Salon reporter Elizabeth Landau spotlights the work of researchers from MIT and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in uncovering how Covid-19 can affect the ear. Viruses such as Covid-19, “all have these tentacles that seem to touch the ear, but nobody’s been able to study them because the ear is so inaccessible,” says Prof. Lee Gehrke. “So that’s the part that I think I get most excited about. Now we have a way to look at these things in a way that we were not able to do before.”
In a letter to the Financial Times, Prof. Donald Sadoway underscores the need for new smelting capacity to meet the growing need for copper for the transition to clean energy. “Imagine a process that produces superior metal at lower cost with zero greenhouse gas emissions,” writes Sadoway. “Such technology would recapture domestic market share from foreign producers. We must invent the future; we cannot simply legislate for it.”
A series of recently tested hypersonic missiles in North Korea brings forth concerns about vulnerability for U.S. troops and their allies in Asia, reports Josh Smith for Reuters. Research affiliate David Wright warns that “South Korea and the roughly 28,500 U.S. troops based there are so close that incoming missiles could fly on even lower trajectories, with a much shorter flight time, making defense more difficult,” writes Smith.
Postdoctoral associate Matt McDonald will run in the 2022 Boston Marathon this upcoming April, reports Michael Silverman for The Boston Globe. “It’s thrilling that I’ll get to race the best marathon in the world on the street that I run every day,” says McDonald.
MIT researchers have developed a new technique for producing low-voltage, power-dense actuators that can propel flying microrobots, reports Danica D'Souza for Mashable. “The new technique lets them make soft actuators that can carry 80 percent more payload,” D’Souza reports.
In an article for The Wall Street Journal about next generation technologies that can create and quantify personal health data, Laura Cooper spotlights Prof. Dina Katabi’s work developing a noninvasive device that sits in a person’s home and can help track breathing, heart rate, movement, gait, time in bed and the length and quality of sleep. The device “could be used in the homes of seniors and others to help detect early signs of serious medical conditions, and as an alternative to wearables,” writes Cooper.
MIT researchers have developed an approach to control methane emissions by using zeolite clays with small amounts of copper, reports The Engineer. “The systems’ ideal location, the team concluded, would be in places with a concentrated source of methane such as dairy barns and coal mines,” according to The Engineer. “These already tend to have air-handling systems in place since a buildup of methane can be a safety hazard.”
MIT researchers have developed a new approach to removing methane emissions from the air using zeolite, an inexpensive material used in cat litter, reports Adele Peters for Fast Company. Prof. Desiree Plata explains that compared to carbon dioxide, “methane is actually much worse, from a global warming perspective. What this allows us to do is bring immediate climate benefit into the Earth system and actually change global warming rates in our lifetime.”
Forbes reporter Christ Westfall spotlights “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” a new book by Prof. David Autor, Prof. David Mindell and Research Scientist Elizabeth Reynolds that explores the future of work in America. “The US has allowed traditional channels of worker voice to atrophy without fostering new institutions or buttressing existing ones,” they write. “It has permitted the federal minimum wage to recede to near irrelevance.”
The Conversation reporter Stacy Morford spotlights research by climatologist Judah Cohen and atmospheric scientist Mathew Barlow, which shows how changes in the Arctic can lead to changes in the stratospheric polar vortex, and cold waves in North America and Asia. “Our research reinforces two crucial lessons of climate change: First, the change doesn’t have to occur in your backyard to have a big effect on you,” write Cohen and Barlow. “Second, the unexpected consequences can be quite severe.”
An international team of scholars, including MIT researchers, has published a new study exploring the history and use of letterlocking, reports William J. Broad for The New York Times. The researchers note that they hope their work prompts “novel kinds of archival research, and allows even very well-known artefacts to be examined anew.”
New York Times reporter Veronique Greenwood writes that Prof. Tami Lieberman examined the human skin and found that each pore had a single variety of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria living inside. “Each person’s skin had a unique combination of strains, but what surprised the researchers most was that each pore housed a single variety of C. acnes,” writes Greenwood. “The pores were different from their neighbors, too — there was no clear pattern uniting the pores of the left cheek or forehead across the volunteers, for instance.”
Inside Science reporter Will Sullivan writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that during Covid-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020 there was a reduction in human activities that release aerosols into the atmosphere, resulting in diminished lightning activity.
IEEE Spectrum reporter Prachi Patel writes that researchers from MIT and Google Brain have developed a new open-source tool that could streamline solar cell improvement and discovery. The new system should “speed up development of more efficient solar cells by allowing quick assessment of a wide variety of possible materials and device structures,” writes Patel.
MIT researchers have proposed a conceptual hovering rover that would use the moon’s static charge to stay airborne, reports Elizabeth Howell for Forbes. “We think a future [moon] mission could send out small hovering rovers to explore the surface of the moon and other asteroids,” says graduate student Oliver Jia-Richards.