Tag: mit

Brown University mass shooting and MIT assassination may be connected, police confirm

The Brown University mass shooting which killed two students may be connected to the assassination of an MIT professor two days later, police have said.

An unidentified gunman opened fire on the Brown campus in Providence, Rhode Island on Saturday, and investigators failed to track the attacker down. 

Two days later, an unknown assailant fatally shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Nuno Loureiro inside his Boston home around 50 miles away. 

FBI agent Ted Docks said Tuesday ‘there seems to be no connection’ between the two shootings, but investigators told WPRI Thursday that there may be a link. 

The outlet did not give further information about the connection, but said it marks ‘a new break in the case’ which has baffled investigators for days. 

Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, of Virginia, and Ella Cook, of Alabama, were fatally gunned down during the mass shooting at Brown on Saturday. 

They were in a study session held at the Ivy League’s School of Engineering Barus and Holley Building when a gunman burst in shortly after 4pm and opened fire. 

The gunman fired 40 rounds, killing the two students and wounding 12 more. 

FBI agents have released several photographs and videos of two ‘persons of interest’, but they are yet to name a suspect in the tragedy. 

A different ‘person of interest’ was detained at the Hampton Inn hotel in Coventry the day after the shooting, but they were later released without charge. 

Two days after the Brown shooting, at around 8.30pm Monday evening, married father-of-three Loureiro was shot dead in his home in Brookline, Boston. 

Loureiro’s neighbor and friend, Louise Cohen, said she discovered his body after hearing shots disturb the peace of their beautiful area on Gibbs Street. 

Cohen said she was lighting a menorah candle when she heard gunshots fired. She rushed to the hallway of their building and found Loureiro lying on his back. 

The professor’s heartbroken wife was also in the entry along with another neighbor, and they scrambled to dial 911. Loureiro was taken to hospital but died the next day.

Loureiro’s neighbors remembered him as a kind-hearted, ‘wonderful man’, while students flocked to the candle-lit vigil in his memory.

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MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies

A Massachusetts university professor who was shot at his home has died, campus officials say.

Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was shot “multiple times” on Monday and died on Tuesday morning in hospital, according to Brookline police and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) officials.

Police said officers responded to a call for gunshots at an apartment at about 8:30pm local time. Loureiro was taken by ambulance to a Boston hospital, where he died on Tuesday morning.

No one is in custody and police are treating the incident as “an active and ongoing homicide investigation”, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office said.

CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, reported that a neighbour said he heard “three loud bangs” Monday evening and thought somebody in the apartment building was kicking in a door.

Long-time resident Anne Greenwald told CBS that the professor had a young family and went to school nearby.

Loureiro majored in Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon in 2000 and obtained a Phd in physics at Imperial College London in 2005, according to his faculty web page.

Loureiro was known for his research on the dynamics of plasma – the part of blood that carries platelets, red blood cells and white blood cells around the body. He was named director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in May.

He also studied how to harness clean “fusion power” to combat climate change, CBS said.

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An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study—Then It All Fell Apart

Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprung to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.

While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence’s workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers’s work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn’t like using it very much.

Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?

By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia’s brightest minds?

“There is no world where this makes any sense,” said David Autor, one of the MIT professors who had previously championed his student’s research. MIT, Autor and Acemoglu declined to comment on​ the specifics of the investigation into the research, citing privacy constraints.

Toner-Rodgers’s illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all—for better or worse—assumed. He focused on AI, a field where peer-reviewed research is still in its infancy and the hunger for data is insatiable.Expand article logo  Continue reading

What has stunned his former colleagues and mentors is the sheer breadth of his apparent deception. He didn’t just tweak a few variables. It appears he invented the entire study.

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Top MIT scientist blasts ‘climate hysteria,’ says global warming fears are driven by money… not evidence

Skepticism about climate change has resurfaced, as some experts claim the exact causes of global warming remain unclear and that the policies addressing it are motivated more by money than by science.

Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spent decades studying atmospheric science. He told the Daily Mail that the public hysteria surrounding global warming isn’t actually based on realistic data.

Climate change is the term used to describe Earth’s warming, mainly as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas.

Scientists and climate activists have warned that this extra warmth could cause more extreme storms, rising seas that flood cities, and hotter summers that make it harder to grow food worldwide – all within the next 25 years.

However, Lindzen said the financial implications of controlling the multi-trillion-dollar energy industry have been the true motivation for politicians to support flawed research that argues small temperature increases will lead to immediate disasters.

‘The fact that you have a multi-trillion dollar industry and you have an opportunity to completely overturn it had a great appeal to a lot of politicians,’ he explained. ‘They go wild on it. Another half degree and we’re doomed, and so on. The public knows this is nonsense.’ 

Lindzen explained the basic math behind what he called ‘climate alarm.’ He said the emphasis on lowering specific emissions like carbon dioxide (CO₂) simply doesn’t produce the worldwide temperature changes advocates say it will.

