Tag: mit

Renowned MIT Professor and Drug Safety Analytics Specialist Calls for Immediate Suspension of all mRNA COVID Vaccines

The number of health professionals and experts calling for the immediate suspension of COVID mRNA vaccines is growing, and yet governments still turn a blind eye to one of the most atrocious crimes against humanity.

Late Sunday night, Prof. Retsef Levi from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) warned about the risks associated with experimental mRNA COVID vaccines.

Prof. Levi has been a faculty member at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2006. MIT is one of the top private universities in Cambridge, United States. It is ranked #1 in QS World University Rankings 2023.

“I have more than 30 years of experience as a practitioner and an academic in using data and analytics to assess and manage risk, particularly in the context of health systems health policies, as well as the management of safety and quality of manufacturing of biologic drugs,” said Levi.

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MIT Goes Against the Grain, Releases a Stunning Statement Endorsing Free Speech

Surprise — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology endorses students’ liberty to engage in offensive speech…officially.

In contrast to castigations of “hate speech” and the increasingly common notion that “hate speech isn’t free speech,” MIT is siding with the Constitution.

On December 21st, the Cambridge private land-grant research university released a Free Expression Statement.

From the document:

Free expression is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of a diverse and inclusive community. We cannot have a truly free community of expression if some perspectives can be heard and others cannot. Learning from a diversity of viewpoints, and from the deliberation, debate, and dissent that accompany them, are essential ingredients of academic excellence.

Free expression promotes creativity by affirming the ability to exchange ideas without constraints. It not only facilitates individual autonomy and self-fulfillment, it provides for participation in collective decision-making and is essential to the search for truth and justice. … Academic freedom promotes scholarly rigor and the testing of ideas by protecting research, publication, and teaching from interference.

That principle means on-campus guests can’t be relegated to a single perspective:

A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views. Debate and deliberation of controversial ideas are hallmarks of the Institute’s educational and research missions and are essential to the pursuit of truth, knowledge, equity, and justice.

The school makes clear things such as “direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment” won’t be protected. Furthermore, it expects “a collegial and respectful learning and working environment.”

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MIT Engineers Invent Robot Capable of Building “Almost Anything” Including Replicating Itself

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a group of robots with built-in intelligence that are capable of building almost anything, including buildings, vehicles, and even replicating themselves into bigger robots.

This innovative research was published in the journal Nature Communications Engineering in a study authored by CBA doctoral student Amira Abdel-Rahman, Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, and three others.

The researchers revealed they are working with the aviation industry, car companies, and NASA on the new technology.

“The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wing and a functional racing car could be assembled from tiny identical lightweight pieces — and that robotic devices could be built to carry out some of this assembly work,” MIT announced on Tuesday, Nov. 22.

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DARPA and NIH-Funded MIT Researchers Create ‘Stickers that Can See Inside the Body’

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a proof-of-concept for a new “ultrasound sticker,” which is the size of a stamp and is able to provide continuous ultrasound imagining of a person’s internal organs for up to 48 hours. The stickers, which utilize hydrogel in order to function, currently require a wired connection to instruments, but future iterations will function wirelessly.

“Currently, ultrasound imaging requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices,” MIT notes in a press release describing the ultrasound sticker. “But a new design by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the pharmacy.”

To create their ultrasound sticker the researchers, who outlined their design and prototype in a closed-access paper in Science, paired a “stretchy adhesive layer” with “a rigid array of transducers.” Transducers are electronic devices that convert energy from one form to another—in this instance, by sending sound waves into a human body, which, in turn, echo off internal organs and return back where the echoed signals are translated into visual images.

In order for the ultrasound echoes to work, however, they must travel through a liquid gel, which acts as a conductive medium that creates a bond between the skin and the ultrasound transducer. In this instance, the researchers chose hydrogel as the conductive medium. Hydrogel, for those unfamiliar, is a crosslinked three-dimensional polymeric network structure, which can absorb and retain considerable amounts of water. It’s used to make, for example, the kinds of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to deliver the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines.”

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MIT Engineers Create ‘Robotic Lightning Bug’ That Weighs Little More than a Paperclip

In a new study published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters a team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) describes how it created a 650 mg aerial robot powered by four electroluminescent actuators (tiny “soft” motors), each able to generate distinct colors and patterns. This tiny flying bug-bot, the researchers say, “further shows the potential of achieving coordinated swarm flights without using well-calibrated indoor tracking systems.”

In the video immediately above the engineers outline how their “insect-scale” flying lightning bug robot works, noting it was inspired by the ever-whimsical firefly and its ability to use bioluminescent chemical reactions to create light.

“If you think of large-scale robots, they can communicate using a lot of different tools—Bluetooth, wireless, all those sorts of things. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think about new modes of communication. This is a major step toward flying these robots in outdoor environments where we don’t have a well-tuned, state-of-the-art motion tracking system,” Kevin Chen says in an MIT press release. Chen is the D. Reid Weedon Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and the senior author of the paper.

