School of Engineering

The Huffington Post reports on how MIT researchers have developed a robotic cheetah that can run and jump, untethered. 

Los Angeles Times reporter Deborah Netburn writes about how MIT engineers have analyzed the feasibility of the Mars One colonization plans. "The claim they make is that no new technology is required for their mission," says graduate student Syndey Do. "Our numbers show that is not feasible."

Rafi Letzter of Popular Science writes that a team of MIT researchers has published a study debunking Mars One’s plan to establish the first human colony on Mars by 2025. The team found that “without dramatic improvements in equipment life, the space colonists, who would have no way to return to Earth, could starve to death,” writes Letzter. 

An MIT study indicates that plans for settling on Mars could put colonists in danger of starvation, reports Thor Benson for UPI. "Our habitation simulations revealed that crop growth, if large enough to provide 100% of the settlement's food, will produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat,” the researchers explain. 

Huffington Post reporter Thomas Tamblyn writes that a team of MIT scientists has found that the Mars One colonization plans are flawed. The researchers found that Mars colonists are unlikely to survive as the production of crops will over saturate the living environment with oxygen, Tamblyn writes. 

Niina Heikkinen reports for Scientific American that MIT researchers have identified a new way to make yeast more ethanol-tolerant. The researchers were able to improve “alcohol tolerance and extend the amount of time that individual cells could produce ethanol.” 

WCVB reports that researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a pill coated with tiny needles that can deliver drugs directly into the digestive tract. The pill was found to deliver insulin more efficiently than current methods, WCVB reports.  

“Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a pill-like capsule that injects medication into the stomach lining after being swallowed,” reports Sky News. The new capsule could allow for oral delivery of drugs that currently must be injected.

Melissa Malamut of Boston Magazine writes that a team of MIT researchers has developed a new scaling law to estimate the risk of blast-induced traumatic brain injury. The new method could be useful in helping the military develop more protective helmets and in diagnosing traumatic brain injury, Malamut reports. 

BBC News reporter Chris Neiger writes that MIT researchers have developed a new traffic management system to help drivers avoid congested roads. “According to field trials, the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-based traffic solution resulted in an 8% increase in overall vehicle speed,” write Neiger. 

MIT scientists have developed a pill coated in tiny needles that allows medicine to be absorbed through the lining of the stomach, writes Brooks Hays of UPI. Initial trials showed that the pill delivered insulin more efficiently than an injection. 

Thomas Burton of The Wall Street Journal writes that MIT researchers were among those awarded the first research grants under President Obama’s new BRAIN Initiative. Burton writes that one of the MIT grants will go toward “determining which exact brain circuits are involved in generating short-term memories that influence decisions.”

Boston Globe reporter Deborah Kotz writes that MIT researchers have been awarded new grants from the National Institutes of Health to further brain research. “Biophysicist Alan Jasanoff received a grant to develop imaging agents for functional MRI imaging that would target the flow of calcium into and out of brain cells,” writes Kotz of one of the MIT grants. 

MIT neuroscientists were among the recipients of new grants for brain research from the National Institutes of Health, reports Jon Hamilton for NPR. Hamilton explains that as part of one grant, “Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will try to adapt functional MRI so that it can show the activity of individual brain cells.”

Shankar Vedantam of NPR reports on Dr. Boris Katz’s new research examining how errors in written English can reveal clues about other languages. “By analyzing the patterns of mistakes that native speakers of two languages make in English, the computer can say, look, these two languages might actually be related to one another,” Vedantam explains.