The scientist noted that the planet’s temperature has fluctuated significantly throughout recorded history and science still can’t definitively prove what the exact cause of both extreme warming and cooling events has been.

‘We don’t understand the glaciation that occurred in the 15th century. You know, so what was going on then? Inadequate CO₂?’ Lindzen said of the event in the Northern Hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age.

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The Brain’s Hidden Radar: How Theta Waves Sweep the Mind to Spot the Unexpected

New research from MIT suggests that brainwaves sweep across the cerebral cortex much like radar scans the sky, helping the brain detect unexpected visual anomalies.

Neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, led by Hio-Been Han in Professor Earl K. Miller’s lab, made the discovery while studying how the brain stores and processes visual information in the short term—a process known as visual working memory.

The Cortex

The cerebral cortex maps what the brain perceives in space. When we focus on our surroundings, theta-frequency waves sweep across them, searching for visual anomalies that might demand attention. Using animal subjects, the researchers sought to understand why performance in visual working memory tasks varies and why memory capacity appears limited.

Their work builds on previous studies identifying theta waves as being strongly correlated with attention—particularly during tasks requiring the brain to track multiple points at once. Miller’s earlier research supported the theory that different brainwave frequencies act as carriers for distinct forms of neural computation. The new study takes this a step further, revealing how those traveling waves may actively drive such computations.

“It shows that waves impact performance as they sweep across the surface of the cortex,” said Professor Miller, also of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This raises the possibility that traveling waves are organizing, or even performing, neural computation.”

Brainwaves and Video Games

For their experiments, the team trained animals to play a simple video game: an array of colored squares appeared briefly on-screen, followed by a second array in which one square had changed color. The animals’ task was to look at the altered square as quickly as possible. Researchers tracked their eye movements and reaction times while recording brainwave activity in the frontal eye fields—a region of the cortex responsible for mapping visual information from the retina.

After analyzing hundreds of trials, the researchers found that both theta brainwave activity and the vertical location of the changed square were strongly correlated with how accurately and quickly the animals detected changes. Certain horizontal bands of the cortex appeared tuned to specific theta frequencies, meaning that a subject’s performance depended on whether the brain’s internal rhythm aligned with the position of the visual change.

“The optimal theta phase for behavior varied by retinotopic target location, progressing from the top to the bottom of the visual field,” the researchers wrote in Neuron. “This could be explained by a traveling wave of activity across the cortical surface during the memory delay.”

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MIT Says It Will Not Sign Trump Admin’s Higher Education Compact

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has declined to sign onto the Trump administration’s proposed compact, which would mandate campus reforms in exchange for preferential access to federal funding.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the decision on Oct. 10 in a campus-wide letter attaching her formal response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who invited nine universities to sign the new agreement.

The proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would require participating universities to freeze tuition for five years, limit international student enrollment, and adopt the federal government’s biology-based definitions of sex and gender when it comes to sports or single-sex spaces.

Other provisions call for reinstating the SAT requirement for applicants, curbing grade inflation, prohibiting the use of race and sex as factors in admissions or employment, and reforming or dismantling departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

MIT ‘Cannot Support the Proposed Approach’

In her response, Kornbluth acknowledged that MIT shares some of the administration’s stated goals, such as focusing on merit, reducing costs for students, and upholding free expression.

“These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health, and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law,” Kornbluth wrote.

She also noted that MIT disagreed with a number of the demands, saying that they “would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution” and that the premise of the document is inconsistent with MIT’s core belief that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote.

“In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

MIT is the first of the nine universities invited to join the compact to publicly reject it. The administration also invited Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.

It’s unclear why those particular institutions were chosen or whether other schools will be offered the same terms.

The Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times by publication time.

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MIT Creates AI-Powered Treatments to Combat Antibiotic Resistant Superbugs

In a groundbreaking advance against the escalating crisis of antibiotic resistance, researchers at MIT have harnessed artificial intelligence to design entirely new antibiotics capable of tackling two notorious drug-resistant bacteria.

The antibiotics can be used to treat Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the culprit behind gonorrhea, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a common cause of severe skin and bloodstream infections.

The study, published today in the journal Cell, comes at a critical time. Over the past 45 years, the FDA has approved only a handful of new antibiotics, most of which are mere tweaks on existing drugs.

Meanwhile, bacterial resistance has surged, contributing to nearly 5 million deaths annually worldwide from drug-resistant infections.

Traditional drug discovery methods, reliant on screening known chemical libraries, have struggled to keep pace.

But MIT’s Antibiotics-AI Project is flipping the script by using generative AI to explore uncharted “chemical spaces”, vast realms of hypothetical molecules that don’t exist in nature or labs yet.

Led by James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the team generated over 36 million potential compounds computationally.

These were then screened using machine-learning models trained to predict antibacterial activity, toxicity to human cells, and novelty.

