Author: Ms. R.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DoE/NNSA) recently announced that it has selected MIT to establish a new research center dedicated to advancing the predictive simulation of extreme environments, such as those encountered in hypersonic flight and atmospheric re-entry. The center will be part of the fourth phase of NNSA’s Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP-IV), which supports frontier research advancing the predictive capabilities of high-performance computing for open science and engineering applications relevant to national security mission……

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The following article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. On Sept. 14, 2015, a signal arrived on Earth, carrying information about a pair of remote black holes that had spiraled together and merged. The signal had traveled about 1.3 billion years to reach us at the speed of light —……

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Seven technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, either wholly or with collaborators, have earned 2025 R&D 100 Awards. This annual awards competition recognizes the year’s most significant new technologies, products, and materials available on the marketplace or transitioned to use. An independent panel of technology experts and industry professionals selects the winners. “Winning an R&D 100 Award is a recognition of the exceptional creativity and effort of our scientists and engineers. The awarded technologies reflect Lincoln Laboratory’s mission to……

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When cells are healthy, we don’t expect them to suddenly change cell types. A skin cell on your hand won’t naturally morph into a brain cell, and vice versa. That’s thanks to epigenetic memory, which enables the expression of various genes to “lock in” throughout a cell’s lifetime. Failure of this memory can lead to diseases, such as cancer. Traditionally, scientists have thought that epigenetic memory locks genes either “on” or “off” — either fully activated or fully repressed,……

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Using tiny particles shaped like bottlebrushes, MIT chemists have found a way to deliver a large range of chemotherapy drugs directly to tumor cells. To guide them to the right location, each particle contains an antibody that targets a specific tumor protein. This antibody is tethered to bottlebrush-shaped polymer chains carrying dozens or hundreds of drug molecules — a much larger payload than can be delivered by any existing antibody-drug conjugates. In mouse models of breast and ovarian cancer,……

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The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research fondly remembers its founding director, David Baltimore, a former MIT Institute Professor and Nobel laureate who died Sept. 6 at age 87. With discovery after discovery, Baltimore brought to light key features of biology with direct implications for human health. His work at MIT earned him a share of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco) for discovering reverse transcriptase and identifying retroviruses, which use……

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Most people recognize Alzheimer’s disease from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now, a sweeping new open-access study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes. The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene……

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