Download RSS feed: News Articles / In the Media / Audio
Professor Sangeeta Bhatia and her colleagues have successfully engineered bacteria that can be used to detect cancer and diabetes, writes Robert Service for Science. The researchers found that “while conventional imaging techniques struggle to detect liver tumors smaller than 1 square centimeter, this approach was able to flag tumors as small as 1 square millimeter.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Melissa Healy writes that researchers from MIT and the University of California, San Diego have successfully modified bacteria to detect cancer. “Their work is a key component of broader efforts to make the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer increasingly precise and targeted," writes Healy.
Researchers from MIT and the University of California, San Diego have genetically modified bacteria so that it can detect cancer, BBC News reports. The researchers hope that one day, “the general approach could one day be used to develop relatively cheap and easy to use home-testing kits for a range of diseases.”
MIT researchers have developed a non-invasive way to detect liver cancer using probiotics, reports Vijee Venkatraman for BetaBoston. The researchers found that they could “use bacteria as tumor scouts…and engineer them to emit a signal once they reached the mass and multiply.”
According to The Economist, a new algorithm created by EECS graduate student YiChang Shih and his colleagues can remove the reflections that often appear in photos taken through glass. As the team describes in their paper, their software “can indeed separate the desired image from the reflected one.”
Wired reporter Emily Dreyfuss writes about the MIT team competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and their approach to the competition. The team, which is competing using the Atlas robot designed by Boston Dynamics, has built their software so that Atlas can operate autonomously, Dreyfuss explains.
Scott Kuindersma, a post-doctoral associate and Planning and Control Lead for the MIT DARPA Robotics Challenge team, spoke with Boston.com about the Atlas robot. “Walking robots are interesting for a lot of reasons,” says Kuindersma. “They have the promise of getting over challenging terrain that would stymie many track systems.”
TechCrunch's Darrell Etherington writes about WaitChatter, a program developed by researchers at MIT CSAIL that leverages unoccupied time by teaching users a new language. WaitChatter “uses a Google Chat extension to offer up quick vocabulary learning lessons right in your IM chat window.”
Nidhi Subbaraman writes for BetaBoston about WaitChatter, a new application developed by MIT students that could help teach users a foreign language while they chat online. “The application uses the brief window when the ellipses dominate the screen as an opportunity to spring a vocabulary quiz,” Subbaraman explains.
“MIT researchers have created an algorithm [that] can distinguish between different lymphomas in real time,” writes Melissa Malamut for Boston Magazine. Graduate student Yuan Luo and Professor Peter Szolovits developed a system that can automatically suggest cancer diagnoses based on data points from past pathology reports, Malamut explains.
Hal Hodson writes for New Scientist about Vital-Radio, a new system developed by CSAIL researchers that monitors and records a person’s breathing and heartbeat. Researchers hope the new system could be used to “monitor and improve patient health in hospitals and at home.”
Mark Anderson profiles Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, recipient of the 2015 IEEE Medal of Honor, for IEEE Spectrum, chronicling her journey from a childhood passion for music to her pioneering research on carbon. Anderson writes that Dresselhaus has “blazed a path for researchers eager to exploit the magic of carbon computing.”
Chuck Bednar writes for redOrbit that a team of MIT researchers has developed a method for defending against cyberattacks in the cloud and implemented their new technique in computer chips. “By adapting the technology to chips used in home systems, they are looking to key prying eyes from stealing your computer’s data,” Bednar reports.
Lauren Beavin of Boston Magazine speaks with A.M. Turing Award recipient Michael Stonebraker about why Boston is such a great place for computer scientists. The Boston tech scene "is way above critical mass, and the quality of life here is very, very high,” Stonebraker explains.
The ACM has awarded the A.M. Turing Award, widely regarded as the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” to CSAIL researcher and adjunct professor Michael Stonebraker, reports Barb Darrow for Fortune. Stonebraker is “famous for arguing that database is not a one-size-fits-all category."