Wired reporter Eric Niiler writes that Prof. Kerry Emanuel has found that the probability of a storm like Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas has increased due to warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the lack of high-level winds that normally push such storms out to sea or towards Oklahoma.
Writing for The New York Times about educational technology, Prof. Cynthia Breazeal describes her research examining the importance of social cues in learning from technology. “If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it,” she explains.
A study by MIT researchers found that after a law was passed in Louisiana allowing public-school teachers to contradict the scientific curriculum, students scored lower on the science section of the ACT, reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. The study also showed that, “at the same time, creationism-related search terms on Google became more common, relative to evolution-related terms.”
MIT researchers have developed a system that allows drones to scan and read RFID tags, reports Amy Wallace for UPI. Rather than use the drones to carry RFID readers, researchers found a way to use “the drones to relay signals emitted by a standard RFID reader, allowing for the more effective locating of tags,” writes Wallace.
WGBH reporter Robin Washington examines a new study by researchers from the MIT AgeLab, which examined how accurately salespeople explained new car safety features. “We found that there is a lot of variability in how dealerships are communicating advanced safety systems to consumers,” says Research Specialist Hillary Abraham.
Damien Garde of STAT highlights Prof. Li-Huei Tsai’s research on the HDAC2 enzyme in an article about Alzheimer’s research. “If we can reduce HDAC2 expression in Alzheimer’s disease models, we can reactivate the genes [that] actually rescue learning and memory,” says Prof. Tsai.
Salon’s Heather Digby Parton highlights research from Prof. Ethan Zuckerman regarding the effects of online media on the last election. The study found that clickbait news sites “received amplification and legitimation through an attention backbone that tied the most extreme conspiracy sites.”
Research Scientist Jennifer Morris writes for Salon about her research showing that power companies should invest in carbon-free power sources despite uncertainty about future U.S. emissions limits. Morris and her colleagues found that investing in carbon-free sources, “best positions the United States to meet a wide range of possible future policies at a low cost to the economy.”
Noah Smith of Bloomberg writes that the foreign trade theory proposed by Prof. Cesar Hidalgo and his research team suggests that a country’s future growth is determined by how many different products it makes. This forecasting method is based on “the level of regulation or the amount of investment in education,” explains Smith.
Renée Richardson Gosline, a senior lecturer in the Sloan School of Management, writes for WBUR’s Cognoscenti about whether it is a good idea to integrate artificial intelligence in all aspects of the online shopping experience. People often “outsource decisions and tasks to technology based on the assumption that it will improve your performance,” explains Gosline.
CSAIL researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can reduce video buffering, writes Kevin Murnane for Forbes. The system, “adapts on the fly to current network and buffers conditions,” enabling smoother streaming than other methods.
In an attempt to curb the increase in Lyme disease on Nantucket, Prof. Kevin Esvelt has proposed using gene-editing technology to engineer mice that can combat the spread of the disease, reports Cristina Quinn for WGBH. The idea is to, “genetically engineer these mice so that they are immune to the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.”
Prof. Feng Zhang has been honored as one of the recipients of this year’s Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research for his work contributing to the development of the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, according to the AP. The AP notes that CRISPR-Cas9, “has sparked a boom in research over the past five years.”
A study co-authored by MIT researchers shows that the moon’s magnetic field could have lasted for as long as two billion years, according to Xinhua. “The researchers are planning to analyze more lunar rocks to determine when the dynamo died off completely.”
MIT researchers have found that the moon’s magnetic field lasted at least 1 billion years longer than initially thought, reports Charles Q. Choi for NBC News. “Understanding more about the nature of the magnetic field of Earth's moon could shed light on the magnetic fields of distant moons and planets, which could influence their habitability."