Research

MIT researchers have engineered wasp venom to kill bacteria, reports Chukwuma Muanya for The Guardian. The researchers found that the altered peptides wiped out the antibiotic-resistant bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa within four days.

Provost Martin Schmidt and SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles speak with Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Castellanos about MIT’s efforts to advance the study of AI and its ethical and societal implications through the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Schmidt says this work “requires a deep partnership between the technologists and the humanists.”

Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson speaks with Gizmodo reporter Brian Merchant about the 2018 AI Index report, which examines trends in the field of AI. Brynjolfsson says that when it comes to the impact of automation on the labor market, “developing countries are likely to be the hardest hit—they are the ones that depend most on low wages to compete in manufacturing.”

Fast Company reporter Katharine Schwab writes that researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have developed a new interactive tool, called Escape, that allows users to map flight costs to any destination in the world. Escape’s “design is meant to help narrow down countless destinations as you plan your next getaway.”

Boston Globe reporter Jessie Scanlon spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay’s work developing machine learning systems that can identify patients at risk of developing breast cancer. Barzilay is creating “software that aims to teach a computer to analyze mammogram images more effectively than the human eye can and to catch signs of cancer in its earliest phases.”

Forbes reporter Fiona McMillan writes that MIT researchers have engineered an anti-bacterial peptide found in wasp venom in an effort to create a new antibiotic. McMillan writes that the researchers, “gained new insight into which structural attributes work best, either alone or in combination. In this way, they were able to tweak the peptide’s structure to obtain optimal function.”

MIT researchers have found that it’s easy to reidentify anonymized data compiled in massive datasets, reports Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan for Fast Company. The findings show that urban planners, tech companies and designers, “who stand to learn so much from these big urban datasets,” writes Campbell-Dollaghan, “need to be careful about whether all that data could be combined to deanonymize it.”

Graduate student Irene Chen speaks with WGBH’s Living Lab Radio about her work trying to reduce bias in health care algorithms. “The results that we’ve shown from healthcare algorithms are so powerful that we really do need to see how we could implement those carefully, safely, robustly and fairly,” she explains.

A new study by MIT researchers provides evidence that compiling massive anonymized datasets of people’s movement patterns can put their private data at risk, reports the Xinhua news agency. The researchers found “data containing ‘location stamps’ – information with geographical coordinates and time stamps – could be used to easily track the mobility trajectories of how people live and work.”

MIT researchers have repurposed the toxic venom found in wasps to create a new drug that could potentially be used to kill bacteria, reports the Xinhua news agency. “The venom-derived peptide is believed to kill microbes by disrupting bacterial cell membranes,” Xinhua explains.

Boston Herald reporter Jordan Graham writes that MIT researchers have used the venom from a South American wasp to engineer a new type of antibiotic. “The idea here is to take that very well-crafted toxin and turn it into something that can be useful for humans and our society,” explains César de la Fuente Nunez, a postdoc at MIT.

A new study by researchers from MIT and a number of other universities finds that the “Trump administration’s proposal to roll back fuel economy standards relies on an error-ridden and misleading analysis that overestimates the costs and understates the benefits of tighter regulation,” reports Tony Barboza for The Los Angeles Times.

Popular Mechanics reporter Jill Kiedaisch writes that MIT researchers have developed a plant cyborg, named Elowan, that can move itself towards sources of light. Kiedaisch writes that Elowan “could elevate how we interface with the world around us, leveraging the natural abilities of plants to inform how we animals express our own agency to live, and keep living, perhaps a bit more symbiotically.”

Popular Mechanics reporter David Grossman writes that MIT researchers have developed a conceptual design for storing renewable energy for the grid in tanks of white-hot molten silicon. The researchers estimate that their system, “would cost around half as much as the current cheapest form of renewable energy ready to scale out to an entire grid.”

Prof. Julie Shah and Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speak with Miles O’Brien of the PBS NewsHour about how robots can be used to augment human capabilities in the workplace. Shah explains that she is developing technology that enables robots to “integrate and work effectively with the person, so that they can accomplish the task together.”