Author: Ms. R.

Each year, new MIT graduate students are tasked with the momentous decision of choosing a research group that will serve as their home for the next several years. Among many questions they face: join an established research effort, or work with a new faculty member in a growing group? Professors Cynthia Breazeal, leading a group of over 30 students, and Ming Guo, with a lab of fewer than 10, demonstrate that excellent mentorship can thrive in a research group……

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MIT physicists and colleagues report new insights into exotic particles key to a form of magnetism that has attracted growing interest because it originates from ultrathin materials only a few atomic layers thick. The work, which could impact future electronics and more, also establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Among their discoveries, the team has identified the microscopic origin of these particles,……

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For their last meeting of the fall 2023 semester, the students in MIT’s course 21W.756 (Nature Poetry) piled into a bus and headed to a local performance space for a reading: their own. Sure, students in the course, taught by Professor Joshua Bennett, spend much of the semester reading and discussing poems. But they create and perform, too, often using tools from their other studies at MIT. One student in 21W.756 built a custom field microphone to incorporate recorded……

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Researchers at MIT recently signed a four-year collaboration agreement with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme (NQCP) at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), focused on accelerating quantum computing hardware research. The agreement means that both universities will set up identical quantum laboratories at their respective campuses in Copenhagen and Cambridge, Massachusetts, facilitating seamless cooperation as well as shared knowledge and student exchange. “To realize the promise of quantum computing, we must learn how to build systems……

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Shimmering ice extends in all directions as far as the eye can see. Air temperatures plunge to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and colder with wind chills. Ocean currents drag large swaths of ice floating at sea. Polar bears, narwhals, and other iconic Arctic species roam wild. For a week this past spring, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan called this place — drifting some 200 nautical miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the frozen Beaufort……

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At the top of many automation wish lists is a particularly time-consuming task: chores.  The moonshot of many roboticists is cooking up the proper hardware and software combination so that a machine can learn “generalist” policies (the rules and strategies that guide robot behavior) that work everywhere, under all conditions. Realistically, though, if you have a home robot, you probably don’t care much about it working for your neighbors. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers decided, with that……

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