Prof. Donald Sadoway speaks with Miles O’Brien of the PBS NewsHour about how designing better batteries could help make renewable energy more feasible. “The issue is that we don’t have a battery technology that can meet the rigorous performance requirements of the grid, namely, super low-cost and super long service lifetime,” explains Sadoway.
A recent analysis by researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Climate Interactive demonstrates how the structure of the Paris climate agreement “could lead to a scenario in which temperatures are held to about 1.8 C,” reports Chris Mooney for The Washington Post.
Liz Stinson reports for Wired on the Reality Editor, an app created by researchers from the MIT Media Lab that can break down objects from the physical world into their functional components. “A user could break down a toaster into modular components…and then...reassign any of those functionalities to a totally different object,” writes Stinson.
Prof. Carlo Ratti writes about the proliferation of startup hubs around the world in this piece for Project Syndicate. “Before long, the digital world and the physical world will be indistinguishable,” writes Ratti. “The era of ‘Silicon Everywhere’ is upon us – and it is taking shape in the world’s cities.”
Senior lecturer Sharmilia Chatterjee writes for Fortune about the growth in box-delivery subscription services and how large retailors may end up edging them out of the market. “Before entrepreneurs rush into the subscription box space, they should take heed of a number of factors including…the entry of big players,” Chatterjee writes.
Huffington Post reporter Lila Shapiro speaks with Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute, about the use of the CRISPR gene-editing technique to treat neurological diseases. “CRISPR’s impact is potentially across the board,” says Desimone. “It went from nothing just a few years ago to being a tool that’s in everyone’s toolbox.”
Dana Guth reports for Boston Magazine on a new bandage developed by Prof. Xuanhe Zhao that can deliver medication directly to a wound. “The bandage is filled with tiny pathways, so that drugs can flow through its gel-like material, providing relief for burns and other minor skin conditions,” writes Guth.
Boston Herald reporter Jessica Van Sack writes that Grove, an MIT startup dedicated to enabling people to grow their own produce, will award five of its indoor garden/fish tank systems to local schools. “When you have a full ecological system, it becomes more than just planting seeds and watching them grow,” explains co-founder Gabe Blanchet.
In a letter to The Boston Globe, a number of MIT faculty members argue that much more is known about climate change than a skeptic admitted in a recent opinion piece for the Globe. The authors write that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “presents strong evidence that more than half of the climate change seen in recent decades is human-driven.”
In its list of the "Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2015," Physics World gave three of the ten slots to work involving MIT researchers. Prof. Marin Soljačić, Prof. Joseph Formaggio with the Project 8 Collaboration, Prof. Martin Zwierlein and graduate student Lawrence Cheuk were among those whose research was highlighted.
Lauren Landry writes for Boston Magazine about MIT startup Lumii, which is developing glasses-free 3-D technology. Our vision is that, one day, you will take out your phone and you’ll see a 3-D, interactive hologram popping out of it,” says co-founder Tom Baran. “You won’t need to wear those goofy glasses.”
A new learning program developed by researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto imitates the way humans learn, according to EFE. The researchers aim to “reduce the difference in learning capability between humans and machines.”
Researchers from MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto have created a learning program that can grasp new concepts just like humans do, reports Will Dunham for Reuters. “Judges found the work produced by the computers to be virtually indistinguishable from that of human subjects,” explains Dunham.
A study conducted by Prof. Esther Duflo found that when women were offered financial support through livestock and educational training, they were able to climb out of poverty, according to The Economist. “Seven years after the programme began their average monthly consumption was almost one-third higher than it had been after two years.”
A new advance in machine learning allows a computer program to recognize and draw handwritten characters based off a few examples, reports John Markoff for The New York Times. Markoff explains that the “improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life.”