Researchers from MIT and Google have developed a new system that could be used to help decode and parse ancient languages or how animals communicate, report Mary Lou Jepsen and John Ryan for Wired.
Prof. Jeffrey Hoffman speaks with NPR’s Joe Palca about MOXIE, an instrument developed by MIT researchers to extract oxygen from Mars’ atmosphere. Hoffman explains the idea behind MOXIE, “is to go after the oxygen that is combined with carbon to make up the carbon dioxide, which forms about 95% of the Martian atmosphere.”
Financial Times reporter Lucy Watson spotlights Prof. Timothy Hyde’s book, “Ugliness and Judgement: On Architecture in the Public Eye” on a list of the best interior books to kick off the new year. Watson writes that in the book, Hyde explores “what are considered to be the ‘most vile’ buildings of the past century, and explores the societal (and aesthetic) contexts that make them so.”
In an article for The Boston Globe, Prof. Jonathan Gruber examines how to address the challenges facing the U.S. health care system. “Health care reforms can take any number of iterations in the coming decades,” writes Gruber. “But unless it ensures universal, nondiscriminatory access and recognizes the need for price regulation, it will continue to fail Americans.”
Profs. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee speak with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about their Nobel Prize-winning research aimed at alleviating poverty. “This is a prize for a whole movement of people who have really tried to go back to the field and tried to understand the problem of the poor in detail and try out solutions,” says Duflo.
Jeanne Guillemin, a research associate and senior advisor at the MIT Security Studies Program, has died at 76, reports Katharine Q. Seelye for The New York Times. Guillemin was known as “an eminent medical anthropologist and scientific sleuth who helped expose a secret biological warfare lab in the Soviet Union as the source of a lethal anthrax outbreak,” Seelye recounts.
MIT researchers have developed a new non-invasive, hands-off medical imaging technique, reports Andrew Liszewski for Gizmodo. “Using lasers, they can peer beneath the surface of the skin without any physical contact required, improving upon the limitations of equipment like ultrasound machines,” Liszewski explains.
Graduate student Jonathan Marcus speaks with Boston Globe reporter Nancy Shohet West about his experience mentoring students participating in Hackaway for Good, which was aimed at creating technology with a social impact. Marcus notes that the technical ability of the high school students who participated “blows me away, but through this event they are also learning to apply empathy in developing prototypes.”
A new co-authored by MIT researchers finds that the “app-based gig economy seems to have altered the norms and expectations of both consumers and workers,” reports Michelle Cheng for Quartz. The researchers found that “perceptions of worker autonomy have driven the decline in tipping norms associated with gig work.”
Writing for Scientific American, Karen Weintraub spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new invisible ink that could be injected under a patient’s skin, leaving a record of their vaccination history. “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease,” explains research scientist Ana Jaklenec.
Writing for National Geographic, graduate student Lucy Jakub examines the Earth’s history of mass extinctions. “Increasing evidence suggests that many global extinction events were associated with oxygen-depletion in the oceans, a symptom of greenhouse warming, and that has worrying implications for the present-day effects of climate change,” writes Jakub.
MIT researchers have developed a method of storing vaccination history underneath a patient's skin, reports Elizabeth Cooney for STAT. “My hope is that this scientific work could someday have a significant impact in terms of enabling patients in the developing world to receive the correct vaccines when needed,” explains Prof. Robert Langer.
Senior lecturer Robert Pozen is funding a new prize in honor of his mother that will honor outstanding financial policy research or practices, reports Jon Chesto for The Boston Globe. “Policymakers or academics who make an outstanding contribution to financial policy,” says Pozen, “they get some recognition but they don’t get the financial rewards that the people who are running these companies get.”
Research affiliate Matt Beane writes for Wired about the potential challenges posed by creating AI systems that can predict unintended consequences. Beane explains that the more tasks we hand over to an AI system “singularly focused on its goals, the more they can produce consequences we don’t like, sometimes at the speed of light.”
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, examines how new smart technologies designed to help care for the elderly are vulnerable to cyberattacks. “Technology now provides a critical role in supporting caregivers and the wellbeing of older adults,” writes Coughlin. “However, caregivers now have a new job — the cyber security of their older loved ones.”