Researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed “a new type of electrically conductive hydrogel ‘scaffold’ that could eventually be used to create a soft brain-computer interface (or BCI) that translates neural signals from the brain into machine-readable instructions,” reports Adam Bluestein for Fast Company.
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights a new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III that makes the case that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”
Graduate student Soumya Sudhakar speaks with BBC Digital Planet host Gareth Mitchell about her new study showing that hardware efficiency for self-driving cars will need to advance rapidly to avoid generating as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world.
MIT researchers have found that “automation is the primary reason the income gap between more and less educated workers has continued to widen,” reports Ellen McGirt for Fortune. “This single one variable…explains 50 to 70% of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016,” says Prof. Daron Acemoglu
MIT researchers have found that in the U.S., “fires started by people account for a majority of premature deaths related to inhalation of tiny smoke particles,” writes Cara Murez for U.S. News & World Report. “Fires not only threaten human lives, infrastructure and ecosystems, but they are also a major cause for concern in terms of air quality,” says Therese Carter PhD ’22.
Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi spotlights Sublime Systems, an MIT startup developing new technology to produce low-carbon cement. “Sublime’s solution involves splitting the cement-making process into two steps,” explains Rathi. “The first step is to make calcium—the key element in limestone—in a form that’s ready to chemically react with silicon—the key element in sand. Sublime reduces energy use and carbon emissions in this step by avoiding limestone and using electricity, rather than coal-fired heat.”
Researchers from MIT and Mass General Hospital have developed “a deep learning model named ‘Sybil’ that can be used to predict lung cancer risk, using data from just a single CT scan,” writes Sai Balasubramanian for Forbes. “Sybil is able to predict a patient’s future lung cancer risk to a certain extent of accuracy, using the data from just one LDCT [low-dose computed tomography scan],” writes Balasubramanian.
The Economist highlights several studies by MIT researchers on income inequality and wages in the U.S., noting that “Clem Aeppli of Harvard and Nathan Wilmers of MIT found that earnings inequality basically reached a plateau after 2012.” Additionally, Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have found that wages for the bottom half of workers have been growing roughly two percentage points faster than for the upper half of workers.
Prof. Admir Masic speaks with NPR host Scott Simon about the concrete blend used by the ancient Romans to build long standing infrastructures. “We found that there are key ingredients in ancient Roman concrete that lead to a really outstanding functionality property in the ancient mortar, which is self-healing,” explains Masic.
Using statistical modeling, MIT researchers have found that the energy needed to power a fleet of fully autonomous EVs could generate as much carbon emissions as all the world’s data centers combined, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science.
Washington Post reporter Pranshu Verma writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds the “future energy required to run just the computers on a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today.”
Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum speaks with Wired reporter Will Knight about AI image generators and the limitations of AI tools. “It's amazing what they can do,” says Tenenbaum, “but their ability to imagine what the world might be like from simple descriptions is often very limited and counterintuitive.”
Graduate student Matthew Groh discusses Detect Fakes, a research project he co-created aimed at teaching people how to detect deepfakes, with Wall Street Journal reporter Ann-Marie Alcántara. Groh recommends people pay attention to the context of an image or video, noting that people can “pay attention to incentives and what someone is saying and why someone might be saying this.”
Research Scientist Mary Knapp’s proposal for a Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths (GO-LoW), a space-based observatory consisting of thousands of satellites that could study the magnetic fields of distant and rocky exoplanets, has been selected for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts programs, writes George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have found that “managers educated at business schools were more likely to favor shareholders over employees,” writes University of London Prof. André Spicer for the Financial Times. The researchers found that “employees working for companies run by a business school-educated manager earned, on average, 6 percent less in the US and 3 percent less in Denmark,” writes Spicer.