Author: Ms. R.

For students, postdocs, and early-career researchers, communicating complex ideas in a clear and compelling manner has become an essential skill. Whether applying for academic positions, pitching research to funders, or collaborating across disciplines, the ability to present work clearly and effectively can be as critical as the work itself. Recognizing this need, The MIT Office of Graduate Education (OGE) has partnered with the Writing and Communication Center (WCC) to launch the WCC Communication Studio: a self-service recording and editing……

Read More

A new class is giving MIT students the opportunity to examine the historical and practical considerations of urban farming while developing a real-world understanding of its value by working alongside a local farm’s community. Course 4.182 (Resilient Urbanism: Green Commons in the City) is taught in two sections by instructors in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the School of Architecture and Planning, in collaboration with The Common Good Co-op in Dorchester. The first section was completed in spring 2025……

Read More

In recent months, Russia has frequently flown drones into NATO territory, where NATO countries typically try to shoot them down. By contrast, when three Russian fighter jets made an incursion into Estonian airspace in September, they were intercepted and no attempt was made to shoot them down — although the incident did make headlines and led to a Russian diplomat being expelled from Estonia. Those incidents follow a global pattern of recent years. Drone operations, to this point, seem……

Read More

Sometimes the answers to seemingly intractable environmental problems are found in nature itself. Take the growing challenge of plastic waste. Jacqueline Prawira, an MIT senior in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), has developed biodegradable, plastic-like materials from fish offal, as featured in a recent segment on the CBS show “The Visioneers with Zay Harding.” “We basically made plastics to be too good at their job. That also means the environment doesn’t know what to do with this, because……

Read More

MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines. The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of……

Read More

In an MIT classroom, a professor lectures while students diligently write down notes they will reread later to study and internalize key information ahead of an exam. Humans know how to learn new information, but large language models can’t do this in the same way. Once a fully trained LLM has been deployed, its “brain” is static and can’t permanently adapt itself to new knowledge. This means that if a user tells an LLM something important today, it won’t……

Read More

What can we learn about human intelligence by studying how machines “think?” Can we better understand ourselves if we better understand the artificial intelligence systems that are becoming a more significant part of our everyday lives? These questions may be deeply philosophical, but for Phillip Isola, finding the answers is as much about computation as it is about cogitation. Isola, the newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), studies the fundamental mechanisms……

Read More