A CRISPR-based diagnostic test for Covid-19 developed by researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute could produce results within an hour, reports Deborah Becker for WBUR. "Using these technologies will really allow for much more rapid testing — down from days to sometimes less than an hour," said McGovern fellow Jonathan Gootenberg. "That would enable a drastic change in how the tracing and handling of the pandemic is done."
Third-year student Emily Rabinovitsj speaks with Boston Globe correspondent Mike Kotsopoulos about her quest to complete the virtual Boston Marathon and raise funds for 15-40 Connection, a non-profit dedicated to educating people on how to detect early-stage cancer. “I got this gift of being able to have a full life after a diagnosis and I feel like I have a responsibility to take advantage of that opportunity and help others have this same opportunity,” Rabinovitsj said.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Lerman highlights how MIT researchers developed a robotic system that uses UV light to disinfect spaces. “By knowing the geometry of the space — usually represented as a map — the robot can compute a patrolling trajectory and speed to expose all surfaces to the dosage that neutralizes the pathogens,” explains Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL.
Emily Calandrelli SM ’13 speaks with STAT reporter Pratibha Gopalakrishna about her work aimed at getting children interested in science, the importance of representation in the STEM fields, and her new Netflix show. “I don’t shy away from the science because I think kids are very clever and know way more than a lot of people give them credit for,” says Calandrelli.
Fast Company reporter Adele Peters spotlights how, as part of an effort to reduce Covid-19 risk for health care workers, researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital developed a new system that enables remote vital sign monitoring. "We started to think about how we could protect healthcare providers and minimize contact with folks that might be infectious,” says Prof. Giovanni Traverso.
CNN reporter Allen Kim spotlights how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have modified a robotic dog so that it can be used to help measure a patient’s vital signs. “The researchers expect to focus on triage applications in the short term, with the goal of ultimately deploying robots like this to patients' hospital rooms to continuously monitor them and let doctors to check in on them without ever having to step into the room,” writes Kim.
CBS Boston features how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital equipped a robot from Boston Dynamics with technology to enable remote vital sign monitoring.
In this video, Bloomberg News spotlights how researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a new system that facilitates remote monitoring of a patient’s vital signs, as part of an effort to help reduce healthcare workers’ Covid-19 risk. Researchers have successfully measured temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation in healthy patients.”
Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have repurposed a robotic dog from Boston Dynamics with technology that enables doctors to remotely measure a patient’s vital signs, reports Rick Sobey for The Boston Herald. “Using four cameras mounted on the dog-like robot, the researchers have shown that they can measure skin temperature, breathing rate, pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation in healthy patients,” writes Sobey.
A new tool developed by MIT researchers sheds light on the operations of generative adversarial network models and allows users to edit these machine learning models to generate new images, reports Daphne Leprince-Ringuet for ZDNet. "The real challenge I'm trying to breach here," says graduate student David Bau, "is how to create models of the world based on people's imagination."
New research from Prof. Lydia Bourouiba finds that guidelines for safe social distancing may need to be updated as researchers gain more information about how the virus spreads, reports Ben Guarino for The Washington Post. “It becomes very important to not think just about a fixed distance. It’s very important to think about the air flow,” says Bourouiba.
On this episode of Freakonomics, Prof. Andrew Lo discusses the economics of drug development. “It’s important that we get the pricing of these vaccines correct so that they provide both a reasonable rate of return to investors who have risked their capital to develop these vaccines, while at the same time making sure that there’s no price gouging going on and that ultimately we provide access to everybody,” says Lo.
TechCrunch reporter Taylor Hatmaker writes that MIT researchers will led a new NSF-funded research institute focused on AI and physics.
Researchers from MIT and the University of Oxford have found that guidelines for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic may need to be updated to account for factors such as ventilation, crowd size and exposure time, reports Akshay Syal for NBC News. "It's not just 6 feet and then everything else can be ignored or just mask and everything else can be ignored or just ventilation and everything else can be ignored,” says Prof. Lydia Bourouiba.
MIT researchers have created a new synthetic lining that could be used to help treat digestive diseases, reports Pratibha Gopalakrishna for STAT. “We wanted to develop a liquid system that is easier to take compared to tablets or capsules, but had enhanced capabilities,” explains Prof. Giovanni Traverso.