MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
July 15, 2016
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

How to stay anonymous online

Network can protect users’ anonymity if all but one of its servers are compromised.

New clue to how lithium works in the brain

Biologists find a possible explanation for why the drug helps bipolar patients.

Exploring networks efficiently

Analysis of ant colony behavior could yield better algorithms for network communication.

Seeking simple solutions with huge impacts

PhD student Cauam Cardoso assesses technologies that aim to help the world’s poor.

Why we like the music we do

New study suggests that musical tastes are cultural in origin, not hardwired in the brain.

Better views with smaller satellites

Batches of shoebox-sized satellites could improve estimates of Earth’s reflected energy.

In the Media

By studying how people from different cultures respond to consonant and dissonant chords, MIT researchers have found that musical tastes may be rooted in cultural origins, not biology, writes Sarah Kaplan for The Washington Post. The results “underscore the degree of variation that exists across cultures in terms of how people hear and evaluate music," explains Prof. Josh McDermott.

CNN reporter Sara Ashley O’Brien writes that CSAIL researchers have demonstrated that a robot could help schedule tasks in a hospital’s labor and delivery unit. The researchers trained a robot to understand a nurse’s scheduling decisions and “90% of the time the Nao robot made suggestions that doctors and nurses carried out.”

In a New York Times column, MITEI researcher Howard Herzog argues that carbon capture should be part of a portfolio of low-carbon energy options used to tackle climate change. “The magnitude of the climate challenge is so large, we need as many options as possible, including renewables, nuclear and carbon capture,” writes Herzog.