Research

Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed “Sybil” – an artificial intelligence tool that can predict the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years, reports Mallika Marshall for CBS Boston. 

Prof. Sara Seager and her colleagues write for Physics Today about how the SpaceX Starship could help transform astrophysics missions. “Assuming it is successful, Starship will dramatically enhance our space capabilities in ways that will qualitatively alter how astrophysics missions can be built,” write Seager and her colleagues.

Researchers at MIT have developed underwater robotic structures that can contort into different shapes, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “This ability is key in submersible robots, since it allows them to move through the water much more efficiently, as countless varieties of fish do in rivers, lakes, and the open ocean,” explains Paul.

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors explore their research demonstrating that “the biggest shift when a chief executive with a business degree takes charge is a decline in wages and the share of revenues going to labor.” Acemoglu and his co-authors note that while many business schools have updated their offerings to include more ethics courses, they emphasize the importance of “being aware of what managers with business degrees used to do is an important step in reflecting on how we can build better programs.”

MIT researchers have developed a new system for creating deformable underwater robots that can be used to build robots of varying shapes and sizes with both hard and soft elements, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “The robot is largely hollow, built of modular voxels that can be assembled to create systems that are rigid in certain directions and soft in others,” Heater explains.

Research scientist Mary Knapp and her collaborators are working on a concept for The Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (Go-LoW), a space-based observatory comprised of small satellites aimed at making low-frequency radio waves visible, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “I learned back in my undergrad days that there was this part of the spectrum we couldn’t see,” Knapp explains. “It really just struck me that there was this unexplored part of the universe, and I want to explore this part of the sky for the first time.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have studied the mind of polyglots and uncovered how language-specific regions of the brain respond to different and familiar languages, reports Natalia Mesa for Science. The researchers found that “the activity in the brain’s language network fluctuated based on how well participants understood a language. The more familiar the language, the larger the response,” writes Mesa. “There was one exception to the rule: when participants heard their native tongue, their language networks were actually quieter than when they heard other familiar languages.”

MIT researchers have found that air pollution can impact the performance of chess players, reports Sharon Udasin for The Hill. "With just a modest rise in pollution levels, the researchers saw that a player’s probability of making an error increased by 2.1 percentage points,” Udasin writes.

Researchers at MIT have discovered what makes ancient Roman concrete “exponentially more durable than modern concrete,” reports Jim Morrison for Wired. “Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure,” writes Morrison.

Prof. Juan Palacios speaks with The Guardian reporter Helena Horton about how air pollution can lead to more mistakes in chess players. “We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Palacios.

MIT researchers devised a new way to arrange LED pixels to create screens with a much higher resolution than is currently possible, reports The Economist. The new technique, which involves stacking micro LEDS, could also be used to make “VR images that appear far more lifelike than today’s.”

Researchers at MIT have developed an autonomous vehicle with “mini sensors to allow it to see the world and also with an artificially intelligent computer brain that can allow it to drive,” explains postdoctoral associate Alexander Amini in an interview with Mashable. “Our autonomous vehicles are able to learn directly from humans how to drive a car so they can be deployed and interact in brand new environments that they’ve never seen before,” Amini notes.

MIT researchers have developed a new AI tool called Sybil that could help predict whether a patient will get lung cancer up to six years in advance, reports Pranshu Verma for The Washington Post.  “Much of the technology involves analyzing large troves of medical scans, data sets or images, then feeding them into complex artificial intelligence software,” Verma explains. “From there, computers are trained to spot images of tumors or other abnormalities.”

An MIT study has found that the wide spread adoption of self-driving cars could lead to increased carbon emissions, reports Rima Sabina Aouf for Dezeen. “The study found that with a mass global take up of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in operation today,” writes Aouf.

Principal Research Scientist Eric Heginbotham writes for Newsweek that in simulations of a possible invasion of Taiwan, he and his colleagues found that “China would lose—so long as the United States continues to invest in maintaining deterrence and chooses to intervene directly and vigorously.” Heginbotham adds: “The United States should ensure that the political relationship with China remains positive in those areas that do not directly compromise America's position and — consistent with U.S. policy for half a century—that avoid promoting de jure independence for Taiwan.”