MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
June 15, 2017
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

New system allows optical “deep learning”

Neural networks could be implemented more quickly using new photonic technology.

A noninvasive method for deep brain stimulation

Electrodes placed on the scalp could help patients with brain diseases.

Dora Aldama: Drawn to multidimensional problems

MIT graduate student connects the business, engineering, and human elements of producing aerospace technology.

Giving robots a sense of touch

GelSight technology lets robots gauge objects’ hardness and manipulate small tools.

Engineers design drones that can stay aloft for five days

New design could provide communication support in disaster zones.

Academics without borders

Senseable City Lab visualizes 20 years of data to show how students, faculty, and scholars join MIT from all over the world.

MIT students hack assistive technology solutions for local clients

At the 2017 Assistive Technologies Hackathon hosted at Beaver Works, students created helpful devices for Greater Boston residents with disabilities.

In the Media

New York Times reporter Pam Belluck writes that MIT researchers have developed a new, non-invasive deep brain stimulation technique. The technique could be used to help treat, “a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders more cheaply and safely than current approaches,” writes Belluck.

MIT researchers have developed a surgical technique that could make prosthetic limbs feel more natural, writes Karen Weintraub for Scientific American. “With this approach, we’re very confident that the human will actually feel position, will actually feel speed, will actually feel force,” says Prof. Hugh Herr. “It’ll completely feel like their own limb.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Alison Gopnik writes about Prof. Pawan Sinha’s research examining how humans acquire specific visual abilities. Sinha’s latest research examines how people learn to differentiate between faces and other objects. He found that children who had their vision restored were able to learn “the skill and eventually they did as well as sighted children.”

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Christopher Warshaw discusses his research, which shows there is not one state where the majority of residents support the American Health Care Act. “Across all the states that voted for President Trump last year, we estimate that support for the A.H.C.A. is rarely over 35 percent."