In the Media

Prof. Regina Barzilay joins The Economist’s “Babbage” podcast to discuss how artificial intelligence could enable health care providers to understand and treat diseases in new ways. Host Alok Jha notes that Barzilay is determined to “overcome those challenges that are standing in the way of getting AI models to become useful in health care.” Barzilay explains: “I think we really need to change our mindset and think how we can solve the many problems for which human experts were unable to find a way forward.”  

Financial Times reporter Robin Wigglesworth spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s new research that predicts relatively modest productivity growth from AI advances. On generative AI specifically, Acemoglu believes that gains will remain elusive unless industry reorients “in order to focus on reliable information that can increase the marginal productivity of different kinds of workers, rather than prioritizing the development of general human-like conversational tools,” he says.

Current AI models require enormous resources and often provide unpredictable results. But graduate student Ziming Liu and colleagues have developed an approach that surpasses current neural networks in many respects, reports Manion Bischoff for Scientific American. “So-called Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) can master a wide range of tasks much more efficiently and solve scientific problems better than previous approaches,” Bischoff explains.

Ara Mahar, a technical associate at the McGovern Institute, speaks with CBS News about what inspired their interest in kimonos – a traditional Japanese garment. “Mahar became so enamored [with the kimono] they moved to Japan to formally study it in 2016,” explains CBS. “Mahar became an expert, and moved back to Boston two years later. Mahar now gives demonstrations and lectures throughout the area.” 

Researchers at MIT have developed a fiber capable of suppressing sound that is made up of “silk, canvas and other common materials,” reports Charlie McKenna for MassLive. “The silk is barely thicker than human hair and is made by heating the materials and drawing them into a fiber,” explains McKenna. “Since each material flows at the same temperature, they can be pulled into a fiber while maintaining their structure.” 

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that the sun’s magnetic field “could form much closer to the star’s surface than previously thought,” reports Will Sullivan for Smithsonian Magazine. “The findings could help improve forecasts of solar activity that can affect satellites, power grids and communications systems on Earth—and produce magnificent auroras,” explains Sullivan. 

MIT have developed a new ingestible vibrating capsule that could potentially be used to aid weight loss, writes Newsweek’s Robyn White. Prof. Giovanni Traverso said the capsule “could facilitate a paradigm shift in potential therapeutic options for obesity and other diseases affected by late stomach fullness.”

Senior Research Scientist C. Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, speaks with Joshua Miller of The Boston Globe about the 11th consecutive month of record high global temperatures and the overall pace of climate change. The rising temperatures fall “very consistently with what the science is telling us about human interference with climate,” Schlosser explains. 

MIT engineers have developed a new adhesive, low-cost hydrogel that can stop fibrosis often experienced by people with pacemakers and other medical devices, reports for Maria Bolevich Interesting Engineering. “These findings may offer a promising strategy for long-term anti-fibrotic implant–tissue interfaces,” explains Prof. Xuanhe Zhao. 

MIT scientists are working to fortify coastlines with “architected” reefs that can also provide habitats for fish and marine life, reports Ed Brown for TechBriefs. “We looked at the structure of these reefs and we found some similarities to what we had been doing in fluid mechanics. That led us to the idea of trying to make artificial reefs that we could architect and build in a very directed way,” says Prof. Michael Triantafyllou.

A new study by MIT engineers finds that heating metals can sometimes make them stronger, a “surprising phenomenon [that] could lead to a better understanding of important industrial processes and make for tougher aircraft,” reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for New Scientist. “It was just so unexpected or backwards of what you might conventionally see,” explains graduate student Ian Dowding. 

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with CNBC reporter Trevor Laurence Jockims about the importance of embedding cybersecurity into company culture. “Cybersecurity has to be in the culture of the organization,” says Madnick. “Corporate culture prioritizes other things over security and risk management.”

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have determined how to measure the spin of a nearby supermassive black hole using a new calculation method, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. The team “managed to deduce a supermassive black hole’s spin by measuring the wobble of its accretion disk after a star has been disrupted—a polite word for torn up—by the gigantic object,” explains Schultz. “They found the black hole’s spin was less than 25% the speed of light—slow, at least for a black hole.” 

MIT astronomers have found a new way to measure how fast a black hole spins, observing the aftermath of a black hole tidal disruption event with a telescope aboard the International Space Station, reports Laura Baisas for Popular Science. “The only way you can do this is, as soon as a tidal disruption event goes off, you need to get a telescope to look at this object continuously, for a very long time, so you can probe all kinds of timescales, from minutes to months,” said Research Scientist Dheeraj Pasham.

MIT astronomers measured a black hole’s spin for the first time by tracking the X-ray flashes produced by a black hole following a tidal disruption event, reports Interesting Engineering’s Mrigakshi Dixit. “The spin value of a black hole tells us about how it evolved over the age of the universe,” explains Research Scientist Dheeraj Pasham.