MIT researchers developed a super-thin, bendy material that converts WiFi signals into electricity, reports Ian Sample for The Guardian. “In the future, everything is going to be covered with electronic systems and sensors. The question is going to be how do we power them,” says Prof. Tomás Palacios. “This is the missing building block that we need.”
Prof. Polina Anikeeva speaks with Forbes contributor Poornima Peiris about her work developing materials that could be used to help explore and better understand the brain and nervous system. “I am not interested in just improving things, I want to work on innovative ideas,” says Anikeeva.
TIME reporter Jamie Ducharme highlights how Prof. Dina Katabi has developed a device that uses wireless signals to collect information about how well a person is sleeping. “If we can monitor health continuously but passively in a patient’s natural environment, that can help dramatically,” explains Katabi.
Associated Press reporter Tali Arbel writes that MIT researchers have found that Amazon’s facial detection technology often misidentifies women and women with darker skin. Arbel writes that the study, “warns of the potential of abuse and threats to privacy and civil liberties from facial-detection technology.”
A new study by Media Lab researchers finds that Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition system performed more accurately when identifying lighter-skinned faces, reports Drew Harrell for The Washington Post. The system “performed flawlessly in predicting the gender of lighter-skinned men,” writes Harrell, “but misidentified the gender of darker-skinned women in roughly 30 percent of their tests.”
Verge reporter James Vincent writes that Media Lab researchers have found that the facial recognition system Rekognition performed worse at identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or dark-skinned. In experiments, the researchers found that the system “mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time,” Vincent explains.
Writing for Forbes, Jeff Kart highlights how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to process samples of bacteria and gauge whether the bacteria can produce electricity. “The vision is to harness the most-powerful bacteria for tasks like running fuel cells or purifying sewage water,” Kart explains.
MIT researchers have found that the Rekognition facial recognition system has more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services, reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini said “the results of her studies raised fundamental questions for society about whether facial technology should not be used in certain situations,” writes Singer.
MIT researchers developed a new technique to make a more effective and precise CRISPR gene editing system, reports Eileen Drage O’Reilly for Axios. The system uses the new enzyme Cas12b, which has a “small size and precise targeting [that] will enable it to be used for in vivo applications in primary human cells,” O’Reilly explains.
New Yorker contributor Caroline Lester writes about the Moral Machine, an online platform developed by MIT researchers to crowdsource public opinion on the ethical issues posed by autonomous vehicles.
In an article for Bloomberg Opinion, Noah Smith highlights Prof. David Autor’s recent lecture at the American Education Association. Autor shows that, “the urban-rural education gap has widened — in 1970, an American in a rural area was only 5 percent less likely to have a college degree as someone in an urban area, but by 2015 that gap had grown to 20 points.”
Wired reporter Matt Jancer writes about Embr Wave, a wearable device developed by several MIT alumni, which helps users regulate their body temperature. Jancer notes that a button on the Wave “turns it hotter or colder, and when it heats up or cools, your inner wrist you feel as if you turned on a personal thermostat only for you.”
HealthDay reporter Steven Reinberg writes that a new study by Prof. Siqi Zheng finds that air pollution can make people unhappy. Zheng found that, “On days with high levels of pollution, people are more likely to engage in impulsive and risky behavior that they may later regret, possibly because of short-term depression and anxiety,” writes Reinberg.
Inverse reporter Emma Betuel reports on a new study by MIT researchers showing that air quality impacts the happiness of people living in cities in China. “When the air is polluted people stay home, they don’t go out, and they order food delivery while staying home playing computer games and shopping online,” explains Prof. Siqi Zheng.
By analyzing posts on social media in China, Prof. Siqi Zheng has found that air pollution can cause increased levels of depression and unhappiness, reports Adele Peters for Fast Company. “We want to show that there’s a wider range of the social cost of air pollution,” explains Zheng.