MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
March 24, 2016
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

A new glimpse into working memory

Study finds bursts of neural activity as the brain holds information in mind, overturns a long-held model.

New chemistries found for liquid batteries

Grid-scale approach to rechargeable power storage gets new arsenal of possible materials.

When slower is faster

Study: Communicating vehicles could ease through intersections more efficiently.

Toward a better understanding of the brain

Genome-editing pioneer Feng Zhang hopes his work will shed light on neurological disorders.

Physicists prove energy input predicts molecular behavior

Theoretical proof could lead to more reliable nanomachines.

Secure, user-controlled data

Cryptographic system would allow users to decide which applications access which aspects of their data.

In the Media

Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee write for The New York Times about the significance of AlphaGo, an AI system, beating the human champion of the strategy game Go. AlphaGo’s victories, “illustrate the power of a new approach in which instead of trying to program smart strategies into a computer, we instead build systems that can learn winning strategies almost entirely on their own.”

A new working paper co-authored by Prof. Pierre Azoulay examines how the passing of a prominent scientist can provide opportunities for other researchers, according to The Economist. The researchers found that “publications by researchers who had not collaborated with the star increased by 8% a year.”

Popular Science reporter Claire Maldarelli writes that researchers from MIT and NYU have identified how sensory overload occurs for people with neurodevelopmental disorders. Based off their findings, the researchers hope “they can not only classify these disorders in a better way, but also develop therapies that alleviate or diminish the symptoms.”