MIT PhD student Nina Andrejevic is training her machine-learning models to hunt for new and useful traits in materials. With her twin sister Jovana, she has developed a method for testing material samples to predict the presence of topological characteristics that is faster and m … | Continue reading
MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel, as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities. | Continue reading
MIT Associate Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi offers a cautionary note about the prospects for AI in medicine: “If used carefully, this technology could improve performance in health care and potentially reduce inequities. But if we’re not actually careful, technology could worsen car … | Continue reading
MIT physicists have discovered a new quantum bit, or “qubit,” in the form of vibrating pairs of atoms known as fermions. The new qubit appears to be extremely robust, able to maintain superposition between two vibrational states, even in the midst of environmental noise, for up t … | Continue reading
Feature-attribution methods are used to determine if a neural network is working correctly when completing a task like image classification. MIT researchers developed a way to evaluate whether these feature-attribution methods are correctly identifying the features of an image th … | Continue reading
SketchAdapt, program-writing artificial intelligence system, learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details. | Continue reading
MIT scientists built a 3D atlas of the ocean’s oxygen-starved waters that could help predict oceanic response to climate change. | Continue reading
New sulfur-based processing methods developed by MIT researchers could help ease looming shortages of the essential metals that power everything from phones to automotive batteries. | Continue reading
Dead-end Discovery is a new learning model can identify high-risk treatments in urgent situations, and in some cases alert doctors when a patient is approaching a medical dead-end that will likely result in their death. | Continue reading
MIT alumni Marcos Berrios, Christina Birch, and Christopher Williams were introduced Monday as members of NASA’s 2021 astronaut class. | Continue reading
A new AI-powered, virtual platform called ThreeDWorld (TDW) uses real-world physics to simulate a rich and interactive audio-visual environment, enabling human and robotic learning, training, and experimental studies. | Continue reading
A new analysis by MIT researchers could help architects and builders reduce the carbon footprint of truss structures, the crisscrossing struts that bolster bridges, towers, and buildings. | Continue reading
MIT researchers developed a machine learning model that understands the underlying relationships between objects in a scene and can generate accurate images of scenes from text descriptions. | Continue reading
MIT physicists have confirmed that as atoms are chilled and squeezed to extremes, their ability to scatter light is suppressed, making them less visible. The findings show the Pauli exclusion principle, or Pauli blocking, applies not just to electrons but also to atoms. | Continue reading
Human neurons have a lower density of ion channels than expected, compared to neurons of other mammals, according to a new study. The researchers hypothesize that a lower channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently. | Continue reading
Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact nuclear fusion reactor that could be realized in as little as a decade. Such a reactor could serve as a nearly inexhaustible energy resource. | Continue reading
MIT researchers have developed a control framework that enables robots to understand what it means to help or hinder one another and incorporate social reasoning into the tasks they are accomplishing. | Continue reading
Roboat, a full-scale, fully autonomous robotic boat developed at MIT, is launching along the canals of Amsterdam. The work comes from researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory, together with Amsterdam In … | Continue reading
MIT research suggests the underlying function of “next-word prediction” computational models closely resembles the function of language-processing centers in the human brain. | Continue reading
MIT researchers conducted a study with blind and sighted readers to determine the most useful descriptive alternative text to include with a chart. They developed a four-level framework that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a chart caption, whether it is generated by … | Continue reading
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a novel control system that enables the MIT mini cheetah robot to traverse discontinuous terrain effectively, in real-time without requiring the terrain to be pre-mapped. | Continue reading
An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest possible route when navigating on foot. Instead, pedestrians use vector-based navigation, choosing “pointiest” paths that point most directly toward their destination, even if the routes are longer. | Continue reading
A new kind of fiber can be made into clothing that senses how much it is being stretched or compressed, and then provides tactile feedback in the form of pressure, lateral stretch, or vibration. Such fabrics could be used in garments that help train singers or athletes to better … | Continue reading
