An international team of scientists, including researchers from MIT and Harvard, have found that an artificial intelligence program trained to read X-rays and CT scans can successfully predict a person’s race with 90 percent accuracy, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. "The research effort was born when the scientists noticed that an AI program for examining chest X-rays was more likely to miss signs of illness in Black patients," writes Bray.
Wall Street Journal reporter Ryan Dezember visited Prof. Desiree Plata’s lab to learn more about her group’s work developing a new tool to help address climate change. Plata and her colleagues “soaked an odor-eating clay used in cat boxes in a copper solution to create a compound that they say snatches methane from passing air and turns it into carbon dioxide, a much less harmful greenhouse gas.” The new technique has the “potential to greatly reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere and slow warming temperatures on the planet.”
Researchers at MIT have built a highly efficient thermophotovoltaic cell that converts incoming photons to electricity, reports Kevin Hurler for Gizmodo. “We developed this technology—thermal batteries—because storing energy as heat rather than storing it electrochemically is 10 to 100 times cheaper," explains Prof. Asegun Henry.
Astronomers and researchers from MIT and 80 other institutions have captured the first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy reports Joel Achenbach for The Washington Post. “The pandemic slowed us down but it couldn’t stop us,” said research scientist Vincent Fish of the pandemic’s impact on the Event Horizon Telescope team’s work.
Researchers from MIT and 80 other institutions have captured the first image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, reports Denise Chow for NBC News. The image provides “the first direct visual evidence of ‘the gentle giant’ that lies at the center of our galaxy,” writes Chow.
An international team of scientists, including MIT researchers, unveiled the first picture of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, reports Martin Finucane for The Boston Globe. “Our collaboration’s remarkable images of Sgr A* and our scientific conclusions were a combined effort that involved not just the handful of us on stages around the world today, but more than 300 people all working together united by our fascination with black holes,” explains research scientist Vincent Fish.
Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein writes that the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope has imaged the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. To get the picture, eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” explained research scientist Vincent Fish.
Researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope team, including MIT scientists, have captured the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, reports Bill Chappell for NPR. “More than 300 researchers collaborated on the effort to capture the image, compiling information from radio observatories around the world,” reports Chappell. “To obtain the image, scientists used observations from April 2017, when all eight observatories were pointed at the black hole.”
Prof. Devin Michelle Bunten and University of Pennsylvania Prof. Amy Hillier published an analysis on how to bring more queer and intersectional approaches to fair housing, reports Rachel M. Cohen for Vox. “The legality of private discrimination against most household structures mirrors the skepticism of nonnormative housing long espoused by public policy,” Bunten and Hillier write.
New York Times contributor Thomas B. Edsall spotlights Prof. Jonathan Gruber’s research that provides evidence that “lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent.” Gruber noted, “The very states that oppose abortion rights are the ones that engage in poorly designed tax cuts that leave them without the resources to support their neediest citizens.”
Scientists from MIT and other institutions have developed the largest, most detailed computer model of the universe’s first billion years, which could help shed light on how the early universe evolved, reports Charles Q. Choi for Scientific American. The model, named THESAN, “can track the birth and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies within a cubic volume spanning more than 300 million light-years across.”
A new study co-authored by Prof. Pierre Azoulay finds that immigrants are 80% more likely to start businesses than people born in the U.S., reports Yasmin Amer for WBUR. "[Immigrants] create more firms pretty much in every size bucket," says Azoulay. "They create more small firms, they create more medium sized firms. They create more firms that will grow up to be very large."
Eureka Robotics, an automation company based in Singapore, has developed their products based on research from MIT and Nanyang Technological University, reports Catherine Shu for TechCrunch. “It [Eureka Robotics] focuses on robotic software and systems to automate tasks that require High Accuracy and high Agility (HAHA),” writes Shu. “Its robots are used for precision handling, assembly, inspection, drilling and other tasks.”
Researchers at MIT have developed an automated search tool that can help astronomers identify the echoes emitted by a specific type of black hole, reports Juandre for Popular Mechanics. “The team’s algorithm, which they dubbed the ‘Reverberation Machine,’ pored through data collected by the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, an x-ray telescope mounted to the International Space Station,” writes Juandre. “They identified previously undetected echoes from black hole binary systems in our galaxy.”
MIT astronomers have used light echoes from X-ray bursts to try to map the environment around black holes, reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times. Prof. Erin Kara then worked with education and music experts to transform the X-ray reflections into audible sound. “I just love that we can ‘hear’ the general relativity in these simulations,” said Kara.