NBC Boston’s Jeff Saperstone visits MIT to learn more about how researchers discovered that a common hydrogel used in cosmetic creams, industrial coatings and pharmaceutical capsules can absorb moisture from the atmosphere as the temperature rises. The material could one day be used to harvest moisture for drinking water or feeding crops. “For a planet that's getting hotter, this could be a game-changing discovery,” Saperstone notes.
Researchers at MIT have developed an ingestible pill that can raise levels of hormones to help increase appetite and decrease nausea, reports Maggie Chen for Wired. The researchers “hope that it can one day act as an effective noninvasive therapy for those who experience gastroparesis—or other eating disorders—essentially being a temporary switch that can be activated to drive hunger and digestion,” writes Chen.
Boston Globe reporter Kara Miller spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s work advocating for better treatment and pay for workers. Ton, who originally came to the Boston area to study supply chains, recently published a new book, “The Case for Good Jobs,” and is “on a mission to change how company leaders think, and how they treat their employees,” writes Baskin. “To Ton, the solution is clear: Treat people better, give them more control over their lives, close the income divide. It’s just good business.”
Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech research project at MIT CSAIL and a principal investigator MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, speaks with Politico reporter Mohar Chatterjee about generative AI, the pace of computer progress and the need for the U.S. to invest more in developing the future of computing. “We need to make sure we have good secure factories that can produce cutting-edge semiconductors,” says Thompson. “The CHIPS Act covers that. And people are starting to invest in some of these post-CMOS technologies — but it just needs to be much more. These are incredibly important technologies.”
Researchers from Lincoln Laboratory and NASA are working on the TROPICS mission to study tropical cyclones, reports Bella Isaacs-Thomas for the PBS NewsHour. “Technology today — finally — allows us to miniaturize these satellites, fly a lot of them and get that temporal update that we’ve been wanting for so long,” explains Laboratory Fellow William Blackwell.
Undergraduate student Kathleen Esfahany speaks with GBH host Jeremy Siegel about her work discovering that people are most creative in the early stages of sleep. “The biggest finding and the thing that I think most people would relate to is that there was a nice effect of people being more creative after a nap, versus staying awake,” says Esfahany. “And I think this is well-corroborated by a lot of other studies, but this was just really exciting to be able to see.”
Boston Magazine reporter Rowan Jacobsen spotlights how MIT faculty, students and alumni are leading the charge in clean energy startups. “When it comes to game-changing breakthroughs in energy, three letters keep surfacing again and again: MIT,” writes Jacobsen.
J. Daniel Kim PhD ’20 and Minjae Kim SM ’17 PhD ‘18 have found that young companies “were less likely than similar companies to change their line of business or location” after the departure of a founder, reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. “Companies that did change their line of business tended to perform better, especially around recessions,” explains Lewis. “This supports the notion that the loss of a founder tends to impede necessary change.”
MIT researchers have developed a new method to make chatbots more factual, reports Gerrit De Vynck for The Washington Post. “The researchers proposed using different chatbots to produce multiple answers to the same question and then letting them debate each other until one answer won out,” explains Vynck. “The researchers found using this ‘society of minds’ method made them more factual.”
Researchers at MIT have found that lawyers “have an easier time remembering legal documents written in simple English over those filled with so-called legalese,” reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. “On average, for instance, lawyers scored 45% on a test that asked them to recall documents written in legalese, compared to the average 38% scored by nonlawyers,” explains Cara. “But the lawyers’ score also increased to over 50% when they were given the simplified version.”
Boston Globe columnist Thomas Farragher spotlights how researchers from MIT’s Haystack Observatory have built an “ice penetrator,” a device designed to help scientists study how sea ice is changing. Chris Eckert, a mechanical engineer at Haystack, explains, “Global warming is a real thing and we need a new class of instrumentation and measurements to truly understand it.”
MIT researchers have developed a new machine-learning technique that can identify which pixels in an image represent the same material, which could help with robotic scene understanding, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Since an object can be multiple materials as well as colors and other visual aspects, this is a pretty subtle distinction but also an intuitive one,” writes Wiggers.
Researchers from MIT and McMaster University have used artificial intelligence to identify a new antibiotic that can fight against a drug-resistant bacteria commonly found in hospitals and medical offices, reports Ken Alltucker for USA Today. The researchers believe the AI “process used to winnow thousands of potential drugs to identify one that may work is an approach that can work in drug discovery,” writes Alltucker.
MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have found that people are most creative when drifting off to sleep, reports WHDH. “The earliest stage sleep, we call that N1 stage sleep, just a brief nap in that period can really boost your creativity,” says undergraduate student Kathleen Esfahany.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have used artificial intelligence to develop a new antibiotic to address Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacteria known for infecting wounds, lungs and kidneys, reports Harland-Dunaway for The World.