Led by Professor Eric Alm, a team of researchers plans to analyze sewage in Cambridge to screen for data on disease and drug use, reports Michael Fitzgerald for The Boston Globe. “Sewage is really an unexploited source of rich information about human activities,” says Alm.
Greg Satell writes for Forbes about Professor Zeynep Ton’s book “The Good Job’s Strategy,” in which she argues that maintaining a well-trained and well-paid workforce can lead to greater profits. “A higher paid workforce results in less turnover, better customer service and greater efficiency,” writes Satell of Ton’s findings.
Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News writes that MIT researchers have found that Latin Americans are less likely to be approved for work authorizations in the U.S. than immigrants from other areas. Researchers found that authorization disparities “disappeared in cases when officials looked more closely at supporting documents.”
Justin Bachman writes for Bloomberg BusinessWeek about Prof. Dava Newman’s proposal for the skin-tight BioSuit, meant to replace today’s bulky spacesuits. BioSuit “shrinks onto the body, achieving pressurization not with gas but with a soft exoskeleton of heat-activated materials that shape to fit the traveler’s frame.”
Kyle Vanhemert writes for Wired about a talk by graduate student Greg Borenstein on the future of camera technology. “The gist of Borenstein’s talk: Cheap cameras are getting better and better, and researchers are finding more and more to do with them,” writes Vanhemert.
John Hamilton reports for NPR on a new study by Prof. John Gabrieli that suggests information gathered from brain scans can help predict aspects of a person's future. Certain brain measures provide results that are often "better than currently available tests or clinical measures," Gabrieli explains.
Patrick J. Egan writes for The Washington Post about the racial diversity of police forces. In examining how politics may influence the makeup of a police force, Egan highlights a study co-authored by Prof. Chris Warshaw that found that municipal governments tend to adapt to voters’ views.
Prof. Sara Seager speaks with New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye about the search for Earth-like planets. “We can count as many as we like,” Seager explains, “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like."
Fusion reporter Ted Hesson writes about a new study, co-authored by MIT Professor Emilio Castilla, examining labor certifications for U.S. immigrants. The researchers found that “Asian and Canadian immigrants have a much better chance of being approved for a work visa than immigrants from Latin America.”
Forbes has released its annual “30 Under 30” section, which highlights game changers under the age of 30 from a wide variety of disciplines. This year’s list features a number of MIT students, alumni and research staff, as well as Professor Nikhil Agarwal.
In a piece for Salon, Paul Rosenberg writes about Prof. Jeremy England’s theory about the origins of life. England’s theory, based on the principals of thermodynamics, shows that under certain conditions “where life is possible…it is also quite probable, if not, ultimately, inevitable,” Rosenberg explains.
Robert Lane Greene writes for The Economist about a new paper by MIT researchers, which examines the importance of specific languages by studying how languages are connected to one another. The researchers found that for many languages “their connectivity has little to do with their home country’s modern power.”
Jon Chesto writes for The Boston Globe about a new battery technology from Professor Don Sadoway’s company, Ambri, that allows for more efficient grid-level power storage: “The goal is to allow electric utilities or big industrial plants to store power so it can be released at times of high usage.”
“A team of MIT researchers found that an existing computer vision system can achieve object recognition as well as humans and other primates,” writes Jamie Ducharme for Boston Magazine. Professor James DiCarlo’s team compared the visual recognition abilities of primates to those of the advanced computer system Super Vision.
Professor Jeremy England appears on WGBH television’s Greater Boston to discuss his work examining the origins of life. England explains his theory that, from the perspective of physics, energy played a role in the formation of life.