WCVB reporter Jessica Brown shares the story of Heather Walker, vice president of public relations for the Boston Celtics, who is currently enrolled in a MIT glioblastoma research study. The team of MIT researchers are examining “the tumor’s DNA, looking for gene mutations and abnormal proteins that make it unique,” says Brown. “With that information, the group designs a custom vaccine that trains the body’s immune system to recognize the cancerous cells and attack them.”
Sloan graduate student Haiyi Zhang and Wellesley College Prof. Courtney Coile are conducting an ongoing research effort to understand how the pandemic changed retirement, writes Washington Post reporter Andrew Van Dam. “They found that workers were less likely to retire if they could work from home. However, they didn’t see evidence that local coronavirus outbreaks nor the local job market had an effect on early retirements,” writes Van Dam.
WCVB reporter Maria Stephanos shares the experience of Heather Walker, vice president of public relations for the Boston Celtics, who is enrolled in an MIT glioblastoma research study. Walker’s family and friends have created the Heather Walker Fund for Glioblastoma Research at Dana Farber, where “all the money raised will go to supporting a glioblastoma research study at MIT [that is] using immunotherapy and personalized vaccines,” says Stephanos.
Forbes contributor Bruce Y. Lee writes that MIT researchers have found that lack of sleep can affect a person’s gait and that catching up on sleep can improve gait control for those who are chronically sleep deprived. Lee writes that the findings demonstrate how, “lack of sleep may affect your ability to move your body and navigate in subtle ways.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that Covid-19 may impact the inner ear, affecting hearing and balance, reports Robert Preidt for HealthDay News. “Their results suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect the inner ear, specifically hair cells that are crucial for hearing and balance,” writes Preidt. “To a lesser degree, the coronavirus can infect Schwann cells, which insulate neurons.”
Quanta Magazine reporter Thomas Lewton spotlights Prof. Janet Conrad’s work on MiniBooNE, a neutrino particle detector that was in operation from 2002 until 2019.
Axios reporter Alison Snyder writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how AI algorithms could provide insight into the human brain’s processing abilities. The researchers found “Predicting the next word someone might say — like AI algorithms now do when you search the internet or text a friend — may be a key part of the human brain's ability to process language,” writes Snyder.
Financial Times reporter Tom Wilson writes that researchers from MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) have successfully demonstrated the use of a high-temperature superconductor, which engineers believe can allow for a more compact fusion power plant. “It’s the type of technology innovation that you know shows up every once in a while in a given field,” CFS chief executive, Bob Mumgaard, tells Wilson.
New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy spotlights Prof. Nancy Leveson’s research into accident prevention. Coy writes that Leveson’s approach “doesn’t focus on identifying individual faulty components or singling out blundering people. Instead she looks at how accidents can be caused by unforeseen interactions between various components of a complex system.”
Gizmodo reporter Tom McKay explores a new report co-authored by Prof. Antoinette Schoar and Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics, which reveals that 10,000 individual investors control one-third of the Bitcoins in circulation. This “inherent concentration makes Bitcoin susceptible to systemic risk and also implies that the majority of the gains from further adoption are likely to fall disproportionately to a small set of participants,” the researchers explain.
Hidden Brain podcaster Shankar Vedantam speaks with NGO leader and Maldives native, Hassan Maniku, who is working with researchers from the MIT Self-Assembly Lab to find a natural process to quickly build islands to combat the growing effects of rising sea levels on coastal communities. “People in the Maldives know they can’t stop the ocean from rising, they have to adapt to that reality and over the last several years, that is exactly what they have started to do,” says Vedantam.
Forbes contributor Bruce Dorminey writes that a new study by MIT scientists finds that the surfaces of carbonaceous asteroids may be much more rocky than previously thought. “This news is important for planetary science because we need to sample asteroids to answer fundamental questions such as how the solar system formed and how life came to be on Earth, says postdoctoral fellow Saverio Cambioni.
Newsweek reporter Robert Lea writes that astronomers from MIT and elsewhere have found evidence of a large planetary collision that stripped the atmosphere from a planet. “While astronomers have long believed these kinds of collisions are common throughout the Universe, this is the first time that they have spotted evidence of one that stripped an atmosphere in such a way around a distant star,” writes Lea.
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have uncovered evidence that early dinosaurs may have lived in social herds, reports Kate Baggaley for Popular Science. “People have known for a long time that the more advanced dinosaurs, the ones that lived in the late Jurassic and Cretaceous, especially the large sauropods…moved and lived in herds,” explains research scientist Jahandar Ramezani. “But the question has always been, when did this behavior start?”
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers presents the first evidence that a distant planet had its atmosphere partially blown away by a large impact, reports Charles Choi for Space.com. "I think a really critical implication is that the gas that is released in the aftermath of a giant impact can last for a long time, and it can affect the way the system evolves long-term," explains graduate student and lead author Tajana Schneiderman.