A brief history of the famous 1969 Margaret Hamilton photo featuring the Apollo software she and her team developed for NASA, sending humans to the moon. Article includes rarely-seen outtakes of Hamilton and her code from the MIT Museum. | Continue reading
MIT computer scientists have crunched data from 57 textbooks and more than 1,110 research papers to trace the history of how quickly algorithms got better. | Continue reading
A deep learning model predicts high-resolution automobile crash risk maps that describe the expected number of crashes and identify high-risk areas. The work was led by scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Qatar Center for … | Continue reading
MIT researchers have demonstrated that a special class of deep learning neural networks is able to learn the true cause-and-effect structure of a navigation task during training. | Continue reading
The unique mineral composition of the 2,050-year-old Roman tomb of Caecilia Metella could point the way toward more resilient and sustainable modern concrete structures. | Continue reading
Images from the Perseverance rover confirm that Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake, MIT researchers report. The team also detected signs of flash flooding strong enough to carry large boulders downstream into the ancient delta. | Continue reading
The use of blockchain technology as a communication tool for a team of robots could provide security and safeguard against deception, according to a study by researchers at MIT and Polytechnic University of Madrid. The research may also have applications in cities where multirobo … | Continue reading
Researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories have developed a fully flexible device made of the 2-D material molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) that converts energy from Wi-Fi signals into electricity to power electronics, wearables, internet-of-things technologies, and t … | Continue reading
MIT scientists estimate that oxygenic photosynthesis — the ability to turn light and water into energy, releasing oxygen— first evolved on Earth between 3.4 and 2.9 billion years ago. | Continue reading
MIT engineers developed a technique that, for the first time, allows them to measure the generation rate and half-life of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in mice. | Continue reading
An MIT CSAIL-led group is drawing on an underused resource — the vast body of radiology reports that accompany medical images, written by radiologists in routine clinical practice — in order to improve the interpretive abilities of machine learning algorithms. | Continue reading
The economic crisis has revived an old philosophical idea about risk and uncertainty. But what is it, exactly? | Continue reading
MIT Engineers designed a relatively low-cost, energy-efficient approach to treating water contaminated with heavy metals such as lead. | Continue reading
MedKnowts, a “smart” electronic health record system, can help doctors work more efficiently by presenting relevant information from a patient’s medical history, autocompleting medical terms as a clinician types, and auto-populating repetitive fields. The system was developed by … | Continue reading
A newly discovered bacterial enzyme could expand scientists’ CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The work was led by researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute. | Continue reading
Researchers have developed a way of rapidly switching the magnetic polarity of a ferrimagnet 180 degrees, using just a small applied voltage. The discovery could usher in a new era of ferrimagnetic logic and data storage devices, the researchers say. | Continue reading
MIT’s Erik Demaine has proven that the video game “Super Mario Brothers” is even harder than NP-hard — meaning it’s among the hardest problems in the complexity class PSPACE. | Continue reading
Vaccinating against certain cancer proteins can boost overall T cell response and help shrink tumors in mice, according to MIT scientists. The findings could help researchers decide what proteins to include in cancer vaccines. | Continue reading
MIT scientists have discovered a new class of compact DNA modifying systems called OMEGAs that naturally shuffle DNA in bacteria and can be engineered to work in human cells. | Continue reading
MIT engineers developed a way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer. | Continue reading
For the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created. The demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the first fusion power … | Continue reading
MIT Professor Emeritus Paul Penfield, chronicler of entropy and lifelong teacher, died at age 88. A longtime department head, Penfield developed courses illuminating the equivalence of information and thermodynamic entropy. | Continue reading
Crowdsourcing fact-checking of news stories can work about as effectively as using professional fact-checkers, according to a study co-authored by Professor David Rand and PhD student Jenny Allen of the MIT Sloan School of Management. | Continue reading
Computer scientists have developed a way to preserve a network when the fiber is down. The ARROW system reconfigures optical light from a damaged fiber to healthy ones. | Continue reading
Moving to certain locations in the U.S. can have a significant impact on the longevity of senior citizens, according to research co-authored by MIT economist Amy Finkelstein. | Continue reading