Writing for The Boston Globe, Shirley Leung spotlights the thousands of women who helped make the Apollo 11 mission a success, including Margaret Hamilton and Saydean Zeldin of the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Zeldin, who worked on the program responsible for turning the command module’s engines on and off, recalls that she “had to formulate the equations that we were going to code.”
MIT Solve has launched an innovation fund aimed at attracting funding for social-impact ventures tackling global issues such as access to clean water, reports Eillie Anzilotti for Fast Company. “There’s an increase in focus on these issues in the U.S. and across the world, and there’s definitely increased movement on the political and investment spectrums,” explains Alex Amouyel, executive director of Solve.
Writing for Fortune about the impacts of automation on the labor market, Geoff Colvin highlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s research analyzing the historical effects of technology on workers. Colvin explains that Acemoglu and his colleagues found that, “for the first time in modern history, automation isn’t necessarily good for workers overall.”
In an article for The Washington Post, Prof. Kate Brown examines the impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Brown notes that the consequences of the accident reached further than initially thought, writing that “the fallout map shows that Chernobyl radioactivity drifted widely across Europe, usually in areas with higher altitudes and precipitation.”
In an article for Wired, Andrew McAfee, cofounder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, argues that the increased energy use and pollution associated with new technology is actually offset by the physical concept of dematerialization. “[W]e don’t need to worry that the iPhone and its digital kin are going to gobble up the planet, or even put a big dent in it,” writes McAfee. “In fact, they’re doing the opposite.”
MIT researchers have created an app that translates proteins into music, reports Eva Amsen of Forbes. This method could potentially be used to “make it easier to process very subtle changes that would be less obvious if you looked at the data visually,” Amsen explains.
Boston Celtic Jaylen Brown and Michael Tubbs, the 28-year-old mayor of Stockton, CA, will be two of the MIT Media Lab’s 2019 Directors Fellows. As part of the program, they “will work with the lab’s students and faculty to personally take on the kinds of problems that they want to fix,” writes Claire Miller for Fast Company.
Prof. Markus Buehler speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research, which attempts to better understand and create new proteins by translating them into music. Buehler explains that they were able to listen to proteins after discovering that “amino acids have a unique frequency spectrum which we could then make audible using a concept of transposition.”
A study co-authored by Prof. Cynthia Breazeal found that a “social robot” teddy bear “boosted spirits, eased anxiety and even lowered perceived pain levels” among Boston Children’s Hospital patients aged 3 to 10 years old, reports Robert Preidt for US News & World Report. “We want technology to support everyone who's invested in the quality care of a child," says Breazeal.
Researchers at MIT and Brown University created an interactive data system that “could give everyone AI superpowers,” writes Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch. Known as ‘Northstar,’ the system can instantly generate machine-learning models to use with existing data sets in order to generate useful predictions, explains Etherington.
Diana Cai writes for STAT about Prof. Markus Buehler’s new research to turn amino acids into music. “Buehler thinks the technology could help in understanding genetic diseases caused by misfolded proteins,” writes Cai, noting that, “AI may conceivably ‘hear’ patterns of misfolding that could distinguish dangerous mutations from harmless ones.”
In a new study, Prof. Markus Buehler converted 20 types of amino acids into a 20-tone scale to create musical compositions. “Those altered compositions were converted back into a conceptual amino acid chain, which enabled the team to generate variations of proteins that have never been seen in nature,” writes Becky Ferreira for Motherboard.
Forbes contributor Poornima Peiris highlights some of the technology solutions developed by solvers participating in MIT Solve’s global challenges. Peiris spotlights everything from a new system to grow oyster reefs that can protest coastlines during storms and help filter toxins in water to a device that can be used to remotely monitor vital signs in infants in low-income areas of the world.
Gizmodo reporter Victoria Song writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system that can teach a machine how to make pizza by examining a photograph. “The researchers set out to teach machines how to recognize different steps in cooking by dissecting images of pizza for individual ingredients,” Song explains.
Reporting for NBC Mach, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky writes that MIT researchers are developing augmented plants that can serve as sensors. Jeffrey-Wilensky explains that the researchers believe the plants could one day be used to “guard our homes, connect us to distant friends and send us gentle push notifications without the sensory overload of a computer screen.”