Natasha Frost of Quartz speaks with graduate student Mostafa Mohsenvand about his work developing a new wearable device that could one day be used to help people with memory loss. Frost writes the device may help those suffering with Alzheimer’s by “making memories instantly accessible externally for those who may otherwise be unable to recall them.”
A new report from MIT researchers finds a correlation between climate change and an increase in mental health issues, writes Nicole Karlis for Salon. Research scientist Nick Obradovich explains that the study shows, “policymakers should be very actively considering how to increase societal resilience to our changing climate.”
TechCrunch reporter Kate Clark spotlights Prof. Tim Berners-Lee’s quest to decentralize the web and provide people with power over their personal data through his new startup inrupt. Clark explains that inrupt is expanding the platform Berners-Lee developed that allows users to “keep their data wherever they choose, rather than being forced to store it on centralized servers.”
MIT researchers have created an AI system that allows users to automatically erase people and objects from photos, writes Mark Wilson for Fast Company. Wilson writes that the researchers have “built a remarkably simple front-end interface to control [the system]. In one column, you select what you’d like to remove from your photos, and in the right column, you select your source material.”
A team of researchers led by Prof. J. Christopher Love has developed a system to produce on-demand clinical-grade vaccines and drugs, writes Dr. Francis Collins on the NIH Director’s Blog. In addition to allowing on site production for hospitals the systems could also “produce biologic treatments specially tailored to attack the cancer of a particular individual,” suggests Collins.
Researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology are part of a team that developed a potential treatment for drug-resistant malaria, which is expected to be publicly available within the next decade. The research “could lead to other drugs against cancer and infectious diseases such as dengue and tuberculosis,” writes Casandra Wong for Yahoo! News.
MIT alumnus William Nordaus has been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work studying the interaction between climate change and the economy, reports Dave Keyton and Jim Heintz for the AP. Nordhaus shared the award with Paul Romer, who also conducted graduate work at MIT.
Postdoctoral associates Tyler Clites, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez and Amye Kirtane were named to STAT’s 2018 Wunderkinds list, which spotlights researchers that are “blazing new trails as they attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in science and medicine.”
CNN reporter Susan Scutti writes that MIT researchers have found that climate change could cause an increase in mental health issues. During a 30-day period, exposure to hotter temperatures and higher rates of precipitation “produced increases in the probability that people were going to report some mental health problem in that period,” explains research scientist Nick Obradovich.
MIT researchers find that hotter and more extreme weather can negatively impact a person’s mental health, reports Karen Kaplan for The Los Angeles Times. The researchers explain that, “given the vital role that sound mental health plays in personal, social, and economic well-being, our findings provide added evidence that climatic changes pose substantial risks to human systems.”
CNBC reporter Andrew Zaleski writes that MIT researchers have developed a neuromorphic chip design that could help advance the development of computers that operate like humans. The design could “lead to processors capable of carrying out machine learning tasks with dramatically lower energy demands,” Zaleski explains.
Verge reporter James Vincent writes that MIT researchers have developed a challenge, the Minimal Turing Test, which prompts participants to select a word that can prove that they are human. “It tells you something about the gap between humans and smart robots,” explains graduate student John McCoy, “that people who have never had to think about this situation before came up with a lot of smart and funny results.”
New York Times reporter Penelope Green profiles Prof. Neri Oxman, spotlighting her work with material ecology. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the MoMA, says that the “reason why she is a gift to the field of architecture and design is that her science works, her aesthetics work, and her theory works.”
A paper by Prof. Sandy Pentland and Research Affiliate Yaniv Altshuler explains how social physics can be used to help detect cybercrime, writes Visiting Lecturer Irving Wladawsky-Berger for The Wall Street Journal. Wladawsky-Berger explains that Pentland and Altshuler show how social physics can easily decipher “the use of code-words, evasive behavior or any other attempt to mask one’s intentions.”
Popular Science reporter Rob Verger writes that MIT researchers have developed a new AI system that can help identify fake news. Verger explains that the researchers set out to create a tool that could “evaluate how factually strong different sites are, and their political bias.”