Slate reporter Jordan Weissman writes about Professor David Autor’s new paper, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas’s City’s Economic Symposium. In the paper, Autor argues that robots and computers will not replace humans in the labor market as they lack the ability to reason like the human brain.
Charles Pulliam-Moore of the PBS NewsHour reports on new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab showing that humans are happier and more productive when robots are in control. The research, “could lead to situations in which human employees could be empowered by machines, rather than replaced by them,” Pulliam-Moore writes.
CBC News reports on the MIT study examining how carbon reduction policies impact health care spending. “They discovered that the greatest health savings came from the cap-and-trade program, with savings coming in at 10.5 times the $14.5-billion cost of such a program,” CBC reports.
Erika Fry writes for Fortune about the spread of infectious diseases, highlighting a study by researchers from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering that examines how infectious diseases could spread worldwide through air transportation. The researchers developed a metric to rank and predict which U.S. airports would be the most influential spreaders of a disease.
The MIT Alumni Association’s Slice of MIT blog features highlights of MIT President L. Rafael Reif’s Ice Bucket Challenge. “MIT President L. Rafael Reif is the Institute’s 17th president, but he is almost surely the first MIT president to publicly dump a bucket of near-freezing water over his head,” writes Jay London.
Reuters reports on Professor David Autor’s new paper on how automation and computers are impacting the labor market. "I expect that a significant stratum of middle skill, non-college jobs combining specific vocational skills with foundational middle skills - literacy, numeracy, adaptability, problem-solving and common sense - will persist in coming decades," Autor explains.
Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that will allow delivery drones to monitor their own health. “Drones will be able to keep an eye on their ability to do the job by predicting fuel levels and checking on the condition of propellers, cameras and other sensors,” writes Collins.
Melissa Malamut of Boston Magazine writes that MIT chemical engineers have developed a new treatment for bone injuries. The researchers developed an implantable tissue scaffold coated with bone growth factors that helps the body quickly form new bone.
BetaBoston reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes that MIT researchers are developing new techniques to make future delivery drones more functional and efficient. “We have broken the large problem into lots of small problems,” says Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi.
MIT scientists have shown recycled lead can be used in solar cells, reports Popular Science’s Emily Gertz. “The group's work demonstrates that the perovskite created from the lead in just one old car battery could provide materials for 30 households-worth of solar energy cells,” writes Gertz.
Martin LaMonica writes for IEEE Spectrum about how MIT researchers have developed a system that uses car batteries to produce solar cells. “The beauty is that this new process is pretty interchangeable with the current production method,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Feltman writes that MIT engineers have developed a system that recycles batteries into solar cells. “We think it could be a competitor that’s easy to process, has rapidly increasing efficiency, and can be made in an environmentally friendly way,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
In a piece for The Boston Globe, Kevin Lewis writes about how political scientists from MIT and the University of California, Berkeley found that, contrary to popular belief, Senator Joseph McCarthy did not influence the outcomes of the 1950 and 1952 Senate elections.
Clive Cookson of The Financial Times reports on the new vision-correcting display developed by researchers from MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. The technology, which automatically corrects for vision problems, “puts the glasses on the display, rather than on your head,” explains Dr. Gordon Wetzstein.
Drake Bennett of Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have created a robot that can self-assemble from a flat sheet of paper in four minutes. The robot is made of paper, and layered with a circuit board and prestretched polystyrene, the same material used to create Shrinky Dinks, Bennett explains.