Using cephalopods, like squid, as inspiration, researchers from MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Novo Nordisk have developed a capsule that can deliver drugs directly into the digestive track without using needles, writes Corinna Singleman for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. “The capsule design is highly adaptable and was intentionally developed to handle a wide range of drug types,” said Prof. Giovanni Traverso.
Research Scientist Susan Amrose speaks with Knowable Magazine reporter Lele Nargi about the use of inland desalination for farming communities. Amrose, who studies inland desalination in the Middle East and North Africa, is “testing a system that uses electrodialysis instead of reverse osmosis,” explains Nargi. “This sends a steady surge of voltage across water to pull salt ions through an alternating stack of positively charged and negatively charged membranes.”
Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with Bloomberg reporter Charley Locke about the increased safety of air travel. “These events we fear have become extraordinarily rare,” says Barnett. “Of course these events are unnerving, but generally, as soon as they happen, the pilots know what to do and bring the plane back safely.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, and Prof. Russ Tedrake speak with the Financial Times about how advances in AI have made it possible for robots to learn new skills and perform complex tasks. “All these cool things that we only dreamed of, we can now begin to realize,” says Rus. “Now we have to make sure that what we do with all these superpowers is good.”
The Economist covers new work by Prof. Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Novo Nordisk, who have developed an ingestible capsule that can “get medication into patients without having to jab them at all, by copying the jet-propulsion techniques used by squid and their kin.”
Prof. Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues have developed a new device, inspired by sea creatures, that can deliver drugs orally by using jets to “eject drugs into the tissue lining the digestive tract," reports Anil Oza for STAT. “We want to make it easier for patients to receive medication,” says Traverso. “The challenge with drugs like insulin and monoclonal antibodies is that they require an injection. That in and of itself can be a barrier for receiving that medication.”
WCVB reporter Jessica Brown spotlights how researchers from the MIT AgeLab explored the most effective way to communicate with elderly individuals about driver retirement. The researchers found that “35% of older drivers are more likely to listen to a spouse who asks them to give up the keys,” explains Brown.
Prof. Benjamin Weiss, director of the MIT Paleomagnetism Lab, speaks with Forbes reporter Bruce Dorminey about the use of paleomagnetism to track the geographic origins of stromatolites. Weiss notes that he and his colleagues published a paper examining the magnetization of stromatolites in the Strelley Pool Chert in Australia’s Pilbara region. The team’s measurements show that these stromatolites formed within 8 degrees latitude of the equator, Weiss explains.
Research from the Data Provenance Initiative, led by MIT researchers, has “found that many web sources used for training AI models have restricted their data, leading to a rapid decline in accessible information,” reports Gary Drenik for Forbes.
Researchers at MIT have developed a new AI model capable of assessing a patient’s risk of pancreatic cancer, reports Erez Meltzer for Forbes. “The model could potentially expand the group of patients who can benefit from early pancreatic cancer screening from 10% to 35%,” explains Meltzer. “These kinds of predictive capabilities open new avenues for preventive care.”
Prof. Jon Gruber speaks with former Massachusetts Secretary of Public Safety and Security Andrea Cabral and GBH Boston Public Radio host Margery Eagan about the future of health care in the United States.
Craft in America visits Prof. Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine of CSAIL to learn more about their work with computational origami. “Computational origami is quite useful for the mathematical problems we are trying to solve,” Prof. Erik Demaine explains. “We try to integrate the math and the art together.”
Prof. Hugh Herr speaks with Nature reporter Fred Schwaller about his work developing bionic limbs. Schwaller notes that “Herr’s research team is focusing on surgical techniques and implants that improve on the electrodes used in current bionic-limb systems, which either penetrate the peripheral nerves or wrap around them.” Herr explains: “We’re reimagining how limbs should be amputated and bionic limbs constructed.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a robot capable of assembling “building blocks called voxels to build an object with almost any shape,” reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “You can get furniture-scale objects really fast in a very sustainable way, because you can reuse these modular components and ask a robot to reassemble them into different large-scale objects,” says graduate student Alexander Htet Kyaw.
Financial Times reporter Seb Murray highlights a new paper by Prof. Roberto Rigobon and Research Scientist Florian Berg that explores why different ESG ratings can paint different pictures of the same company, finding that “measurement differences between rating agencies are the main source of divergence.” Murray notes that “by exposing these inconsistencies, the research highlights the need for standardization, noting that regulators could help by harmonizing ESG disclosure practices. That would make ratings more reliable and useful for decision makers.”