A new tool developed by MIT researchers sheds light on the operations of generative adversarial network models and allows users to edit these machine learning models to generate new images, reports Daphne Leprince-Ringuet for ZDNet. "The real challenge I'm trying to breach here," says graduate student David Bau, "is how to create models of the world based on people's imagination."
On this episode of Freakonomics, Prof. Andrew Lo discusses the economics of drug development. “It’s important that we get the pricing of these vaccines correct so that they provide both a reasonable rate of return to investors who have risked their capital to develop these vaccines, while at the same time making sure that there’s no price gouging going on and that ultimately we provide access to everybody,” says Lo.
Researchers from MIT and the University of Oxford have found that guidelines for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic may need to be updated to account for factors such as ventilation, crowd size and exposure time, reports Akshay Syal for NBC News. "It's not just 6 feet and then everything else can be ignored or just mask and everything else can be ignored or just ventilation and everything else can be ignored,” says Prof. Lydia Bourouiba.
New Scientist reporter Alice Klein writes that MIT researchers have developed a synthetic glue that could be used to line the small intestine and help treat several conditions, including diabetes and lactose intolerance. “The researchers found they could control the uptake of different nutrients,” writes Klein, “by adding various substances to the synthetic lining.”
Gizmodo reporter Ed Cara writes that a study co-authored by Prof. Lydia Bourouiba argues that social distancing guidelines likely need to be updated in favor of a more nuanced approach. The researchers found that “rather than think exclusively about personal space,” writes Cara, “people should consider their circumstances.”
A team of MIT researchers tested several different techniques for action labeling in videos and found that “older, simple, two-dimensional convolutional neural networks—a type of neural network architecture that has been around for quite a while now—worked better than much more complex, models that try to analyze the videos in three dimensions,” reports Jeremy Kahn for Fortune.
In an article for The Conversation, graduate student Silvia Danielak delves into her new research exploring why disaster management models often need to be adjusted to better serve the needs of different communities. “Paying attention to the urban disaster managers’ understanding of place-based risk sheds light on the continuously compounding vulnerability and lack of sustainable disaster risk reduction in communities at risk,” Danielak writes.
A study by researchers from MIT’s Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) finds antibiotic resistance in some types of bacteria may be reversed using hydrogen sulphide, reports Melanie Sison for SciDevNet. “This is a very exciting discovery because we are the first to show that H2S can, in fact, improve sensitivity to antibiotics and even reverse antibiotic resistance in bacteria that do not naturally produce the agent,” says Wilfried Moreira, a principal investigator at SMART.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that St. Elmo’s Fire could help protect airplanes from lightning strikes, reports Caroline Delbert for Popular Mechanics. The researchers found that “the special kind of electrical charge can be used to place a protective and preemptive charge around airplanes in flight, and wind affects flying versus grounded vehicles in opposite ways.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s research examining the impact of automation on employment and a new essay from Prof. David Autor and Dr. Elisabeth Reynolds that illustrates how the pandemic could exacerbate economic inequality.
Writing for The Boston Globe, John Wolfson spotlights Prof. Lisa Piccirillo’s work solving the Conway knot problem. “When you perform a calculation, sometimes there’s really clever tricks you can use or some ways that you can be an actual human and not a computer in the performing of the calculation,” says Piccirillo of what drew her to math. “But when you make a logical argument — that’s entirely yours.”
New York Times reporter Elaine Glusac spotlights a study by Prof. Arnold Barnett that examines the safety of flying during the Covid-19 pandemic. Barnett found that “on a fully loaded flight, the chance of contracting Covid-19 was one in 4,300. If the middle seat is empty, the risk falls to one in 7,700.”
MIT researchers outfitted a Boston Dynamics robotic dog with contactless vital sign monitoring equipment to help clinicians care for patients with Covid-19 without risking exposure, reports Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. Etherington writes that the system “has the potential to not only reduce the risk of exposure for medical personnel, but also drastically reduce use of personal protective equipment.”
Writing for The New Yorker, Bernard Avishai spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work exploring the need for a revolution in financial engineering to help spur the development of vaccines, and how a vaccine megafund could have assisted in bringing the Covid-19 pandemic under control. “The more I studied this, the more I realized that finance actually plays a huge role in drug development,” says Lo, “in many cases, way too big a role.”
Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with Newsweek reporter Alexandra Schonfeld about his new research estimating the risk of contracting Covid-19 on an airplane. "I tried to take into account several things, including the fact that air travel travelers—as a group—might be less likely to be carriers of COVID than randomly chosen citizens," says Barnett.