Research

Prof. Giovanni Traverso speaks with GBH’s “All Things Considered” host Arun Rath about his work developing new approaches to weight loss treatments that don’t involve surgery or pharmaceuticals. “Our team does a lot of work on ingestible systems, ingestible capsules that can do many things,” says Traverso. “You know, we recognize that we live now in a world where we have really incredible therapies that are very effective for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. But we also recognize that they’re not for everybody. There are people who have side effects, people who can’t take them, so these are certainly alternatives, or potentially synergistic interventions, that could work together either with those drugs or, as I was mentioning, for folks that have side effects from the drugs.”

New research by graduate student William Parker SM '22 has found that two geomagnetic storms have led to the mass migrations of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, reports Jeff Foust for Space News. “This is a significant impact,” says Parker. “This is critical infrastructure to all of our space operations moving forward, and it will only become more important as time goes on.”

Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, shares the importance of having conversations about intergenerational family wealth transfers to help avoid disputes in inheritances plans, report Anne Tergesen and Dalvin Brown for The Wall Street Journal. "The only way to avoid causing stress, surprise or anger to people is to have these discussions gradually over time," says Coughlin.

MIT scientists have discovered the smallest asteroids known to exist in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, reports Alfredo Carpineti for IFL Science. “The team of researchers behind this new discovery cleverly reused images from the search for exoplanets,” writes Carpineti. “Stacks of images looking at the same distant star field were used with a technique called “shift and stack”, which aims to highlight possible movement in the foreground, like from an asteroid. They were able to find 138 asteroids in the decameter size range.”

Prof. David Autor has been named a Senior Fellow in the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows program, and Profs. Sara Beery, Gabriele Farina, Marzyeh Ghassemi, and Yoon Kim have been named Early Career AI2050 Fellows, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. The AI2050 fellowships provide funding and resources, while challenging “researchers to imagine the year 2050, where AI has been extremely beneficial and to conduct research that helps society realize its most beneficial impacts,” explains Nietzel. 

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with NBC Boston reporter Colton Bradford about her work developing a new AI system aimed at making grocery shopping easier, more personalized and more efficient. “I think there is an important synergy between what people can do and what machines can do,” says Rus. “You can think of it as machines have speed, but people have wisdom. Machines can lift heavy things, but people can reason about what to do with those heavy things.” 

New Yorker reporter Rivka Galchen visits the lab of Prof. Hugh Herr to learn more about his work aimed at the “merging of body and machine.” Herr and his team are developing bionic prosthetics that can be completely controlled by the human brain and are designed to allow users “to walk approximately as quickly and unthinkingly as anyone else.”  Herr imagines a future where “we will be able to sculpt our own brains and bodies, and therefore our own identities and experiences.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a new type of dynamic gastric balloon that inflates on demand and could be used to help patients feel more full before meals, reports Margherita Bassi for Gizmodo. The engineers have “designed a potential future alternative for patients who, for any number of reasons, cannot treat obesity through medications or invasive surgeries such as gastric bypass surgery or stapling,” writes Bassi. 

Using a new technique developed to examine the risks of multimodal large language models used in robots, MIT researchers were able to have a “simulated robot arm do unsafe things like knocking items off a table or throwing them by describing actions in ways that the LLM did not recognize as harmful and reject,” writes Will Knight for Wired. “With LLMs a few wrong words don’t matter as much,” explains Prof. Pulkit Agrawal. “In robotics a few wrong actions can compound and result in task failure more easily.”

Professor Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues have developed a new gastric balloon that can be inflated and deflated to mimic feeling full. Unlike traditional gastric balloons, which are one size, the new version is “connected to an external control device that can be attached to the skin and contains a pump that inflates and deflates the balloon when needed,” writes Ernie Mundell for HealthDay. 

MIT researchers have developed a gastric balloon that can inflate before eating and contract afterwards in an effort to ensure the body does not grow accustomed to the balloon, reports Nicola Davis for The Guardian. “What we try to do here is, in essence, simulate the mechanical effects of having a meal,” explains Prof. Giovanni Traverso. “What we want to avoid is getting used to that balloon." 

Grist reporter Matt Simon spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds “large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills.” Graduate student Martin Staadecker explains: “Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important. But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have compared 12 large language models (LLMs) against 925 human forecasters for a three-month forecasting tournament to help predict real-world events, including geopolitical events, reports Tomas Gorny for Forbes. "Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments,” the researchers explain.

MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Program Scientist Scott Odell speaks with USA Today reporter Kate Petersen about the impact of renewable energy mining. “We can really reduce the amount of virgin metal we need to mine just by using the old metal we've already got,” says Odell. “We need to design our systems such that we have the capacity to recycle those metals.”

Forbes reporter John M. Bremen spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that “shows the most skilled scientists and innovations benefitted the most from AI – doubling their productivity – while lower-skilled staff did not experience similar gains.” The study “showed that specialized AI tools foster radical innovation at the technical level within a domain-specific scope, but also risk narrowing human roles and diversity of thought,” writes Bremen.