MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
July 13, 2018
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

Kirigami-inspired technique manipulates light at the nanoscale

Folding and cutting thin metal films could enable microchip-based 3-D optical devices.

The city is her lab

Siqi Zheng studies the economics of China’s urban explosion.

An AI system for editing music in videos

Given a video of a musical performance, CSAIL’s deep-learning system can make individual instruments louder or softer.

Automating molecule design to speed up drug development

Machine-learning model could help chemists make molecules with higher potencies, much more quickly.

Making nuclear energy safer and more affordable

Galvanized by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disasters, PhD student Xingang Zhao envisions a future with safe, efficient nuclear power.

In the Media

Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Benjamin Olken speak with NPR’s Jason Beaubien about their efforts to improve Indonesia’s Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, program. "There's a certain tendency among both social scientists and policymakers to assume that the solution to a complex problem has to be complex,” says Banerjee, “and I don't think that's always true."

In an episode of BBC Click, host Spencer Kelly visits CSAIL to learn about developments in robotics and deep learning algorithms. Kelly notes that CSAIL is, “at the forefront of robotics, building machines in shapes and sizes that challenge our very idea of what a robot is.”

A new paper by Assistant Prof. Salvatore Vitale finds that studying the rare pairing of a neutron star and a spiraling black hole could allow researchers to determine the universe’s rate of expansion, writes Jeremy Fox of The Boston Globe. The positive detection of a collision could “potentially give a dramatic contribution to our understanding of the universe,” says Vitale.