A study by MIT researchers shows that climate change will have a significant impact on phytoplankton, which will cause the oceans to change color, reports Brett Molina for USA Today. The researchers “developed a model simulating how different species of phytoplankton will grow and interact, and how warming oceans will have an impact,” Molina explains.
CNN reporter Jen Christensen writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that climate change will impact phytoplankton, causing the color of the world’s oceans to shift. “The change is not a good thing, since it will definitely impact the rest of the food web,” says principal research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz.
A new study by MIT scientists provides evidence that climate-driven changes in phytoplankton will cause more than half of the world’s oceans to shift in color by 2100, reports Barbara Moran for WBUR. Principal research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz explains that the color changes are important “because they tell us a lot about what's changing in the ocean.”
MIT researchers developed a new technique to make a more effective and precise CRISPR gene editing system, reports Eileen Drage O’Reilly for Axios. The system uses the new enzyme Cas12b, which has a “small size and precise targeting [that] will enable it to be used for in vivo applications in primary human cells,” O’Reilly explains.
In an article for The New York Times, Prof. David Rand examines what makes people susceptible to believing false or misleading information. Rand and his co-author write that their research “suggests that the solution to politically charged misinformation should involve devoting resources to the spread of accurate information and to training or encouraging people to think more critically.”
Popular Mechanics reporter David Grossman writes that MIT researchers have developed a new imaging technique that allows entire neural circuits in the brain to be explored at speeds 1,000 times faster than currently available methods. The new technique could allow scientists to “spot where brain diseases originate or even the basics of how behavior works.”
MIT researchers have developed a new high-resolution technique to image the brain that could be used to create more precise maps of the brain and identify the causes of brain disease, reports Megan Thielking for STAT. “If we can figure out exactly where diseases begin,” explains Prof. Edward Boyden, “that could be pretty powerful.”
Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”
Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum writes that researchers determined how fast a supermassive black hole spins by measuring a star being swallowed by the black hole. Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham explains that, “this measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant.”
Astronomers from MIT have detected echoes in X-ray flares emitted by a black hole consuming stellar material, writes Charles Q. Choi for Space.com. The findings “might shed light on how matter behaves not just as it falls into stellar-mass black holes,” writes Choi, “but also supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that a team of researchers, including MIT scientists, have detected fast radio bursts (FRB) coming from a distant galaxy. Coldewey explains that the researchers used the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment radio telescope, which “points at the whole sky and chooses where to ‘look’ using software,” to identify 13 new FRBs.
Nature reporter Alexandra Witze highlights the TESS satellite’s success in uncovering new exoplanets outside our solar system. Senior research scientist George Ricker feels, “TESS works better than team members had dared to dream,” Witze writes, adding that “its four cameras can see objects 20% fainter, and focus more sharply, than originally expected.”
NASA’s MIT-led TESS mission has discovered a new exoplanet orbiting a star 53 light years from Earth, reports Mike Wall for Space.com. The “sub-Neptune” planet is “about three times bigger than Earth, which means it's likely gaseous rather than rocky,” writes Wall.
CNN reporter Ashley Strickland writes that NASA’s planet-hunting satellite TESS has discovered another exoplanet 53 light years away. Strickland explains that the exoplanet orbits “a bright neighboring star in the Reticulum constellation, with a 36-day orbit and a surface temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit.”