Researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed a face mask outfitted with sensors that can detect if the wearer has Covid-19, reports Adele Peters for Fast Company. “If testing and sensing at a biological molecular level could be done in a format that can follow people around instead of people having to go to the clinic, maybe you can encourage people to get more testing done,” says Luis Soenksen, a Venture Builder at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health.
Profs. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee speak with Financial Times reporter Martin Sandbu about the need for better economic “plumbing,” the shortcomings of policy to address climate change and the state of the profession of economics. Duflo notes that before the pandemic there had been improvement in quality of life around the world, "in part because of more focus on these quality of life issues and, I would argue, a little bit more attention given to plumbing and setting pragmatic objectives and programs as opposed to aiming for some more elusive growth.”
Time reporter Alice Park spotlights how MIT startup BioBot is sampling and analyzing sewage for communities across the U.S. to help track the spread of Covid-19. “Over the course of this pandemic, the entire world has seen how valuable wastewater epidemiology is as a tool,” says Newsha Ghaeli, president and co-founder of Biobot. “Our long-term vision is that wastewater epidemiology becomes a permanent part of the infrastructure embedded on top of sewage systems across the country and around the world.”
In an interview with of CBC Radio, graduate student Carmelo Ignaccolo discusses the need to better understand how to make cities good places for residents and tourists to coexist. "There are very different ways in which data can really help us plan better cities," says Ignaccolo.
Students in Prof. Azra Akšamija’s class created Covid-19 masks that reflected their experiences and shared powerful messages with the world, reports 7 News. “Students learn how to articulate problems they see in the world and issues that we are facing,” says Akšamija. “And to communicate that and translate that through their designs.”
Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Shigeru Miyagawa, senior associate dean of the Office of Digital Learning, and Meghan Perdue, a digital learning scientist at MITx, explore how the shift to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed education. “Faculty are now more aware of the ‘whole student,’ acknowledging their lives outside the classroom,” they write. “They have a heightened awareness of the need to create teaching practices that keep the students engaged and to use technology tools that enhance their teaching.”
Writing for The Guardian, Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo underscore the importance of a worldwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign. “Vaccinating the world will be crucial if countries are going to act together to confront the climate crisis,” they write, “which will require many of the same things as delivering vaccines: resources, innovation, ingenuity and a true partnership between rich and developing countries.”
Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson writes that a new study by researchers from MIT and Google finds that simple user experience interventions can help stop people from sharing misinformation on Covid-19. “Researchers introduced several different prompts through a simple popup window, all with a single goal: to get people to think about the accuracy of what they’re about to share,” writes Wilson. “When primed to consider a story’s accuracy, people were up to 20% less likely to share a piece of fake news.”
In an article for Wired, Prof. Amy Moran-Thomas writes about racial bias in pulse oximeters, noting that oximeters designed to work equitably existed in the 70s. “As part of AI’s growing role in health care, a wide range of noninvasive sensors are being developed with the pulse oximeter as their model,” writes Moran-Thomas. “Without care, a coming generation of optical color sensors could easily reproduce the unequal errors for which pulse oximetry is now known across many other areas of medicine.”
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is presenting a series of remote artist-designed walks and experiences, aimed at helping people re-engage with their world and environment, which can be enjoyed anywhere, reports Cate McQuaid for The Boston Globe. “Artists can be pivotal in bringing us to re-engage with the world around us,” says List curator Natalie Bell.
As the curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, addressed how we can live together and how architecture is responding to longstanding global issues that contributed to Covid-19’s global spread, from climate change and migration to political polarization and inequality, reports Elisabetta Povoledo for The New York Times. “The pandemic will hopefully go away,” said Sarkis. “But unless we address these causes, we will not be able to move forward.”
Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, speaks with DesignBoom about the 2021 Venice Architecture Bienale, which was postponed for a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “The postponement led to open discussions among the participants about tactical things, thematic things, but also how do we respond collectively to a crisis like this?,” says Sarkis. “But then it also led to starting to share ideas about how it is more effective to ship from this port versus that, and using local support rather than shipping everything.”
Fast Company reporter Elizabeth Segran writes that a new study by MIT Prof. Jackson Lu finds that mask wearing is more prevalent in communities in the U.S. with higher levels of collectivism. “It’s important to understand how culture fundamentally shapes how people respond not only to this pandemic, but to future crises as well,” says Lu.
A new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Jackson Lu finds that a community’s level of collectivism influences whether someone is willing to wear a mask, reports Cara Murez for U.S. News & World Report. “The role of collectivism could be studied in other crises, such as wildfires or hurricanes,” notes Murez, adding that the researchers “felt it would be important to study whether the pandemic itself has affected the sense of collectivism or individualism.”
A new study co-authored by Professor Scott Stern finds that stimulus measures enacted during the pandemic may have contributed to a surge in start-ups in America, particularly in Black neighborhoods, reports Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. “The idea that the pandemic has kind of restarted America’s start-up engine is a real thing,” says Stern. “Sometimes you need to turn off the car in order to turn it back on.”