Prof. John Horton and his colleagues have found that increases in Uber fares only benefit drivers for a limited amount of time, reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. “They found that fare increases initially provided drivers with higher hourly earnings, but that boost wore off after a couple months,” writes Lewis. “With the higher rates, drivers tried to work more hours and passengers used the service less, reducing the average time each driver was matched with passengers.”
Dr. Akshay Syal, a medical fellow for NBC News, discusses how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to 3D print custom replicas of the human heart.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that strategic placement of EV charging stations and creating systems to help stagger charging times could help reduce or eliminate the need for new power plants to handle the impact of EV charging on the grid, reports Sharon Udasin and Saul Elbein for The Hill. The researchers found that “better availability of charging stations at workplaces could help take advantage of peak power being produced midday by solar energy facilities.”
MIT scientists have uncovered evidence that wildfire smoke particles can lead to chemical reactions in the atmosphere that erode the ozone layer, reports Margaret Osborne for Smithsonian Magazine. “From a scientific point of view, it’s very exciting to see this brand new effect,” says Solomon. “From a planetary point of view… it would be just tragic to have mankind screw up solving the ozone hole by deciding that we’re going to [allow] a lot more of these fires if we don’t mitigate climate change.”
Using an artificial intelligence system, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new Covid-19 vaccine that could be effective against current and future strains, reports Gwen Egan for Boston.com. “The vaccine differs from others currently on the market due to the portion of the virus being targeted,” writes Egan.
Postdoc Saverio Cambioni speaks with Andrew Corselli of Tech Briefs about NASA’s DART mission, which was aimed at testing a method to protect Earth in case of an asteroid impact threat. “DART showed that it is technologically possible to intercept and impact a sub-kilometer asteroid, with limited prior knowledge of its shape and surface properties,” Cambioni explains.
Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights a new working paper by graduate students Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang examining the impact of providing office workers access to ChatGPT for use in a series of office tasks. The researchers found “people with access to the chatbot were able to complete the assigned tasks in 17 minutes, compared to an average 27 minutes for those without the bot, and that the quality of their work improved significantly,” writes Knight.
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray writes that MIT researchers have used an AI system to identify a potential new Covid-19 vaccine that may be effective against both current and future variants of the virus. “The new vaccine targets a portion of the COVID virus that is much less prone to evolve,” writes Bray. “That could potentially make it effective against many different versions of the virus, eliminating the need for routine booster shots.”
Bloomberg reporters Alex Tanzi and Mackenzie Hawkins spotlight a paper by graduate student Evan J. Soltas and his colleague Gopi Shah Goda discussing Covid-19’s impact on the labor market. The researchers “found that workers who miss a full week because of COVID are about 7 percentage points less likely to be employed a year later,” writes Tanzi and Hawkins.
MIT researchers have developed a new approach to vaccines that uses “a machine learning twist [that] could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots,” reports Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch.
Researchers at MIT have predicted that without improvements in hardware efficiency, energy consumption and emissions from autonomous vehicles could be “comparable to that of data centers today,” reports Sarah Wells for Popular Mechanics. “In order to reduce the future carbon footprint of AVs, scientists will need to make the computing systems of AVs, including smart sensors, far more efficient,” writes Wells.
Researchers from MIT have found that wildfire smoke can activate chlorine-containing molecules that destroy the ozone layer, writes Donna Lu for The Guardian. “The question in my mind is: is the man-made chlorine going to get … diluted and destroyed out of the atmosphere faster than global climate change is going to increase the frequency and intensity of this kind of fire?” says Prof. Susan Solomon. “I think it’s going to be a race.”
Axios reporter Jacob Knutson highlights a new study by MIT researchers that finds the smoke released by major wildfires likely reactive chlorine-containing molecules in the atmosphere, delaying the recovery of the hole in the ozone layer. The researchers developed a model that found smoke released by Australian wildfires “chemically depleted between 3% to 5% of the total ozone column in the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes in June and July of 2020.”
New Scientist reporter James Dinneen writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds the smoke from Australian wildfires “may have enabled hydrochloric acid to dissolve at higher temperatures, generating more of the reactive chlorine molecules that destroy ozone.” Research scientist Kane Stone explains that “satellite observations showed chemistry that has never been seen before.”
MIT scientists have found that the Australian wildfires in 2019 and 2020 unleashed remnants of chlorine-containing molecules in the stratosphere, expanding the ozone hole and suggesting that more frequent wildfires could threaten the ozone hole’s recovery, reports Dyani Lewis for Nature. “It’s like a race,” says Prof. Susan Solomon. “Does the chlorine decay out of the stratosphere fast enough in the next, say, 40–50 years that the likely increase in intense and frequent wildfires doesn’t end up prolonging the ozone hole?”