Research

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have used artificial intelligence to develop a new antibiotic to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a challenging bacteria known to become resistant to antibiotics, reports Hannah Kuchler for the Financial Times. “It took just an hour and a half — a long lunch — for the AI to serve up a potential new antibiotic, an offering to a world contending with the rise of so-called superbugs: bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that have mutated and no longer respond to the drugs we have available,” writes Kuchler.

Nature contributor David Chandler writes about the late Prof. Edward Fredkin and his impact on computer science and physics. “Fredkin took things even further, concluding that the whole Universe could actually be seen as a kind of computer,” explains Chandler. “In his view, it was a ‘cellular automaton’: a collection of computational bits, or cells, that can flip states according to a defined set of rules determined by the states of the cells around them. Over time, these simple rules can give rise to all the complexities of the cosmos — even life.”

Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Boston Globe reporter Aruni Soni about her new study that finds reducing the cost of solar energy will be accelerated by improvements in soft tech. “We found that the soft technology involved in solar energy really has not changed and hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as the hardware,” says Trancik. “These soft costs, in many systems, can be 50 percent or even more of the total cost of solar electricity.”

Researchers from the MIT AgeLab and Transamerica have found that individuals ages 40 to 59 are more likely to struggle with preparing for increased longevity, reports Lorie Konish for CNBC. “The research finds while 74% of people in their 50s say it is extremely or very important to save enough money to eventually stop working, just 57% said they expect to be able to retire,” writes Konish. “Moreover, half of people in midlife are struggling to get by financially, more than other age groups studied.”

Using techniques inspired by kirigami, a Japanese paper-cutting technique, MIT researchers have developed a “a novel method to manufacture plate lattices – high performance materials useful in automotive and aerospace designs,” reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “The kirigami-augmented plate lattices withstood three times as much force as standard aluminum corrugation designs,” writes Paul. “Such variations show immense promise for lightweight, shock-absorbing sections needed within cars, planes, and spacecraft." 

A new working paper co-authored by Prof. Nathan Wilmers finds that affordable chain restaurants can provide “much more socioeconomic integration than do independently owned commercial businesses — or, for that matter, traditional public institutions,” reports Catherine Rampell for The Washington Post. “The authors analyzed a massive trove of geolocation data to assess where and when Americans come into contact with people of different income classes than themselves,” writes Rampbell, “if they do at all.”

Adjunct Prof. Tali Sharot speaks with NPR Life Kit host Marielle Segarra about how lying impacts the brain. Sharot refers to an experiment she conducted that used brain imaging technology to monitor how the brain reacts to lying and found that as adults “grew more comfortable lying, the emotional response decreased – meaning that the players became more and more desensitized to their dishonesty with each subsequent lie.”

Research by Alden Cheng PhD ‘23 “suggests that big college football games in October 2016 distracted voters from seeing fake news stories that favored Donald Trump,” reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. “Counties around colleges that played a big game in that month had fewer online searches for pro-Trump fake-news-related terms and had lower percentages of votes for Trump than would otherwise have been expected, given other political demographics,” writes Lewis.

Researchers at MIT have developed a supercapacitor, an energy storage system, using cement, water and carbon, reports Macie Parker for The Boston Globe. “Energy storage is a global problem,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “If we want to curb the environmental footprint, we need to get serious and come up with innovative ideas to reach these goals.”

Prof. Nina Roussille has found that “women on average asked for 3.3% less than men for a full-time engineering job, with that gap growing to 6% for women with more experience,” reports Alicia Wallace for CNN. “However, when salary transparency was employed on the site and a median wage was given, the gap closed.” 

MIT scientists have developed a new brain “atlas” and computer model that sheds insight into the brain-body connections in C. elegans worms, reports Lauren Leffer for Scientific American. “Through establishing those brain-behavior links in a humble roundworm,” writes Leffer, “neuroscientists are one step closer to understanding how all sorts of animal brains, even potentially human ones, encode action.”

Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni speaks with Fast Company reporter Sam Becker about his work in developing the Synthetic Data Vault, which is helpful for creating synthetic data sets, reports Sam Becker for Fast Company. “Fake data is randomly generated,” says Veeramachaneni. “While synthetic data is trying to create data from a machine learning model that looks very realistic.”

Researchers from MIT and Harvard have explored astrocytes, a group of brain cells, from a computational perspective and developed a mathematical model that shows how they can be used to build a biological transformer, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “The brain is far superior to even the best artificial neural networks that we have developed, but we don’t really know exactly how the brain works,” says research staff member Dmitry Krotov. “There is scientific value in thinking about connections between biological hardware and large-scale artificial intelligence networks. This is neuroscience for AI and AI for neuroscience.

Undergraduate student Isabella Struckman and Sofie Kupiec ’23 reached out to the first hundred signatories of the Future of Life Institute’s open letting calling for a pause on AI development to learn more about their motivations and concerns, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The duo’s write-up of their findings reveals a broad array of perspectives among those who put their name to the document,” writes Knight. “Despite the letter’s public reception, relatively few were actually worried about AI posing a looming threat to humanity.”

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with TechCrunch reporter Brain Heater about liquid neural networks and how this emerging technology could impact robotics. “The reason we started thinking about liquid networks has to do with some of the limitations of today’s AI systems,” says Rus, “which prevent them from being very effective for safety, critical systems and robotics. Most of the robotics applications are safety critical.”