Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, spotlights Prof. Ed Boyden’s work developing a new technology that “enables researchers for the first time to study an intact tissue sample and track genetic activity on the spot within a cell’s tiniest recesses, or microenvironments—areas that have been largely out of reach until now.”
Research scientist Andreas Mershin speaks with Noam Hassenfeld of Vox about his work developing a new AI system that could be used to detect disease using smell.
Researchers from MIT have developed a new kind of surgery that could offer amputees better control of their muscles and prosthetic limbs after surgery, reports Cara Murez for U.S. News & World Report. “In this new type of surgery — called agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, or AMI — surgeons reconnect those muscle pairs so they retain the push-pull relationship they've always had and improve sensory feedback,” writes Murez.
A new AI-powered system developed by researchers from MIT and other institutions can detect prostate cancer in urine samples as accurately as dogs can, reports Tanya Lewis and Prachi Patel for Scientific American. “We found we could repeat the training you use for dogs on the machines until we can’t tell the difference between the two,” says research scientist Andreas Mershin.
ITV reporter Liz Summers spotlights how researchers from MIT and other institutions have developed a new system that could eventually be used to help detect diseases via smell. The researchers hope the results could “eventually result in the production of a ‘robotic nose’ perhaps in the form of a smartphone app.”
UPI reporter Brian P. Dunleavy writes that MIT researchers have developed a new system, modeled on a dog’s keen sense of smell, that could be used to help detect disease using smell. “We see the dogs and their training research as teaching our machine learning [sense of smell] and artificial intelligence algorithms how to operate,” says research scientist Andreas Mershin.
Fast Company reporter Ruth Reader writes that researchers from MIT and other institutions have developed a new miniaturized detector that could be used to detect diseases by smell. “This paper was about integrating all the techniques that we know can work independently and finding out what of all this can go and become [part of] an integrated smartphone-based diagnostic,” says research scientist Andreas Mershin.
Mashable spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new type of amputation surgery that could “help amputees better control their residual muscles and sense where their ‘phantom limb’ is in space.”
Scientific American reporter Leslie Nemo spotlights postdoctoral fellow Matheus Victor’s photograph of a petri dish full of neurons. Nemo writes that Victor and his colleagues hope the “rudimentary brain tissue will reveal why a new therapy might alleviate Alzheimer’s symptoms.”
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning algorithm that can anticipate and recognize a protein’s varied structures. “The new AI-system,” writes Hays, “does more than image a diversity of conformations, it can also predict the varied motions of different protein structures.”
MIT researchers have discovered the molecular structure of a protein that plays a key role in the coronavirus’ ability to replicate itself and stimulate the host cell’s inflammation response, reports Travis Anderson for The Boston Globe. “If researchers can find a way to ‘block this channel,’” writes Anderson, “then they might be able to reduce the ‘pathogenicity of the virus’ and also obstruct viral replication.”
Smithsonian reporter Rasha Aridi writes that MIT researchers have found that longing for social interaction elicits a similar neurological response to a hungry person craving food. The researchers found that “after a day of fasting, they noted that they were uncomfortable and had intense food cravings. After social isolation, they felt lonely and unhappy and yearned for interactions.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that lack of social contact can lead many people to crave interactions in a similar manner as they do when experiencing hunger, reports Katherine Dunn for Fortune. The researchers found that “10 hours without any social contact, for many people, led to a kind of psychological and physical craving that's on the same level of intensity as 10 waking hours without food.”
MIT researchers have uncovered evidence that humans crave social contact in the same way they crave food, reports Ali Pattillo for Inverse. The study, “provides empirical support for the idea that loneliness acts as a signal – just like hunger – that signals to an individual that something is lacking and that it needs to take action to repair that," explains former MIT postdoc Livia Tomova.
Prof. James Collins speaks with Boston 25 reporter Julianne Lima about the growing issue of antibiotic resistant bacteria and his work using AI to identify new antibiotics. Collins explains that a new platform he developed with Prof. Regina Barzilay uncovered “a host of new antibiotics including one that we call halicin that has remarkable activity against multi drug-resistant pathogens.”