MIT News Newsletter

	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
February 10, 2017
MIT News: top stories
A weekly digest of the Institute’s research and innovation

Engineers harness stomach acid to power tiny sensors

Ingestible electronic devices could monitor physiological conditions or deliver drugs.

New Center for Autism Research established at MIT’s McGovern Institute

A $20 million gift from Lisa Yang and Hock Tan ’75 SM ’75 will catalyze multidisciplinary autism research.

Stars align in test supporting “spooky action at a distance”

Physicists address loophole in tests of Bell’s inequality, using 600-year-old starlight.

A new fight with old battle lines

Book explores what France’s LGBTQ rights battle says about identity and belonging.

Microbial manufacturing

Engineered bacteria produce rare and commercially useful compounds in large quantities.

Researchers add a splash of human intuition to planning algorithms

Incorporating strategies from skilled human planners improves automatic planners’ performance.

In the Media

In this video, Prof. Leia Stirling and graduate student Alison Gibson speak with Wired about the vibrating boots they developed to help astronauts avoid obstacles. “To be able to provide technologies that can assist the astronauts and actually make a group of people have more capability, that’s really exciting,” explains Stirling.

MIT researchers have developed a pill that uses stomach acid to run sensors in the body and can deliver drugs over a long period of time, writes Hallie Smith of Boston Magazine. By attaching zinc and copper electrodes to the exterior of the pill it “reacts with stomach acid to create electricity,” explains Smith.

An MIT study finds that online and in-store goods are sold at the same price 70 percent of the time, reports Meghan Woolhouse of The Boston Globe. Prof. Alberto Cavallo believes online and in store prices are typically the same because shoppers would likely react badly “to price differences for the same goods from the same retailer.”