fighters who have experienced lifelong conflict. “The aim was to go for more kind of intimate conversations that you wouldn’t normally have access to, with people from diverse sides of these diverse conflicts,” says Prof. Fox Harrell, who worked on the VR aspect of the exhibit.
Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson speaks with the Financial Times about a new report that aims to assess how quickly intelligent machines are progressing. This effort “was prompted by growing concerns about their impact on things such as employment,” writes Richard Waters.
In an article for the Financial Times about the best economics books of 2017, Martin Wolf highlights new works by Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Peter Temin. Wolf writes that in Temin’s “important and provocative book, [he] argues that the US is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with ever fewer households in the middle.”