Author: Ms. R.

Pushing a shovel through snow, planting an umbrella on the beach, wading through a ball pit, and driving over gravel all have one thing in common: They all are exercises in intrusion, with an intruding object exerting some force to move through a soft and granular material. Predicting what it takes to push through sand, gravel, or other soft media can help engineers drive a rover over Martian soil, anchor a ship in rough seas, and walk a robot……

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Taking what they learned conceptually about artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) this year, students from across the Greater Boston area had the opportunity to apply their new skills to real-world industry projects as part of an experiential learning opportunity offered through Break Through Tech AI at MIT. Hosted by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Break Through Tech AI is a pilot program that aims to bridge the talent gap for women and underrepresented genders in computing fields……

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After decades of fundamental scientific and drug discovery research, Alzheimer’s disease has remained inscrutable and incurable, with a bare minimum of therapeutic progress. But in a new review article in Nature Neuroscience, MIT scientists write that by employing the new research capability of single-cell profiling, the field has rapidly achieved long-sought insights with strong potential for both explaining Alzheimer’s disease and doing something meaningful about it. By analyzing this new evidence, for instance, the authors show that the disease’s disruptions converge……

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True to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled every year since the 1960s. But this trajectory is predicted to soon plateau because silicon — the backbone of modern transistors — loses its electrical properties once devices made from this material dip below a certain size. Enter 2D materials — delicate, two-dimensional sheets of perfect crystals that are as thin as a single atom. At the scale of nanometers, 2D materials can conduct electrons far……

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The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity. “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that much destruction,” says Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor at MIT who specializes in disaster resilience. Even in a country like Japan, with advanced engineering,……

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MIT graduate student Karenna Groff ’22 of Weston, Massachusetts, a member of the MIT women’s soccer team, was named the NCAA 2022 Woman of the Year at the NCAA Convention in San Antonio, Texas. The most prestigious honor awarded annually by the NCAA to a female student-athlete, Groff is the second MIT student-athlete to win the award and the sixth Division III student-athlete ever to receive this honor. She was one of nine finalists for the award, spanning Divisions I,……

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Christopher T. Walsh, a highly influential professor of chemical biology who was a former MIT faculty member and Department of Chemistry head, died on Jan. 10 at the age of 79. At the time of his death, Walsh was the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School, but he began his career in 1972 as a jointly appointed faculty member in the MIT departments of Chemistry and Biology. Walsh would go on……

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