Author: Ms. R.

Over the past 30 years, charter schools have emerged as a prominent yet debated public school option. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7 percent of U.S. public school students were enrolled in charter schools in 2021, up from 4 percent in 2010. Amid this expansion, families and policymakers want to know more about charter school performance and its systemic impacts. While researchers have evaluated charter schools’ short-term effects on student outcomes, significant knowledge gaps still exist. ……

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The first documented case of pancreatic cancer dates back to the 18th century. Since then, researchers have undertaken a protracted and challenging odyssey to understand the elusive and deadly disease. To date, there is no better cancer treatment than early intervention. Unfortunately, the pancreas, nestled deep within the abdomen, is particularly elusive for early detection.  MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) scientists, alongside Limor Appelbaum, a staff scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Beth Israel……

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Yuri Sebregts, chief technology officer at Shell, succinctly laid out the energy dilemma facing the world over the rest of this century. On one hand, demand for energy is quickly growing as countries in the developing world modernize and the global population grows, with 100 gigajoules of energy per person needed annually to enable quality-of-life benefits and industrialization around the globe. On the other, traditional energy sources are quickly warming the planet, with the world already seeing the devastating……

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In order for natural language to be an effective form of communication, the parties involved need to be able to understand words and their context, assume that the content is largely shared in good faith and is trustworthy, reason about the information being shared, and then apply it to real-world scenarios. MIT PhD students interning with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab — Athul Paul Jacob SM ’22, Maohao Shen SM ’23, Victor Butoi, and Andi Peng SM ’23 — are……

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A surprising MIT study published in Nature at the end of 2016 helped to spur interest in the possibility that light flickering at the frequency of a particular gamma-band brain rhythm could produce meaningful therapeutic effects for people with Alzheimer’s disease. In a new review paper in the Journal of Internal Medicine, the lab that led those studies takes stock of what a growing number of scientists worldwide have been finding out since then in dozens of clinical and lab benchtop studies. Brain rhythms……

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For 30 years, MIT MedLinks liaisons have volunteered to support MIT students with first-line medical care. Living in each of MIT’s residence halls and in numerous fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups, MedLinks administer basic first aid, share over-the-counter medicines when needed, explain MIT Health’s policies and procedures, and often simply listen to classmates talk about their health and well-being. MedLinks also help build community and plan events that bring people in their residence halls together. Recent events include……

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Throughout the brain’s cortex, neurons are arranged in six distinctive layers, which can be readily seen with a microscope. A team of MIT and Vanderbilt University neuroscientists has now found that these layers also show distinct patterns of electrical activity, which are consistent over many brain regions and across several animal species, including humans. The researchers found that in the topmost layers, neuron activity is dominated by rapid oscillations known as gamma waves. In the deeper layers, slower oscillations……

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MIT researchers have developed a battery-free, self-powered sensor that can harvest energy from its environment. Because it requires no battery that must be recharged or replaced, and because it requires no special wiring, such a sensor could be embedded in a hard-to-reach place, like inside the inner workings of a ship’s engine. There, it could automatically gather data on the machine’s power consumption and operations for long periods of time. The researchers built a temperature-sensing device that harvests energy……

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What is the likelihood of dying in a plane crash? According to a 2022 report released by the International Air Transport Association, the industry fatality risk is 0.11. In other words, on average, a person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to have a 100 percent chance of experiencing a fatal accident. Long touted as one of the safest modes of transportation, the highly regulated aviation industry has MIT scientists thinking that it may……

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