Bloomberg News reports that MIT alumna Megan Smith has been appointed as the White House Chief Technology Officer. In her new role, Smith will serve as a liaison between the White House and Silicon Valley companies, and advise the government on how to better use technology.
Writing for Wired, Issie Lapowsky reports that MIT graduate Megan Smith has been named the White House Chief Technology Officer. “In addition to being a gifted programmer and technologist, Smith has been one of the country’s leading advocates in the movement to get more women into tech jobs,” writes Lapowsky.
New Scientist reporter Paul Marks writes about how MIT researchers are developing self-guided robots to help assess the danger posed by space debris. "Aboard the ISS we are now working on cooperative debris inspection, where more than one of the robots has cameras," says Alvar Saenz-Otero.
In a piece published by The Huffington Post about a new time travel simulation, Lee Billings highlights Professor Seth Lloyd’s work developing a new model for a “closed timelike curve,” or a loop that could be traveled back into time.
Lina Zeldovich of The Atlantic writes about how Prof. Eric Alm and one of his graduate students tracked their bacterial fluctuations for a year to better understand how daily activities influenced their microbiome. “We just don’t know much about the functional role of any of these bugs,” says Alm.
Writing for CNBC, Hazma Ali reports on new MIT research showing that humans prefer to receive orders from robots rather than humans. "Our findings showed that our subjects strongly preferred when the robot scheduled the work of the team,” explains graduate student Matthew Gombolay.
BBC News reporter Victoria Gill writes about new MIT research showing that the tiny hairs, or cilia, on corals draw in nutrients by stirring up water. "Corals could provide a general model for understanding ciliary processes related to disease," says MIT Professor Roman Stocker.
Nicole Skinner writes for Nature about how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to test for malaria. The new method only requires a tiny droplet of blood to check for malaria and can provide a diagnosis within minutes.
Daniel Akst of The Wall Street Journal writes about new MIT findings that could make pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) a more feasible technique for producing power from two streams of different salinity.
Alexis Madrigal writes for The Atlantic about Professor Nicholas Roy’s work in leading the development of a delivery drone for Google. In mid-August, Roy and his colleagues conducted test flights of the drone in Australia.
James Hamblin of The Atlantic reports on the new MIT study that shows implementing a cap on carbon emissions would result in health care savings. An economy-wide cap and trade program "would result in a net benefit of $125 billion in human health costs,” writes Hamblin.
Charles Pulliam-Moore of the PBS NewsHour reports on new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab showing that humans are happier and more productive when robots are in control. The research, “could lead to situations in which human employees could be empowered by machines, rather than replaced by them,” Pulliam-Moore writes.
Erika Fry writes for Fortune about the spread of infectious diseases, highlighting a study by researchers from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering that examines how infectious diseases could spread worldwide through air transportation. The researchers developed a metric to rank and predict which U.S. airports would be the most influential spreaders of a disease.
Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that will allow delivery drones to monitor their own health. “Drones will be able to keep an eye on their ability to do the job by predicting fuel levels and checking on the condition of propellers, cameras and other sensors,” writes Collins.
Melissa Malamut of Boston Magazine writes that MIT chemical engineers have developed a new treatment for bone injuries. The researchers developed an implantable tissue scaffold coated with bone growth factors that helps the body quickly form new bone.