Author: Ms. R.

The brain’s cerebral cortex produces perception based on the sensory information it’s fed through a region called the thalamus. “How the thalamus communicates with the cortex is a fundamental feature of how the brain interprets the world,” says Elly Nedivi, the William R. and Linda R. Young Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Despite the importance of thalamic input to the cortex, neuroscientists have struggled to understand how it works so well given the relative……

Read More

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which leads development of the technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the web remains open, accessible, and interoperable, officially launched as a public-interest nonprofit organization as of Jan. 1. After 28 years of being hosted collectively at MIT and three other international host organizations, the crusaders for web standards have become their own entity.  Many diverse brains make up and contribute to the community collective that is W3C, cultivating and setting global……

Read More

“The whole world is watching,” protestors famously chanted outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as police beat them. That might not have been literally true, but it was close enough. The convention was the top-rated telecast for all of 1968 in the U.S., with 90 percent of U.S. households tuning in for an average of 9.5 hours. Many viewers had a strong reaction to the chaotic events being broadcast. And a majority of those who wrote letters……

Read More

MIT Solve, an MIT initiative with a mission to drive innovation to solve world challenges, announced today the 2023 Global Challenges and the Indigenous Communities Fellowship.  Solve invites anyone from anywhere in the world to submit a solution to this year’s challenges by 12 p.m. EST on May 9. The 40 innovators — including eight new Indigenous Communities Fellows — will form the 2023 Solver Class, and pitch their solutions during Solve Challenge Finals on Sept. 17-18 in New……

Read More

Take apart your laptop screen, and at its heart you’ll find a plate patterned with pixels of red, green, and blue LEDs, arranged end to end like a meticulous Lite Brite display. When electrically powered, the LEDs together can produce every shade in the rainbow to generate full-color displays. Over the years, the size of individual pixels has shrunk, enabling many more of them to be packed into devices to produce sharper, higher-resolution digital displays. But much like computer……

Read More

On Jan. 18, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced its 2022 fellows, those it recognizes “for significant contributions in areas including cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems among many other areas.” Included in the crop of new fellows were six distinguished scientists with ties to MIT. Constantinos Daskalakis, the Armen Avanessians (1982) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), was honored “for contributions to the foundations of algorithmic game theory, mechanism design,……

Read More

The chemical industry is the world’s largest industrial energy consumer and the third-largest source of industrial emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2019, the industrial sector as a whole was responsible for 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, as the world races to find pathways to decarbonization, the chemical industry has been largely untouched. “When it comes to climate action and dealing with the emissions that come from the chemical sector, the slow pace……

Read More

A major aspect of sustainability — a core component in many MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) courses — is considering the future effect of any given business practice or product. Sustainability was top-of-mind for Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research and director of MIT’s design major and minor programs, and Jeremy Carmine Bilotti SM ’21 when planning course 4.041 (Advanced Product Design) last spring. Collaborating with the family-run furniture company Emeco, the discussion eventually landed on……

Read More

Since arriving at MIT in fall 2019, senior Sherry Nyeo has conducted groundbreaking work in multiple labs on campus, acted as a mentor to countless other students, and made a lasting mark on the Institute community. But despite her well-earned bragging rights, Nyeo isn’t one to boast. Instead, she takes every opportunity to express just how grateful she is to the professors, alumni, and fellow students who have helped and inspired her during her time at MIT. “I like……

Read More

Gel-like materials that can be injected into the body hold great potential to heal injured tissues or manufacture entirely new tissues. Many researchers are working to develop these hydrogels for biomedical uses, but so far very few have made it into the clinic. To help guide in the development of such materials, which are made from microscale building blocks akin to squishy LEGOs, MIT and Harvard University researchers have created a set of computational models to predict the material’s……

Read More

Peter Dedon, an MIT professor of biological engineering, has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The 2022 class of AAAS Fellows includes 506 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.   Dedon is the Singapore Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, a lead principal investigator of the Antimicrobial Resistance Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), a member of……

Read More