Say WOW

Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Ellen Roche and Justin Solomon named Edgerton...
MIT associate professors Ellen Roche of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and Justin Solomon of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) have been named the 2023 winners of MIT’s annual Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. Established in fall 1982, the award exists as a permanent tribute to the late Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton for his great and enduring support for younger faculty members over the years. The purpose of the award is...

Read More

Drones navigate unseen environments with liquid neural...
In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones. But these aren’t your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they’re avian-inspired marvels that soar through the sky, guided by liquid neural networks to navigate ever-changing and unseen environments with precision and ease. Inspired by the adaptable nature of organic brains,...

Read More

Nanoparticles provoke immune response against tumors but...
Cancer drugs that stimulate the body’s immune system to attack tumors are a promising way to treat many types of cancer. However, some of these drugs produce too much systemic inflammation when delivered intravenously, making them harmful to use in patients. MIT researchers have now come up with a possible way to get around that obstacle. In a new study, they showed that when immunostimulatory prodrugs — inactive drugs that require activation in the body — are tuned for...

Read More

 
Wearable patch can painlessly deliver drugs through...
The skin is an appealing route for drug delivery because it allows drugs to go directly to the site where they’re needed, which could be useful for wound healing, pain relief, or other medical and cosmetic applications. However, delivering drugs through the skin is difficult because the tough outer layer of the skin prevents most small molecules from passing through it. In hopes of making it easier to deliver drugs through the skin, MIT researchers have developed a wearable...

Read More

Yael Tauman Kalai PhD ’06 awarded 2022...
Yael Tauman Kalai PhD ’06, an MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) adjunct professor, member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research has been awarded the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing for “breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography” by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The $250,000 prize recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists who have made key research contributions to the field,...

Read More

Recycling plastics from research labs
In 2019, MIT’s Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) Office collaborated with several research labs in the Department of Biology to determine the feasibility of recycling clean lab plastics. Based on early successes with waste isolation and plastics collection, EHS collaborated with GreenLabs Recycling, a local startup, to remove and recycle lab plastics from campus. It was a huge success. Today, EHS spearheads the campus Lab Plastics Recycling Program, and its EHS technicians regularly gather clean lab plastics from 212...

Read More

 
MIT Energy Conference grapples with geopolitics
As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s MIT Energy Conference spotlighted the role of geopolitics in the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Each year, the student-run conference, which its organizers say is the largest of its kind, brings together leaders from around the globe to discuss humanity’s most pressing energy and sustainability challenges. The event always involves perspectives from the investment, business, research, and startup communities. But...

Read More

MIT PhD students honored for their work...
In 2017, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) initiated the J-WAFS Fellowship Program for outstanding MIT PhD students working to solve humankind’s water-related challenges. Since then, J-WAFS has awarded 18 fellowships to students who have gone on to create innovations like a pump that can maximize energy efficiency even with changing flow rates, and a low-cost water filter made out of sapwood xylem that has seen real-world use in rural India. Last year, J-WAFS expanded...

Read More

MIT CSAIL researchers discuss frontiers of generative...
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has ignited a deep philosophical exploration into the nature of consciousness, creativity, and authorship. As we bear witness to new advances in the field, it’s increasingly apparent that these synthetic agents possess a remarkable capacity to create, iterate, and challenge our traditional notions of intelligence. But what does it really mean for an AI system to be “generative,” with newfound blurred boundaries of creative expression between humans and machines?  For those who feel...

Read More

 
MIT D-Lab students collaborate with adaptive design...
Participating in an intensive three-week lab in Yucatán, Mexico, changed how MIT junior Penelope Herrero-Marques views her role as an engineer. The January trip was the first step in a new partnership between MIT D-Lab and Perkins School for the Blind, a Massachusetts-based national service provider and international nonprofit that strives to make education accessible to all children. As an undergraduate studying mechanical engineering at MIT, Herrero-Marques deeply connected with her studies, yet always felt that something was missing...

Read More

Scientists track evolution of microbes on the...
Human skin is home to millions of microbes. One of these microbes, Staphylococcus aureus, is an opportunistic pathogen that can invade patches of skin affected by eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis. In a new study, researchers at MIT and other institutions have discovered that this microbe can rapidly evolve within a single person’s microbiome. They found that in people with eczema, S. aureus tends to evolve to a variant with a mutation in a specific gene that helps...

Read More

Min-Min Liang honored with classroom innovation award...
MIT Lecturer Min-Min Liang has won the 2023 MAFLT LCTL Innovation Award in the Classroom Innovation category, offered by the National Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Resource Center at Michigan State University. Liang has taught Chinese at MIT for over 20 years as part of the Global Languages unit. In making the award notification, the committee noted: “Your innovation stood out to the committee because of the ways your project allowed students to engage meaningfully both with the creative...

Read More

 
A new microneedle-based drug delivery technique for...
Increasing environmental conditions caused by climate change, an ever-growing human population, scarcity of arable land, and limited resources are pressuring the agriculture industry to adopt more sustainable and precise practices that foster more efficient use of resources (e.g., water, fertilizers, and pesticides) and mitigation of environmental impacts. Developing delivery systems that efficiently deploy agrochemicals such as micronutrients, pesticides, and antibiotics in crops will help ensure high productivity and high produce quality, while minimizing the waste of resources, is crucial....

Read More

Responding to Ukraine’s “ocean of suffering”
Within 72 hours of the first Russian missiles striking Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, Ian Miller SM ’19 boarded a flight for Poland. Later, he’d say he felt motivated by Kyiv’s “tragic ocean of suffering” and Ukrainian President Zelensky’s pleas for help. But he arrived with little notion of what to do. As he’d anticipated, his hotel in Rzeszów turned out to be a hub for aid workers and journalists. Miller was on his laptop, using the lobby Wi-Fi...

Read More

Funding to Daniel Anderson’s lab will advance...
Sanofi will provide $25 million over five years to the lab of MIT Professor Daniel Anderson, to support the lab’s efforts to develop next-generation delivery technology for messenger RNA. Anderson, who is a professor of chemical engineering and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and others in his lab will use the funding to develop delivery technology for RNA vaccines as well as RNA that can be...

Read More