Set to launch on April 16th, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), will be used to identify “planets that are close enough to Earth for astronomers to explore them in detail,” writes Alexandra Witze for Nature. “It’s not so much the numbers of planets that we care about, but the fact that they are orbiting nearby stars,” says Prof. Sara Seager, deputy science director for TESS.
Graduate student Amy Zhang, has developed an application, known as Squadbox, that seeks to disarm internet harassers by enlisting the help of a user’s friends, who act as inbox “moderators.” “According to what the harassed person has specified beforehand, the moderator can delete any abusive messages, forward on clean messages, or send along messages with tags,” writes Katharine Schwab for Co.Design.
A new headset developed by graduate student Arnav Kapur reads the small muscle movements in the face that occur when the wearer thinks about speaking, and then uses “artificial intelligence algorithms to decipher their meaning,” writes Chelsea Whyte for New Scientist. Known as AlterEgo, the device “is directly linked to a program that can query Google and then speak the answers.”
Writing in The Atlantic, Amy Merrick describes Walmart's increasing reliance on the gig economy and automation, arguing that "the U.S. economy is tilting further toward jobs that give workers less market power." Merrick cites research by Prof. David Autor, who explains that “the concern should not be about the number of jobs, but whether those jobs are jobs that can support a reasonable standard of living.”
In a forthcoming book excerpted in The Guardian, Alex Beard describes Prof. Deb Roy's project to record his infant son's learning behaviors. Beard explains that while Roy set out to create machines that learned like humans, he was ultimately blown away by "the incredible sophistication of what a language learner in the flesh actually looks like and does." "The learning process wasn’t decoding, as he had originally thought, but something infinitely more continuous, complex and social."
Research co-authored by Prof. Christopher Palmer in Sloan found that loan rates vary substantially, even when two borrowers are relatively similar, due primarily to the variations in the lender’s markup. “You would never get away with this if you were selling milk,” Palmer told Jo Craven McGinty of The Wall Street Journal. “It would be the same price for everyone.”
MIT Media Lab researchers have created a system that can detect obstacles through fog that are not visible to the human eye, writes Darren Weaver for CNBC. “The goal is to integrate the technology into self-driving cars so that even in bad weather, the vehicles can avoid obstacles,” explains Warren.
Prof. Evelyn Wang has led the development of a device that may solve water shortages in arid climates. “The device is powered by sunlight only, and the researchers said it could eventually be used to provide more than one-fourth of a liter of water per kilogram of metal-organic framework each day,” writes Chukwuma Muanya of The Guardian.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is “the brainchild of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” hopes to “identify at least 50 rocky exoplanets—Earth-size or bigger,” that will eventually be scrutinized by a larger telescope that is launching in 2022, writes Daniel Clery for Science. “This is the finder scope,” explains research scientist and TESS principal investigator George Ricker.
Launching next month, the TESS satellite “is NASA's next mission in the search for exoplanets,”writes Ashley Strickland for CNN. “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers,” said George Ricker of the MIT Kavli Institute, who is a principal investigator on the mission.
Researchers at MIT have developed a “kirigami” film, based off of the ancient paper-folding technique of the same name, that can be used for bandaging tricky areas like the knee or elbow, writes David Grossman for Popular Mechanics. “We are the first group to find, with a systematic mechanism study, that a kirigami design can improve a material’s adhesion,” says postdoc and lead researcher Ruike Zhao.
Sean Illing of Vox speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her insights on how the digital world is impacting our human relationships. “I’m not anti-technology,” said Turkle. “I’m pro-relationships and pro-conversations and pro-communities and pro-politics. I want people to be media-savvy and to use it to their best advantage.”
Dennis Overbye of The New York Times speaks with Prof. Sara Seager and senior research scientist George Ricker about the future of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. The mission, led and operated by MIT, is preparing to orbit Earth for two years in search of other planets.
Research led by Prof. Amy Finkelstein found that just 4% of “bankruptcy filings by non-elderly adults” were associated with medical expenses. “Medical bankruptcy…wasn’t nearly as common as anticipated,” writes Alex Kingsbury for The Boston Globe. “Public policy aimed at fighting it might not have the anticipated results, either.”
Sarah Toy of The Wall Street Journal writes that CSAIL researchers have developed a soft robotic fish that can capture images and video of aquatic life. “The key here is that the robot is very quiet as it moves in the water and the undulating motion of the tail does not create too much water disturbance,” says Prof. Daniela Rus.