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1944–1956: Radioactive nutrition experiments on retarded children by Harvard and MIT

In December of 1993, Scott Allen, a journalist at the Boston Globe, uncovered documents showing years of ethically dubious experiments conducted on Fernald Center youth. The day after Christmas, he published an article, “Radiation Used on Retarded,” noting that “Records at the Fernald State School list them as “morons,” but the researchers from MIT and Harvard University called the retarded teen-age boys who took part in their radiation experiments ‘the Fernald Science Club.’”

Developmentally disabled children at the Fernald State School and a state School in Waltham, Massachusetts were subjected to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the AEC conducted by Harvard University and MIT researchers. The children were fed Quaker Oats breakfast cereal containing radioactive tracers to test absorption of plant minerals and calcium. Parents were never informed that radioactive elements were involved in the tests.

“In the name of science, members of the club would eat cereal mixed with radioactive milk for breakfast or digest a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays. From 1946 to 1956, scores of retarded teen-agers consumed radioactive food to help the researchers better understand the human digestive process.”

“There is absolutely no ground for caution regarding the quantities of radioactive substances which we would use in our experiments,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology biochemist Robert S. Harris assured Fernald’s superintendent in a letter proposing the research in December 1945. At least some consent forms sent home to parents or guardians do not mention radiation.”

“Based on figures in an unpublished report on the project, the children’s spleens were exposed to between 544 and 1,024 millirems of radiation over the course of seven meals. By comparison, the typical American receives about 300 millirems of radiation from natural sources each year.”

“The experiments at the Fernald School, which almost certainly would not be permitted today, are one of the darker corners of Massachusetts’ atomic legacy. Along with pioneering the field of nuclear medicine, some of the state’s leading academic institutions and hospitals also subjected the terminally ill, the elderly and others to radiation doses that are considered unsafe today, often with no possible benefit to the test subjects.”

Though never secret — researchers published the results of the Fernald studies in scholarly journals — details of the research effort, funded partly by Quaker Oats Co. and the US Atomic Energy Commission, have sat in a jumble of boxes in the Fernald School library until now.

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MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.

Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today (June 7, 2021) in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.

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TRUST THE SCIENCE: MIT Study Confirms Anti-Maskers Understand Data Better Than Their Opponents

A new study from MIT researchers has confirmed that coronavirus skeptics and anti-maskers understand science and data better than their political opponents.

The study, entitled “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online,” was published this month, and analysed the reaction from skeptics and anti-maskers towards the pandemic from March to September 2020, during much of the initial phases of the breakout and then its expansion. The study focused on Facebook groups and Twitter posts, and the interaction between anti-maskers and visualisations of the coronavirus data that was being published by mainstream science outlets and governments.

In the study, the researchers revealed that despite current narratives that anti-maskers are simply scientifically illiterate, they actually have a very good grasp of science and data analysis. In the Facebook groups they studied, the researchers saw a serious emphasis on originally produced content, with people wanting to make sure that they were “guided solely by the data.” Many participants made their own graphs, and instructed others on how to access raw data. “In other words, anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over “expert” interpretations,” they noted:

Its members value individual initiative and ingenuity, trusting scientific analysis only insofar as they can replicate it themselves by accessing and manipulating the data firsthand. They are highly reflexive about the inherently biased nature of any analysis, and resent what they view as the arrogant self-righteousness of scientific elites.

Anti-maskers found themselves not on the side of ignoring science and data, but striving to push for “more scientific rigour” in their approach to the pandemic. The researchers argued that “users in these communities are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production that they recognise as markers of scientific expertise,” and added that “if anything, anti-mask science has extended the traditional tools of data analysis by taking up the theoretical mantle of recent critical studies of visualisation.”

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MIT researchers challenge indoor social distancing rules: ‘No safer at 60 feet than 6 feet’

Anew study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is challenging major COVID-19 mitigation measures of the past year, claiming the widely accepted six-foot “social distancing” rule is more or less meaningless in indoor settings. 

The study, authored by MIT chemical engineering Prof. Martin Bazant and applied mathematics Prof. John Bush, “characterize[s] the evolution of the concentration of pathogen-laden droplets in a well-mixed room, and the associated risk of infection to its occupants.”

Indoor gatherings have been one of the most aggressive targets of COVID-19 mitigation measures over the past year. Health officials have warned that people congregating in indoor settings are at significant risk for COVID-19 infection. Authorities worldwide have mandated both that occupancy limits in public facilities and spaces be sharply decreased and that individuals should maintain strict 72-inch spaces between each other when inside them. 

Those regulations have led most notably to widespread closures of schools for more than a year, as well as significantly curtailed economic activity, particularly among restaurants, bars, theaters and live entertainment venues. 

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MIT Engineers Create Spinach That Act as Sensors and Wirelessly Send Emails. No Mention of Hacking or Other Risks.

All wireless and/or “Smart” technology is vulnerable to hacking (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and other significant mishaps (see 1, 2).  Serious warnings about Internet of Things (IoT) technology’s high failure rate and enormous vulnerability to hackers have been ongoing for years.  Last August, IBM warned about a security flaw in millions of IoT devices including “Smart” Meters and medical implants.

In December, President Trump signed IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 to create standards and guidelines on the use and management of IoT devices by federal agencies.

Nevertheless, sensors that operate and transmit wirelessly are still being used and/or considered for critical tasks including sewage maintenance. Scientists at MIT have taken this even farther.

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