Researchers from MIT and Harvard have “re-evaluated a 2017 review that warned of a growing global sperm-count crisis and associated decline in male fertility and concluded the review vastly overstated the situation,” reports Robert Preidt for U.S. News & World Report.
In an article for The Guardian, graduate student Marion Boulicault details her new findings that suggest recent studies showing declining male fertility are overstated. “The lesson from the research on sperm decline is not that we are facing imminent human extinction (at least not for sperm-related reasons),” writes Boulicault. “Rather, it’s the more banal but accurate fact that there’s much we don’t know about the relationship between men’s reproductive health and environmental pollution.”
A new study by researchers from MIT and BU finds that the “thin gold leaf material used to decorate picture frames or lamp bases could also be used to detect viral infections,” writes Eva Amsen for Forbes. The use of an accessible material like gold leaf means a diagnostic device made from the material “could be used in doctors’ offices or field clinics anywhere in the world, no matter how far they are from a hospital.”
Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson writes that a new study by researchers from MIT and Google finds that simple user experience interventions can help stop people from sharing misinformation on Covid-19. “Researchers introduced several different prompts through a simple popup window, all with a single goal: to get people to think about the accuracy of what they’re about to share,” writes Wilson. “When primed to consider a story’s accuracy, people were up to 20% less likely to share a piece of fake news.”
New York Times reporter Rachel E. Gross writes that a new study by researchers from MIT and Harvard finds that reports of declines in male fertility have likely been overstated.
Mashable spotlights Strolling Cities, a video project from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which uses AI to allow users to imagine what different words would like as a location. “Unlike other image-generating AI systems, Strolling Cities creates fictional cities every time,” Mashable notes.
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that researchers from MIT and other institutions have developed a programmable digital fiber that can capture, store and analyze data. The technology could “be paired with machine learning algorithms and used to make smart fabrics to record health data and aid medical diagnosis,” writes Hays.
Prof. Pierre Azoulay speaks with Forbes reporter Amy Feldman about his research showing that restrictive immigration policies are bad for U.S. entrepreneurship. “You have to think about those folks who didn’t get a visa to study in the U.S. and therefore won’t be in a situation to found a company later on,” says Azoulay.
An electric, autonomous boat developed by MIT researchers is being tested in the canals of Amsterdam as part of an effort to ease traffic, reports Aleksandar Furtula and Mike Corder for the AP. The Roboat project is aimed at developing “new ways of navigating the world’s waterways without a human hand at the wheel,” write Furtula and Corder. “The vessels are modular so they can be easily adapted for different purposes, carrying cargo or workers.”
A recent review by MIT researchers finds that “only about 23% of machine learning studies in health care used multiple datasets to establish their results, compared to 80% in the adjacent field of computer vision, and 58% in natural language processing,” writes Casey Ross for STAT. “If the performance results are not reproduced in clinical care to the standard that was used during [a study], then we risk approving algorithms that we can’t trust,” says graduate student Matthew McDermott. “They may actually end up worsening patient care.”
Michael Hecht of MIT’s Haystack Observatory speaks with Eric Niiler of Wired about how the Mars MOXIE experiment is successfully extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. "It’s stunning how much the results look identical to what we had run in the laboratory two years earlier,” says Hecht, who leads the MOXIE team. “How many things can you put away for two years and turn on and even expect to work again? I mean, try that with your bicycle.”
Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson spotlights Strolling Cities, a new AI video project developed by researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which recreates the streets of Italy based on millions of photos and words. “I decided that the beauty and sentiment, the social, historical, and psychological contents of my memories of Italy could become an artistic project, probably a form of emotional consolation,” says Mauro Martino of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. “Something beautiful always comes out of nostalgia.”
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that people tend to follow a predictable travel pattern that remains consistent in countries around the world. The findings could help urban planners “better understand how populations interact with their surroundings, as well as assist city planners with zoning, infrastructure and other development decisions,” writes Hays.
Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have uncovered a new travel pattern in human mobility that remains consistent across four continents, reports Beck Ferreira for Motherboard. “The notion that distance and frequency of visitation are related is in accordance with intuition,” the researchers explain. “What is surprising is that the relationship between these two quantities can be described by a simple and clean mathematical law.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that air pollution can enhance lightning sparked by wildfires, reports Nikk Ogasa for Science. Ogasa notes that the researchers “also found that air pollution did more than enhance lightning; wildfire smoke more than tripled the intensity of thundershowers.”