A massive worldwide collaboration including researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has identified several genetic factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe COVID-19 illness. The findings from nearly 50,000 COVID-19 patients and 2 million uninfected controls, published July 8 in the journal Nature, could lead to new treatments and demonstrates the power of genetic studies … Continued
Four times faster than conventional PCR methods, new RADICA approach is highly specific, sensitive, and resistant to inhibitors. Researchers from Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP), an interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a new method for rapid and accurate detection of … Continued
Researchers at Harvard and MIT pioneered a biosensor that can test for COVID-19. Wearers breathe into their masks for 15 to 30 minutes, press a button on the sensor, and within 90 more minutes, their COVID test results show up on a readout strip similar to a pregnancy test. The invention is described in greater detail in … Continued
A mutation in the Gamma variant (P1) of coronavirus is linked to increased mortality, a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and MIT researchers said on Wednesday. The mutation also carries greater transmissibility, higher infection rates, and increased pathogenicity, showed the study detailed in the journal Genetic Epidemiology. The findings were based on genome-wide association … Continued
Fast Company reporter Mark Wilson writes that a new study by researchers from MIT and Google finds that simple user experience interventions can help stop people from sharing misinformation on Covid-19. “Researchers introduced several different prompts through a simple popup window, all with a single goal: to get people to think about the accuracy of … Continued
Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Shigeru Miyagawa, senior associate dean of the MIT Office of Digital Learning, and Meghan Perdue, a digital learning scientist at MITx, explore how the shift to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed education. “Faculty are now more aware of the ‘whole student,’ acknowledging their lives outside the classroom,” … Continued
On May 14, six MIT instructors were honored with the 2021 MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning in MOOCs. The prize, established in 2016, honors excellence in creating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for MITx on edX. Anyone in the MIT community can submit nominations, including MITx MOOC creators, and awardees are selected by the … Continued
Writing for The Guardian, MIT Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo underscore the importance of a worldwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign. “Vaccinating the world will be crucial if countries are going to act together to confront the climate crisis,” they write, “which will require many of the same things as delivering vaccines: resources, innovation, ingenuity and … Continued
While there has been much focus on morbidity and mortality rates due to COVID-19, reluctance to seek necessary medical including emergency care had a secondary impact on health. A recent study by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Retsef Levi and MIT Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Sun, in collaboration with members of Boston Emergency Medical … Continued
Covid-19 class taps experts to help students and the public avoid misinformation as the crisis evolves Just a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, Alan Grossman was already mulling over an idea for a new class to help people make sense of the virus. As head of MIT’s Department of Biology, he was … Continued