The result? Antibiotics that are structurally unlike any on the market, operating through fresh mechanisms that rupture bacterial cell membranes, making it harder for resistance to evolve.

“We’re excited about the new possibilities that this project opens up for antibiotics development,” Collins said in a statement.

The researchers employed two innovative strategies. For N. gonorrhoeae, they adopted a “fragment-based” approach.

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MIT Study Finds ChatGPT Can Harm Critical Thinking Over Time

A recent study by the Media Lab at MIT found that prolonged use of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) chatbot, can have a harmful impact on the cognitive abilities of its users.

Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels, noted the report, whose main author was research scientist Nataliya Kos’myna.

These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning, it added.

“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in six to eight months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten,’” Kos’myna told Time magazine. “I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental. Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

For the research, 54 subjects, aged 18 to 39, were divided into three groups to write several SAT essays. One group could use ChatGPT; the second, Google search; and the third, no tools at all. An EEG was used to measure the participants’ brain activity across 32 regions of the brain. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement.

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Epstein-Funded MIT Lab Hosted Panel On Giving Pedos Child Sex Robots

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lab previously funded in part by Jeffrey Epstein hosted a panel where attendees openly discussed the idea of using “child-size sex robots” to treat pedophiles.

The MIT Media Lab’s July 2016 conference on research questions without “social and moral constraints” included a panel discussion arguing that pedophilia should not be seen as a “moral failing” but rather a medical condition and that the development of “child-size sex robots” is an inevitability, a transcript and video of the event shows.

The Media Lab’s ties to the disgraced financier span a 17-year period in which the lab readily accepted Epstein’s cash donations and facilitated introductions with its scientists on-campus and off, according to a 2020 fact-finding report commissioned by the university. The lab’s director contemplated inviting Epstein to one of its conferences in July 2016, the report states, the same month of the conference where the child-size sex robots were proposed, the only conference the lab hosted that month, according to its website.

“Once child-size sex robots hit the market, which they will, is the use of these robots going to be a healthy outlet for people to express these sexual urges and thus protect children and reduce child abuse? Or is the use of these robots going to encourage, normalize, propagate that behavior?” said one panelist. “We can’t research it [because of reporting restrictions]. But I do wonder whether they’re doing more harm than good in these cases. Because as much as people want these sexual urges — the urges, not the act — to be a moral failing, they are a psychological issue.”

“The issue of normalization, as you brought up. How does that change of society as a whole, and the acceptance of certain kinds of behavior?” another panelist said, while warning about the possibility of the robots being diverted to a black market for entertainment. “The notion of studying sexual deviance and actual normal humans interacting with these things can provide the basis for a deeper understanding of how that operates.”

The previously unreported panel comes to light as the public’s gaze once again fixates on Epstein’s ties to academia, Wall Street and government amid the Trump administration’s move to close the book on investigating the matter any further. The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation announced in a July 7 memo that they had uncovered no “client list” and would not make further disclosures, spurring incredulity among the president’s supporters and driving a fracture between U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The memo also stated “Epstein harmed over 1,000 victims.”

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MIT Invents “Bubble Wrap” That Pulls Fresh Water From The Air…Even In The Driest Places In The World

MIT researchers have invented a new water-harvesting device — a high-tech version of “bubble wrap” — that can pull safe drinking water straight from the air, even in extreme environments like Death Valley, the driest desert in North America, according to LiveScience.

In a study published June 11 in Nature Water, the team described how their innovation could help address global water scarcity. “It works wherever you may find water vapor in the air,” the researchers wrote.

The device is built from hydrogel, a material that can absorb large amounts of water, sandwiched between two glass layers resembling a window. At night, the hydrogel draws moisture from the air. During the day, a special coating on the glass keeps it cool, allowing water to condense and drip into a collection system.

The hydrogel is molded into dome shapes — likened to “a sheet of bubble wrap” — that swell when absorbing moisture. These domes increase surface area, helping the material absorb more water.

LiveScience writes that the system was tested for a week in Death Valley, a region spanning California and Nevada that holds the record as the hottest and driest place in North America.

Despite the harsh conditions, the harvester consistently produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of water daily — about a quarter to two-thirds of a cup. In more humid regions, researchers expect even greater yields. According to MIT representatives, this approach outperforms earlier water-from-air technologies and does so without needing electricity.

One major breakthrough was solving a known problem with hydrogel-based water harvesters: lithium salts used to improve absorption often leak into the water, making it unsafe. The new design adds glycerol, which stabilizes the salt and keeps leakage to under 0.06 parts per million — a level the U.S. Geological Survey deems safe for groundwater.

Though a single panel can’t supply an entire household, its small footprint means several can be installed together. The team estimates that eight 3-by-6-foot (1-by-2-meter) panels could provide enough drinking water for a household in areas lacking reliable sources. Compared to the cost of bottled water in the U.S., the system could pay for itself in under a month and remain functional for at least a year.

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