Author: Ms. R.

What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building’s lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks. That’s the idea behind circular construction, which aims to reuse and repurpose a building’s materials whenever possible, to minimize the manufacturing of new materials and reduce the construction……

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Jennifer Meanwell carefully placed a pottery sherd — or broken fragment of ceramic — under the circular, diamond-coated blade of a benchtop saw. “Cutting the sample is the first big step,” says Meanwell, a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. She was leading a lab in making thin sections of pottery for petrographic analysis, a method used to examine ceramics and determine their composition, structure, and origins. “You want a slice that’s thin enough……

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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. What the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship just launched has a bit more horsepower. “Maybe it’s not a Ferrari yet, but we have a car,” says Bill Aulet, the center’s managing director. The vehicle: the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack, a generative artificial intelligence tool trained on Aulet’s 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework to input prompts into large language models. Introduce a startup idea to the Eship JetPack, “and it’s like having five……

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For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. This technique works best when the crystal is intact, but in many cases, scientists have only a powdered version of the material, which contains random fragments of the crystal. This makes it more challenging to piece together the overall structure. MIT chemists have now come up with a new generative AI model that can make……

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A new study from researchers at MIT and Penn State University reveals that if large language models were to be used in home surveillance, they could recommend calling the police even when surveillance videos show no criminal activity. In addition, the models the researchers studied were inconsistent in which videos they flagged for police intervention. For instance, a model might flag one video that shows a vehicle break-in but not flag another video that shows a similar activity. Models……

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When she was a child, Mary Ellen Wiltrout PhD ’09 didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a K-12 teacher. Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, Wiltrout was studious with an early interest in science — and ended up pursuing biology as a career.  But following her doctorate at MIT, she pivoted toward education after all. Now, as the director of blended and online initiatives and a lecturer with the Department of Biology, she’s shaping biology pedagogy at……

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