MIT Media Lab researchers have created an AI program that can write horror stories in collaboration with humans via Twitter, reports David Wade for CBS Boston. “Over time, we are expecting her to learn more from the crowd, and to create even more scarier stories,” says postdoctoral associate Pinar Yanardag.
In a WBUR segment about how technology is increasingly being used to assist seniors and caregivers, Rachel Zimmerman highlights Rendever, an MIT spinout, and speaks with Prof. Paul Osterman, Prof. Dina Katabi and Dr. Joseph Coughlin about their work. Zimmerman explains that Coughlin believes “a mix of smart devices and other personal services,” will help people age well.
Nick Glass of CNN writes about the history of death masks and a new wave of masks developed by Prof. Neri Oxman, which were digitally designed without a human model. “The masks are mesmerizingly beautiful and translucent, filled with smoky whirls of color -- reds, oranges, greens and purples. They seem to evoke many things,” says Glass.
A paper from MIT researchers suggests that small towns will be more negatively impacted by automation than larger cities, writes Ari Gaskell for HuffPost. The researchers found that, “automation is more likely in roles with repetitive tasks playing a major part, and such lower skilled roles tend to be concentrated more in smaller towns than larger cities.”
MIT researchers have developed an artificial neural network that can generate horror stories by collaborating with people on Twitter, HuffPost reports. Pinar Yanardag, a postdoc at the Media Lab, explains that the system is, “creating really interesting and weird stories that have never really existed in the horror genre.”
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that an international team of astronomers, including MIT Prof. Saul Rappaport, has detected comets outside the Milky Way. “The distant ice balls, roughly the size of Halley's Comet, were spotted orbiting a small star 800 light-years from Earth. They were documented using transit photometry,” Hays explains.
MIT scientists have developed a technique that could potentially be used one day to treat diseases of the brain, muscles, liver and kidneys by using CRISPR to edit RNA, writes Melissa Healy for The Los Angeles Times. Making edits to the chemical message of RNA, “doesn’t effect a permanent change in a cell’s architectural plan; rather, it essentially alters the implementation of that plan,” explains Healy.
Newsweek reporter Joseph Frankel writes that MIT Media Lab researchers have developed an AI system named Shelley that uses human input to write short horror stories. Frankel explains that Shelley, “tweets out one or two sentences as the start of a new horror story, then calls for users to respond with their own lines.”
Prof. Feng Zhang and his colleagues have created a CRISPR-based system that can edit RNA in human cells, reports Amy Dockser Marcus for The Wall Street Journal. “The new RNA-editing system, which the scientists have dubbed Repair, allows the editing of individual RNA letters, correcting a common mutation known to play a role in a number of diseases.”
New Scientist reporter Timothy Revell writes that researchers from the MIT Media Lab have developed a new AI system that can tell scary stories. Revell explains that the system is “powered by deep learning algorithms that have been trained on stories collected from the subreddit /r/nosleep where people share their own original eerie works.”
Ike Brannon writes for Forbes about a survey he conducted with Prof. Michelle Hanlon asking equipment manufacturing companies what they want from tax reform. The majority of respondents in this diverse industry were in favor of removing all business tax breaks to “achieve a corporate income tax in the vicinity of 20 percent that is fully ‘paid for’,” writes Brannon.
MIT research scientist John Wright speaks with Hannah Osborne of Newsweek about a new process developed to heat fusion plasma, raising ions to energy levels greater than previously achieved. Wright explains that, “this method may have applications to more efficient heating of the plasma to the temperatures needed to begin the fusion burn.”
New Scientist reporter Michael Le Page writes that a study co-authored by Prof. Kerry Emanuel finds that while in the future hurricanes may be more likely to miss New York City, the city could experience 15-metre storm surges. “The result is peculiar to New York City,” says Emanuel. “Almost everywhere else, including Boston, we see an increase in surge heights and storminess.”
CNN reporter Jacqueline Howard highlights a new study by MIT researchers examining how children interpret an adult’s emotional response to a situation. "The results were surprising in the sense that we found infants were able to make fine-grained distinctions among positive emotions," explains graduate student Yang Wu.
Researchers from MIT’s Urban Risk Lab piloted a free online tool that crowdsources social media posts to map flood conditions during Hurricane Irma, writes Frankie Schembri for NOVA Next. “Residents often have the best information about the situation near them,” explains research scientist Tomas Holderness, “and we now have the network to be able to collect information.”