“Twitter Inc on Wednesday gave $10 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research that would explore how people use and achieve shared goals using social networks,” writes Christina Farr for Reuters. The committment will fund a new laboratory where researchers will develop tools to analyze social media patterns.
Thanks to a $10 million committment from Twitter, researchers at MIT plan to establish a Laboratory for Social Machines to analyze Twitter messages in real time, writes Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe. “With this data, the lab plans to develop new communication tools to help address social problems,” Bray explains.
“With a $10 million investment from Twitter, data scientists at MIT’s Media Lab are creating a new research group that will get access to Twitter’s entire feed of real-time and archived public tweets,” writes Yoree Koh for The Wall Street Journal.
Steve Annear of Boston Magazine writes about Twitter’s $10 million committment to the MIT Media Lab to study the social network’s data. The research “will focus on developing new technologies so that researchers can better digest the logic and ‘social patterns’ in mass media, social media, data streams, and digital content,” writes Annear.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Feltman writes that researchers have found evidence that the moon’s basin was formed by magma flows. "For anyone who's ever looked up at the moon and wondered why it has this pattern on its surface — now we have an answer,” says MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.
Thomas Burton of The Wall Street Journal writes that MIT researchers were among those awarded the first research grants under President Obama’s new BRAIN Initiative. Burton writes that one of the MIT grants will go toward “determining which exact brain circuits are involved in generating short-term memories that influence decisions.”
Boston Globe reporter Deborah Kotz writes that MIT researchers have been awarded new grants from the National Institutes of Health to further brain research. “Biophysicist Alan Jasanoff received a grant to develop imaging agents for functional MRI imaging that would target the flow of calcium into and out of brain cells,” writes Kotz of one of the MIT grants.
MIT neuroscientists were among the recipients of new grants for brain research from the National Institutes of Health, reports Jon Hamilton for NPR. Hamilton explains that as part of one grant, “Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will try to adapt functional MRI so that it can show the activity of individual brain cells.”
Shankar Vedantam of NPR reports on Dr. Boris Katz’s new research examining how errors in written English can reveal clues about other languages. “By analyzing the patterns of mistakes that native speakers of two languages make in English, the computer can say, look, these two languages might actually be related to one another,” Vedantam explains.
“MIT researchers have developed a football-size underwater robot that they say could soon help protect America's ports,” writes Brooks Hays for UPI. While the robot was designed to inspect the water tanks of nuclear reactors, researchers say it could be used to check ships for hidden contraband.
Raghu Dhara of The Harvard Crimson writes that a new study by researchers from MIT, Harvard and Tsinghua University found that online courses are just as effective as traditional university courses. The study found that “the ‘learning gain’ of a group of MOOC students was comparable to that achieved by students enrolled in the same course at MIT,” explains Dhara.
Issie Lapowsky writes for Wired about an MIT study that demonstrated that students who completed a physics class online learned as effectively as those who took it in person. “What’s more, the results were the same, regardless of how well the online students scored on a pre-test before taking the class,” Lapowsky writes.
Professor Rolland Pellenq’s team has developed a new formula that would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with concrete production by half, reports Julia Pyper for Scientific American. The mixture also achieves "two times the resistance of normal cement, in mechanical resistance to fracture,” says Pellenq.
Keith Wagstaff of NBC News reports on a new MIT study, which found that students who complete online courses end up with the same learning gains as those who attend class in person. “That goes for people of all education levels, from those with a high school diploma to those with a Ph.D.,” writes Wagstaff.
William Becker writes for The Huffington Post about a study from the MIT Energy Initiative and the Harvard University Center on the Environment that examined American public opinion on energy sources. "Americans don't really divide along partisan lines when it comes to their energy preference,” the researchers reported.