Professor Esther Duflo has been awarded Spain's Princess of Asturias social science prize for her work studying poverty in developing countries, the Associated Press reports. The organizers of the prize said that Duflo has “profoundly changed strategies for education, health and employment in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
Alison Gopnik of The Wall Street Journal writes that new research by Professor John Gabrieli indicates that poverty can have a negative impact on brain development in children. The researchers found that “low-income children had developed thinner cortices than the high-income children.”
TechCrunch's Darrell Etherington writes about WaitChatter, a program developed by researchers at MIT CSAIL that leverages unoccupied time by teaching users a new language. WaitChatter “uses a Google Chat extension to offer up quick vocabulary learning lessons right in your IM chat window.”
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr reviews “Strategy Rules,” a book co-authored by Professor Michael Cusumano that draws lessons from the careers of tech pioneers Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs. The authors provide a “a strategic framework to the corporate handiwork of the three, and find common themes.”
Nidhi Subbaraman writes for BetaBoston about WaitChatter, a new application developed by MIT students that could help teach users a foreign language while they chat online. “The application uses the brief window when the ellipses dominate the screen as an opportunity to spring a vocabulary quiz,” Subbaraman explains.
In a piece for the BBC about birdsong, Angela Saini highlights Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa’s research that shows human language could have evolved from birdsong. Miyagawa's theory suggests that "human language relies on two distinct systems, both of which had previously evolved in simpler animals."
MIT researchers have measured how gigantic underwater waves move, form, and dissipate, reports Justin Wm. Moyer for The Washington Post. The researchers found that these underwater waves are “big enough that they affect large-scale celestial motions,” explains Prof. Thomas Peacock.
Kathleen McKenna of The Boston Globe writes that Professor Alexander Rich, whose research confirmed DNA’s double-helix structure, died at 90 on April 27. Shuguang Zhang, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at MIT, said that Rich was “warm, wonderful, and open-minded.”
Washington Post reporter Martin Weil writes that Prof. Alexander Rich, who was known for his work with molecular biology, passed away on April 27. Rich’s work on hybridization, the pairing of two single strands of DNA or RNA, “is regarded as integral to creating much of modern biotechnology, with applications in diagnostics, forensics, genealogy and gene sequencing.”
Jordan Graham writes for The Boston Herald about a system created by Prof. Brian Williams that allows unpiloted underwater vehicles to make decisions without human intervention. Williams explains that the system was developed so that an underwater robot would not need low-level commands, “you just give it your goals.”
Prof. Robert Langer, winner of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, speaks with Joel Brown of The Boston Globe about his current research and the need for government support for basic research. “So much good stuff has come out of basic research, research that you don’t really know where it’s going to go. So you want people to be able to get grants to do that,” explains Langer.
Brooks Hays of UPI writes that Prof. Brian Williams has developed a new system that allows autonomous underwater vehicles to operate independently. Robots using the new system “are able to navigate underwater expanses and execute research tasks on their own. Researchers simply dictate high-level goals, and the submersible calculates the most efficient path forward."
“MIT researchers have created an algorithm [that] can distinguish between different lymphomas in real time,” writes Melissa Malamut for Boston Magazine. Graduate student Yuan Luo and Professor Peter Szolovits developed a system that can automatically suggest cancer diagnoses based on data points from past pathology reports, Malamut explains.
MIT researchers have developed a new system that gives underwater robots more decision-making capabilities, reports Kelsey Atherton for Popular Science. Atherton explains that developing machines that can operate without human control could “usher in a whole new age of discovery.”
Professor Thomas Peacock and his research group have examined the world’s strongest “internal waves,” some of which measure more than 500 meters high, writes Chris Sweeney for Boston Magazine. “Internal waves are the lumbering giants of the ocean,” says Peacock. “They move fairly slowly but they are very large in amplitude and carry a lot of energy.”