Researchers at MIT have found “the brain is not wired to transmit a sharp ‘stop’ command in the most direct or intuitive way,” reports Kevin Hartnett for Quanta Magazine. The brain “employs a more complicated signaling system based on principles of calculus,” writes Hartnett.
MIT researchers have found that standard autism diagnostic tests could be “stymieing discovery of sex differences in autism,” reports Ingrid Wickelgren for Scientific American. “To qualify for the study, prospective participants had to take a standard activity-based assessment for autism to confirm their diagnosis,” says Wickelgren. “After testing, half of the 50 girls and women who would otherwise be eligible for the scientists’ study did not meet the test’s criteria for autism.”
Nature reporter Elie Dolgin writes that a new study by MIT researchers explores the role of the gene variant APOE4 in Alzheimer’s, and finds that the gene is linked with faulty cholesterol processing in the brain, impacting the insulation around nerve cells and potentially causing memory and learning deficits. “The work suggests that drugs that restore the brain’s cholesterol processing could treat the disease,” writes Dolgin.
Popular Science reporter Charlotte Hu writes that MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning model that can depict how the sound around a listener changes as they move through a certain space. “We’re mostly modeling the spatial acoustics, so the [focus is on] reverberations,” explains graduate student Yilun Du. “Maybe if you’re in a concert hall, there are a lot of reverberations, maybe if you’re in a cathedral, there are many echoes versus if you’re in a small room, there isn’t really any echo.”
Researchers from MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital are working on developing new technology that could help predict and identify diseases through audio recordings of a patient’s voice, reports Jim Morelli for Boston 25 News. “It’s almost like being Sherlock Holmes to voice, taking voice as a signal and trying to understand what’s going on behind it,” said Satrajit Ghosh, a principal research scientist at the McGovern Institute. “And can we backtrack from voice and say this is ‘Disorder A’ versus ‘Disorder B’?”
A study by Prof. Emery Brown suggests that the combination of Covid-19 and anesthesia could prompt the human brain into a state of quiet that can last weeks or months, similar to how turtles quiet their neurons to survive winter, reports Carl Zimmer for The New York Times. The findings “might point to new ways to save people from brain damage: by intentionally putting people into this state, rather than doing so by accident.”
Scientists at MIT have developed “a machine learning model that can capture how sounds in a room will propagate through space,” report Kyle Wiggers and Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch. “By modeling the acoustics, the system can learn a room’s geometry from sound recordings, which can then be used to build a visual rendering of a room,” write Wiggers and Coldewey.
Scientists at MIT have found that specific neurons in the human brain light up whenever we see images of food, reports Dr. Mallika Marshall for CBS Boston. “The researchers now want to explore how people’s responses to certain foods might differ depending on their personal preferences, likes and dislikes and past experiences,” Marshall.
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. David Rand explores how social media platforms could channel partisan motivations to help moderate the spread of misinformation online. “Combating misinformation is a challenge requiring a wide range of approaches,” writes Rand. “Our work suggests that an important route for social media companies to save democracy from misinformation is to democratize the moderation process itself.”
A study by MIT researchers finds that the screening test used for autism creates a gender gap that impedes diagnosis and treatment for women and girls, reports Sydney Murphy for Health Day. The researchers found that “a screening test often used to decide who can take part in autism studies seems to exclude a much higher percentage of women than men,” writes Murphy.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that women being excluded from studies on autism can hinder diagnoses and the development of useful interventions for women and girls, reports Gianna Melillo for The Hill. “Female diagnoses could be missed altogether and an already small pool of study subjects is further reduced,” writes Melillo.
Prof. Edward Boyden has developed a new imaging technique called expansion-revealing microscopy that can reveal tiny protein structures in tissues, reports The Economist. “Already his team at MIT has used it to reveal detail in synapses, the nanometer-sized junctions between nerve cells, and also to shed light on the mechanisms at play in Alzheimer’s disease, revealing occasional spirals of amyloid-beta protein around axons, which are the threadlike parts of nerve cells that carry electrical impulses.”
Helen Santoro, a participant in Prof. Evelina Fedorenko’s “Interesting Brain Project,” writes about her experience for The New York Times. “In April, I wrote Dr. Fedorenko an email telling her about my missing left temporal lobe and offering to be part of her research,” explains Santoro. “She replied four and a half hours later, and soon I was booking an airplane ticket from my home in rural Colorado to Boston.”
Researchers at MIT have discovered that pictures of food appear to stimulate strong reactions among specific sets of neurons in the human brain, a trait that could have evolved due to the importance of food for humans, reports Sascha Pare for The Guardian. “The researchers posit these neurons have gone undetected because they are spread across the other specialized cluster for faces, places, bodies and words, rather than concentrated in one region,” writes Pare.
Graduate student Anna Ivanova and University of Texas at Austin Professor Kyle Mahowald, along with Professors Evelina Fedorenko, Joshua Tenenbaum and Nancy Kanwisher, write for The Conversation that even though AI systems may be able to use language fluently, it does not mean they are sentient, conscious or intelligent. “Words can be misleading, and it is all too easy to mistake fluent speech for fluent thought,” they write.