GoKawiil
Tech News
Laurie Stach, a 2006 MIT graduate, recalled harboring an early drive to tackle big problems and discovered at MIT that many of her peers shared that same ambition. She argues that while adults praise talented young people in math and science, conventional schooling fails to equip them to act on their ideas now rather than in some distant future.
Kelly Shen, an MIT graduate from the class of 2017, works in Sotheby's art intelligence division, where she designs algorithms that forecast auction prices based on buyer trends and artist popularity. Her work also includes cataloguing art pieces and building real-time systems capable of handling thousands of simultaneous bidders on the auction house's website.
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
Researchers applied distributed acoustic sensing, which detects minute deformations in fibre-optic cables, to capture the acoustic waves generated by thunder and use them to probe subsurface structures such as sinkholes. Separately, scientists injected a patient's own mitochondria, extracted from leg muscle, into her eyes in an attempt to treat severe blindness; the procedure was safe but did not restore vision. Meanwhile, a science sleuth flagged more than 50 cell-ageing studies that appear to have used an incorrect antibody to identify a key protein.
Researchers extracted mitochondria from a blind woman's leg muscles and injected them into the vitreous fluid of both eyes, after a February brain bleed had damaged her optic nerve and retina and eliminated her pupils' response to light. The procedure, described in an unreviewed preprint posted August 10, caused no inflammation or adverse effects and briefly restored some pupillary light response, though the effect faded within about four weeks and vision was not recovered.