Huffington Post reporter Michael McLaughlin writes that a new study co-authored by MIT postdoc Julien de Wit details the discovery of three Earth-sized planets. The “planets orbit a star in the Aquarius constellations named Trappist-1,” writes McLaughlin. “But the planets are close enough to the star to have ‘temperate’ conditions on their surface.”
Boston Globe reporter Astead Herndon writes that an international team of astronomers, including researchers from MIT, have discovered three potentially habitable planets. “This is a paradigm shift,” says Julien de Wit, a postdoc at MIT. “These planets are the best shots for us to search for other habitats, and maybe even life.”
Melinda Moyer of Scientific American reports that researchers have found that people who used acid blockers to treat heart burn are at increased risk for developing intestinal infections. Moyer explains that the blockers “may limit the gut's diversity by reducing its acidity and thus creating an environment that is more or less amenable to certain microbes.”
Researchers from MIT and Mass General Hospital have been named one of the winners of Popular Science’s 2016 Invention Awards for their work developing an ingestible electronic device that measures vital signs, reports Dialynn Dwyer for Boston.com.
In this video, Bloomberg News reporter Sam Grobart examines the new hydrogel developed by MIT researchers that can bend and twist without breaking, and could be used to deliver medicines and monitor our health. Grobart explains that the hydrogel “could be a building block of the medicine of the future.”
WBUR reporter Jack Lepiarz speaks with Prof. Marta Gonzalez about her traffic study that found that if drivers switched routes during rush hour they could cut back on congestion. “We have enough space, in theory, but we are all filling up a few streets that get congested,” Gonzalez explains.
Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney writes that MIT researchers have found that the Paris climate agreement pledges would let the world warm by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The researchers found that “with each year that countries wait to strengthen their current pledges, the rate at which emissions must decline gets steeper and steeper.”
MIT researchers have found that plants may use prions, the proteins responsible for mad cow disease, to form memories, reports Anil Ananthaswamy for New Scientist. “Prions, we think, are responsible for some really broad, really interesting biology,” says Prof. Susan Lindquist. “We have only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.”
A new study co-authored by Prof. David Autor examines how manufacturing job losses caused by trade have contributed to the current political discord, reports Nelson Schwartz and Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. “There are these concentrated pockets of hurt,” explains Autor, “and we’re seeing the political consequences of that.”
As part of their “This Day in History” series, The Boston Globe highlights how on April 24, 1962, MIT researchers “achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, using NASA’s Echo 1 balloon satellite to bounce a video image from Camp Parks, Calif., to Westford, Mass.”
Popular Science reporter Mary Beth Griggs writes that in an MIT course students developed a fleet of duckie-adorned self-driving taxis for a village called “Duckietown.” “Each of the robot taxis is equipped with only a single camera, and makes its way around the roads without any preprogrammed maps."
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray writes that a study by Prof. Alberto Cavallo finds that prices for online and in-store items were identical about 72 percent of the time. Cavallo found that “prices were more likely to be the same for clothing and electronics, while drug stores and office supply stores showed greater price variations.”
MIT researchers have developed an artificial intelligence platform that uses input from human analysts to predict cyber-attacks, reports Brian Mastroianni for CBS News. “We realized, finding the actual attacks involved a mix of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning,” explains research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni.
Prof. David Autor speaks with NPR’s Chris Arnold about trade deals, the presidential election, and how trade with China has impacted American workers. Instead of criticizing trade deals, Arnold notes that Autor would like the national conversation to “focus on what can be done to help workers who've been displaced by trade.”
A Vox article on the potential and challenges of scaling solar power cites the MITEI Future of Solar Energy report’s findings about the relationship between market penetration of solar, market prices, and solar revenues. In the article, MITEI researcher Jesse Jenkins discusses what it will take to make solar energy competitive.