A master’s degree in data, economics, and development policy (DEDP), announced by MIT and offered by its renowned Department of Economics, represents a new path to earning an MIT master’s degree. The program is the first to be available solely to online learners who have earned another new credential, the MITx MicroMasters in DEDP, also announced today by the Institute.

MIT researchers and their colleagues have developed a computational model of the human brain’s face-recognition mechanism that seems to capture aspects of human neurology that previous models have missed. The researchers designed a machine-learning system that implemented their model, and they trained it to recognise particular faces by feeding it a battery of sample images.

Scientists hoping to get a glimpse of molecules that control brain activity have devised a probe that allows them to image these molecules without using any chemical or radioactive labels. Currently the gold standard approach to imaging molecules in the brain is to tag them with radioactive probes. However, these probes offer low resolution and they can’t easily be used to watch dynamic events, says Alan Jasanoff, an MIT professor of b...

  In recent years, computers have gotten remarkably good at recognising speech and images: Think of the dictation software on most cellphones, or the algorithms that automatically identify people in photos posted to Facebook. But recognition of natural sounds — such as crowds cheering or waves crashing — has lagged behind.

It’s a well-known fact that water, at sea level, starts to boil at a temperature of 212ºF, or 100ºC. And scientists have long observed that when water is confined in very small spaces, its boiling and freezing points can change a bit, usually dropping by around 10ºC or so. But now, a team at MIT has found a completely unexpected set of changes: Inside the tiniest of spaces, water can freeze solid even at high temperature...

A technique developed by MIT researchers reveals the inner details of photonic crystals, synthetic materials whose exotic optical properties are the subject of widespread research. Photonic crystals are generally made by drilling millions of closely spaced, minuscule holes in a slab of transparent material, using variations of microchip-fabrication methods.

Using powerful computer simulations, researchers at MIT have made significant strides in understanding graphene’s fundamental properties, including why the friction varies as the object sliding on it moves forward, instead of remaining constant as it does with most other known materials. The findings are presented in Nature, in a paper by Ju Li, professor of nuclear science and engineering and of materials science and enginee...

Artificial muscles — materials that contract and expand somewhat like muscle fibres do — can have many applications, from robotics to components in the automobile and aviation industries. Now, MIT researchers have come up with one of the simplest and lowest-cost systems yet for developing such “muscles,” in which a material reproduces some of the bending motions that natural muscle tissues perform. The key ingredient,...

Ultrashort bursts of electrons have several important applications in scientific imaging, but producing them has typically required a costly, power-hungry apparatus about the size of a car. In the journal Optica, researchers at MIT, the German Synchrotron, and the University of Hamburg in Germany describe a technique for generating electron bursts, which could be the basis of a shoebox-sized device that consumes only a fraction as much power...

MIT biologists have identified a biomarker that can reveal whether patients with a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer will be helped by paclitaxel (commercially known as Taxol), one of the drugs most commonly used to treat this cancer. The findings could offer doctors a new way to choose drugs for this type of breast cancer, known as triple-negative because it lacks the three most common breast cancer markers: estrogen receptor, p...

  A MIT-hosted conference convened inventive minds from around the world to learn about — and collaborate on — actionable research and innovations that can help solve global issues, such as poverty, infectious disease, and food security.

MIT spinout Common Sensing aims to solve the nation’s diabetes-management issues by going digital. The startup’s smart insulin-pen cap logs insulin intake data on an app and in the cloud, to help patients better manage their regimen. Moreover, the cap gives doctors a detailed view into patients’ insulin habits and how they affect blood-glucose levels, for more targeted care. Invented by co-founders James White ’10, SM...

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a drug capsule that remains in the stomach for up to two weeks after being swallowed, gradually releasing its drug payload. This type of drug delivery could replace inconvenient regimens that require repeated doses, which would help to overcome one of the major obstacles to treating and potentially eliminating diseases such as malaria.

One of the limits of today’s VR headsets is that they have to be tethered to computers in order to process data well enough to deliver high-resolution visuals. But wearing an HDMI cable reduces mobility and can even lead to users tripping over cords. Fortunately, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have recently unveiled a prototype system called “MoVR” that allows ga...

A new catalyst material developed by chemists at MIT provides key insight into the design requirements for producing liquid fuels from carbon dioxide, the leading component of greenhouse gas emissions. The findings suggest a route toward using the world’s existing infrastructure for fuel storage and distribution, without adding net greenhouse emissions to the atmosphere.

Of the vast wealth of information unlocked by the Internet, most is plain text. The data necessary to answer myriad questions — about, say, the correlations between the industrial use of certain chemicals and incidents of disease, or between patterns of news coverage and voter-poll results — may all be online. But extracting it from plain text and organising it for quantitative analysis may be prohibitively time consuming.

  The genetic code that allows cells to store the information necessary for life is well-known. Four nucleotides, abbreviated A, C, G, and T, spell out DNA sequences that code for all of the proteins cells need. MIT researchers have now discovered another layer of control that helps cells to rapidly divert resources in emergency situations.

  MIT chemists have determined the structure of a bacterial enzyme that can produce biodegradable plastics, an advance that could help chemical engineers tweak the enzyme to make it even more industrially useful. The enzyme generates long polymer chains that can form either hard or soft plastics, depending on the starting materials that go into them.

If you’ve ever splattered paint on a canvas or sprayed a cookie sheet with oil, you likely created — aside from a minor mess — a shower of droplets, ranging from dime-sized splotches to pencil-point specks. Such droplet sizes may seem random, but now engineers at MIT can predict a liquid’s droplet size distribution, including the likelihood of producing very big and very small droplets, based on one main property: the...

  At MIT’s 2016 Open House last spring, more than 100 visitors took rides on an autonomous mobility scooter in a trial of software designed by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the National University of Singapore, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).