Wall Street Journal reporter Brian Gormley speaks with Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, a principal researcher scientist at IMES, who encourages hospitals to share electronic medical data on intensive care patients. “De-identified data from 60,000 such cases now are freely available in a database called Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care,” writes Gormley of Celi’s work. “Scientists regularly publish papers based on this repository.”
Prof. Aviv Regev speaks with NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce about her work with the Human Cell Atlas trying to catalogue every cell in the human body. “We don't need to analyze every individual cell out of 37 trillion because the cells kind of repeat themselves,” says Regev. “All we need to do is sample enough of them from enough region in order to get comprehensive coverage.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey highlights how MIT researchers have found that tiny satellites, called CubeSats, equipped with lasers could help keep telescopes on track while they are gathering information in space. The light emitted from the lasers could allow satellites “to calculate their position and the minute changes to their imaging apparatus caused by heat and radiation.”
TechCrunch reporter John Biggs writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system that allows users to reverse-engineer complex items by deconstructing objects and turning them into 3-D models. Biggs writes that the system is a “surprisingly cool way to begin hacking hardware in order to understand it’s shape, volume and stability.”
WCVB-TV’s Mike Wankum visits MIT to learn more about Prof. Nicholas Fang’s work developing a new film that can be coated on windows and can block up to 70 percent of incoming solar heat. Wankum explains that the film “could lead to a future with less need for air conditioning.”
A new study by MIT researchers shows that the Sahara desert and North Africa alternate between wet and dry conditions every 20,000 years, reports the Xinhua news agency. The researchers found that the “climatic pendulum was mainly driven by changes to the Earth's axis as the planet orbits the sun, which in turn affect the distribution of sunlight between seasons.”
Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney spotlights Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s discovery that graphene can act as a superconductor when twisted to a magic angle. “I haven’t seen this much excitement in the graphene field since its initial discovery,” said ChunNing Jeanie Lau, a professor at Ohio State University, of the impact of Jarillo-Herrero’s findings.
TechCrunch reporter John Biggs writes that MIT researchers have developed a system for 3-D printing glass that offers users more control over the material and final product. “The system is interesting because it actually produces clear glass structures that can be used for decoration or building,” Biggs notes.
Former postdoctoral associate Pinar Yanardag speaks with STAT reporter Elizabeth Preston about her work developing an immersive virtual reality app that aims to make it easier to pump breast milk. With virtual reality, “you can basically teleport yourself into a nice baby nursery,” says Yanardag. “You don’t need to see this environment, see all these pumps and wires and everything.”
Forbes contributor David DiSalvo highlights Prof. Alan Jasanoff’s book, “The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are” on his list of the must-read brain books of 2018. “Rather than being another assessment of what the brain does, this one is about what it is—and more interestingly what it is not,” writes DiSalvo.
Gizmodo reporter Maddie Stone writes that a new study by MIT researchers provides evidence that chloroform emissions rose 3.5 percent per year from 2010 to 2015 in East Asia. “If emissions continue to grow at 2010-2015 rates,” Stone writes, “the researchers estimate recovery of the ozone hole could be delayed by up to 8 years.”
Fortune cites the work of Prof. Esther Duflo in their special report on the shrinking middle class and what can be done to fix it. “Duflo has shaken up the economics world with a radical premise: Aid programs should be tested and evaluated with the same rigor as prescription drugs, through randomized controlled trials.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Melissa Healy writes that a study by Prof. Adam Berinksy examines how fact-checking impacts how voters view politicians who lie. Healy writes that in a study of Australian voters, Berinksy found that, “fact-checking changed subjects’ views about which politicians they supported, but only slightly.”
Boston Globe reporter Martin Finucane writes that MIT researchers have developed a new way to fabricate tiny objects. “The researchers are currently able to create objects that are around 1 cubic millimeter, with features as small as 50 nanometers,” Finucane explains. “The tiny structures could be useful in fields from optics to medicine to robotics.”
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can shrink objects to the nanoscale using a laser, reports Lauren Kent for CNN. Kent explains that the technology “could be applied to anything from developing smaller microscope and cell phone lenses to creating tiny robots that improve everyday life.”