In the Media

Cognito Therapeutics, an MIT startup co-founded by Prof. Li-Huei Tsai and Prof. Ed Boyden, has developed a headset that uses light and sound to slow the cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients, reports Emily Mullin for Wired. “Cognito’s headset, dubbed Spectris, delivers flashing lights and sounds through a pair of connected glasses and headphones to stimulate gamma waves in the brain” writes Mullin. “Different types of brain waves have different paces, or frequencies. Gamma waves are fast-frequency brain waves associated with thinking skills and memory, and people with Alzheimer’s are known to have fewer of these fast brain waves.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere are studying how T-cell receptors recognize antigens, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. The team “hopes to develop antigen-specific immunotherapies which could also have treatment implications for infectious diseases and allergies,” writes Nietzel.

Times Higher Education spotlights MIT President Sally Kornbluth in a roundup of top universities led by women. “Kornbluth’s academic background is in cell biology. She obtained a degree in political science from the University of Cambridge, and then pursued a PhD in molecular oncology at Rockefeller University.”

Bingxu Liu PhD '23 speaks with Science reporter Christie Wilcox about his work  studying STING, an immune protein that plays a key role in defending the human body against viruses, bacteria, and tumors. “STING is actually one of the most promising cancer immunotherapy targets,” explains Wilcox. “If you activate the STING pathway, it triggers a very strong immune response. But when it’s too strong, it can actually kill your T cells. Initial evidence suggest that T cells die because of some ion impact. Which begs the question: Can we just use STING to activate some parts of the immune response, like interferon, but also block the ion flow [that’s harming T cells]?” 

Prof. Emeritus Donald Sadoway co-founded Boston Metal, an MIT startup that has developed a carbon-free steel manufacturing process, reports Amy Feldman for Forbes. “Boston Metal’s process – which uses an electricity conducting, molten-metal proof anode to liquify iron ore, separating the pure metal without harmful byproducts – allows factories to create carbon-free steel as long as they use a clean energy source, such as hydroelectric power,” explains Feldman. “It also can create steel from lower-grade ores rather than relying on scarce high-grade ones. That’s an important advantage in terms of both cost and availability compared to other methods of making green steel, according to the company.”

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the history and future of artificial neural networks and their role in large language models. “The early artificial neuron was a very simple mathematical model,” says Rus. “The computation was discrete and very simple, essentially a step function. You’re either above or below a value.”  

Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”

MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC about how the new class of weight loss drugs will impact American taxes and the federal deficit. “These drugs could touch tens of millions of Americans, that’s the good news,” says Deese. “They have the potential to reduce obesity, address diabetes and reduce the health care costs associated with that. The problem is that the scale and the cost of these drugs is so large, that it could add enormously to the federal budget.”

Wardah Inam SM '12, PhD '16 founded Overjet, an AI platform that helps dentists “diagnose diseases from scans and other data,” reports Saritha Rai for Bloomberg. “Dentistry was more art than science, and I wanted to bring technology and AI to help dentists make objective decisions,” says Inam. “We began building and then improving our AI systems with tens of millions of pieces of data, including X-rays, historical information, dentist notes, and periodontal charts.”

Boston Globe reporter Adri Pray spotlights the Women Take the Reel Film Festival, an annual celebration of female filmmakers that “features themes of gender, sexuality, race, feminism, and class.”

Christina “Chris” Birch PhD '15 is among NASA’s newest class of astronauts, reports Norah O’Donnell for CBS Evening News. “These new astronauts could one day be part of the team that brings the first woman and first person of color to the surface of the moon and beyond.”

Boston Globe reporter Michael Silverman spotlights the 18^th MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference focused on a, “diverse array of heady topics such as artificial intelligence, the globalization of soccer, the next phase of sports ownership, the evolutional of poker strategy,” writes Silverman, noting that “nearly every conversation on stage seemed to circle back to a shared belief that the momentum already carrying women’s sports is on the verge of a new surge.”

Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks with Heatmap reporter Matthew Zeitlin about her new study examining the effectiveness of climate policies in reducing emissions. Wolfram and her colleague found that instituting a carbon fee and a clean electricity standard would reduce emissions the most. Wolfram added that if the U.S. were to institute a carbon fee, it would be a major step towards a worldwide carbon price. “The more countries that get in this game,” Wolfram said, “the more powerful that policy can be.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings write for The New York Times about the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers. “The magnitude of potential benefit and potential cost — roughly $15,000 per year per person — posed by these drugs suggests that policymakers may have no alternative but to step in and bring their costs in line with their social benefits,” they write. “If policymakers succeed in doing so, we could build a model for drug price negotiation that enables an extraordinary medical breakthrough to improve both our health and our fiscal position.”

Prof. Philip Isola and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien about AI generated images and videos. Rus says the computing resources required for AI video generation are “significantly higher than for still image generation” because “it involves processing and generating multiple frames for each second of video.”