Prof. Kripa Varanasi was named to the Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40” list, which honors “business and civic leaders who are making a major impact in the community while also improving the civic health of the Boston area through volunteer work and other forms of philanthropy.”
Alexandra Ossola writes for Popular Science that MIT researchers have found a molecule that could make the CRISPR gene-editing technique more precise. The new molecule “makes the editing process easier to control and could create new possibilities for how scientists can edit DNA in the future.”
Matt McFarland writes for The Washington Post about Prof. David Mindell’s new book, in which he argues that automation can take away from the enjoyment of working. “The most advanced (and difficult) technologies are not those that stand apart from people, but those that are most deeply embedded in, and responsive to, human and social networks,” Mindell explains.
Researchers from MIT and Olin College are developing technology that could allow fleets of drones to aid firefighters in combatting wildfires, reports Barb Darrow for Fortune. The drones would be used to “collect intelligence about the fire as fast as possible for human fire-fighting experts,” writes Darrow.
Prof. John Lienhard and Dr. Kenneth Strzepek write for The New York Times about the need for Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to successfully share water from the Nile. “The world needs to get good at sharing water, and right away,” they write. “The alternative is frequent regional conflicts of unknowable proportions.”
Prof. Jonathan How and his colleagues are developing a fleet of autonomous drones that could help gather information about wild fires, writes Brian Dowling for The Boston Herald. “These drones will let a firefighter select a point of a fire on a map, then send a drone there to examine the fire and report back with data,” explains Dowling.
Boston Globe reporter Sharon Begley writes that Prof. Feng Zhang has uncovered enzymes that could be used to edit genes more precisely than the proteins currently used by CRISPR. Begley explains that the discovery means that CRISPR could become an “even more powerful tool to reveal the genetic defects underlying diseases and to perhaps repair them.”
In an article for Wired, Sarah Zhang writes that MIT researchers have identified a new gene-editing system that could prove more effective than current techniques. The new system involves, “a different protein that also edits human DNA, and, in some cases, it may work even better than Cas9,” the protein used for DNA editing.
MIT junior Ian Reynolds has constructed an LED display mapping the location of MBTA vehicles across the city’s subway lines, reports Steve Annear for The Boston Globe. “Our transit system has a lot of personality,” says Reynolds. “It’s very, very integrated into the fabric of the city.”
This video produced by The Wall Street Journal examines new research by MIT scientists showing how the soft palate plays a key role in the transmission of the flu. “The discovery should help scientists better understand the characteristics of flu viruses that have the ability to travel through the air.”
Nidhi Subbaraman writes for BetaBoston about Innovation Teams (“iTeams”), an MIT program that helps students commercialize products out of lab technologies. “When it comes to emerging tech — the brand-new stuff that’s published in journals… sometimes the path to market isn’t what the researchers envisioned when they built it. iTeams wants to give the hard stuff a chance,” explains Subbaraman.
CNBC’s Robert Ferris reports that researchers at MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital have devised a new method to create 3-D heart models. The new technique allows doctors to 3-D print replicas of a patient’s heart within 24 hours, making it practical for hospital use, Ferris explains.
Researchers at MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital are developing a new technique to convert images from MRI scans into physical models of the human heart, writes Lindsay Kalter for The Boston Herald. “This can definitely impact clinical practice in terms of helping surgeons plan more efficiently,” explains graduate student Danielle Pace.
“Researchers from MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital say they’ve come up with a better, faster way to build heart models,” writes Barb Darrow for Fortune. The team has devised a method for 3-D printing model hearts from MRI scans that takes three to four hours compared to the 10 hours typically required using current methods.
Graduate student Eric Arndt discusses his research on the bombardier beetle’s ability to produce a boiling-hot stream of liquid on the PBS program SciTech Now. “Insects, as it turns out, are very good material scientists,” explains Arndt. “Just studying these fundamental systems has the possibility of opening up all kinds of doors in all kinds of industries.”