Two students in the School of Engineering have designed a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in .38 seconds. “Their contraption used two PlayStation Eye cameras from the old PS3 console to identify the configuration of the cube,” reports the BBC, which allowed the students to beat the currently recognized Guinness World Record of .637 seconds.
Prof. Sinan Aral writes for The New York Times about research he co-authored with Postdoc Soroush Vousaghi and Associate Prof. Deb Roy, which found that false news spreads “disturbingly” faster than factual news. “It could be, for example, that labeling news stories, in much the same way we label food, could change the way people consume and share it,” writes Aral.
In this opinion piece published by The Boston Globe, Vice President for Research Maria T. Zuber writes that fusion energy is within reach: "The MIT design uses established science for the plasma confinement, and thus puts fusion power plants within reach on a faster time-scale than previously thought possible."
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg are donating $30 million to an MIT and Harvard initiative to improve child literacy. Reach Every Reader, which will be funded for five years, “will combine scientific research with new methods of tracking and predicting students’ reading abilities,” writes Jordan Graham for The Boston Herald.
A study co-authored by Prof. David Autor finds that over the past five decades, automation has helped increase total employment, but wages have not increased, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath. According to Autor, the findings help explain “why inequality between the world’s wealthiest and everyday workers has increased.”
Mashable highlights the robotic system, developed by researchers at MIT and Princeton, that can pick up, recognize, and place assorted objects. The researchers created an algorithm that allows the crane to “grab and sort objects (such as medicine bottles) into bins making it a potential timesaver for medical experts.”
Deborah Cramer, a visiting scholar at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, writes for The New York Times about “the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale.” “We must act boldly and swiftly,” writes Cramer. “With only about 100 breeding female right whales left, we haven’t much time.”
MIT startup Ministry of Supply has developed a jacket that utilizes AI to keep its wearer warm. “The jacket…can also be voice-controlled through devices like the Amazon Echo or manually with an app,” writes Erin Black for CNBC.
The Koch Institute has chosen 10 new scientific images from MIT researchers to display in a public gallery in its lobby. The images “span a range of subject matters and approaches, capturing both fundamental biology and how that biology is upended by disease processes,” writes Lisa Raffensperger of STAT.
Jeff Tollefson at Nature reports on a new MIT collaboration to develop fusion energy with an approach based on high-temperature superconductors. MIT's Martin Greenwald, deputy director of PSFC, tells Tollefson: “We feel very confident in what [SPARC's] performance would be if we can build the magnets at that scale."
Writing for The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray reports that MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems believe they can turn nuclear fusion into a practical energy source. "MIT scientists believe their SPARC design points the way to much smaller and cheaper fusion reactors," explains Bray.
Scientists at MIT and a private company are looking to "transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source," reports Hannah Devlin for The Guardian. Devlin quotes Prof. Maria Zuber, MIT's Vice President for Research: "At the heart of today’s news is a big idea - a credible, viable plan to achieve net positive energy for fusion.”
A study led by Prof. John Hansman suggests that slower planes would significantly reduce noise on the ground. “It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore,” writes Scott McCartney for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.”
WBUR's Bruce Gellerman discusses the latest fusion news out of MIT with Morning Edition host Bob Oakes. "They really do believe that they've got the technology. They've got the science. They've got the engineering. They've got the money. And they're ready to roll," says Gellerman.
The Associated Press reports that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating $30 million to Harvard and MIT, to help improve literacy skills in elementary school students. “[S]truggling to read can be a crushing blow with lifelong consequences,” said President Rafael Reif.