Dynamic programming is a technique that can yield relatively efficient solutions to computational problems in economics, genomic analysis, and other fields. But adapting it to computer chips with multiple “cores,” or processing units, requires a level of programming expertise that few economists and biologists have.

Atoms, photons, and other quantum particles are often capricious and finicky by nature; very rarely at a standstill, they often collide with others of their kind. But if such particles can be individually corralled and controlled in large numbers, they may be harnessed as quantum bits, or qubits — tiny units of information whose state or orientation can be used to carry out calculations at rates significantly faster than today’s semic...

When the Wright brothers accomplished their first powered flight more than a century ago, they controlled the motion of their Flyer 1 aircraft using wires and pulleys that bent and twisted the wood-and-canvas wings. This system was quite different than the hinged flaps and ailerons on most aircraft ever since. But now, thanks to some high-tech wizardry developed by engineers at MIT and NASA, some aircraft may be returning to their roots, with a n...

A new imaging technique developed by scientists at MIT, Harvard University, and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) aims to illuminate cellular structures in deep tissue and other dense and opaque materials. Their method uses tiny particles embedded in the material, that give off laser light. The team synthesised these “laser particles” in the shape of tiny chopsticks, each measuring a small fraction of a human hair’s widt...

  Over the past few decades, many bacteria have become resistant to existing antibiotics, and few new drugs have emerged. A recent study from a U.K. commission on antimicrobial resistance estimated that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections will kill 10 million people per year, if no new drugs are developed.

Harnessing the body’s own immune system to destroy tumours is a tantalising prospect that has yet to realise its full potential. However, a new advance from MIT may bring this strategy, known as cancer immunotherapy, closer to becoming reality. In the new study, the researchers used a combination of four different therapies to activate both of the immune system’s two branches, producing a coordinated attack that led to the comple...

In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognise certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts. But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very good at classifying data, but even its...

Data analysis — and particularly big-data analysis — is often a matter of fitting data to some sort of mathematical model. The most familiar example of this might be linear regression, which finds a line that approximates a distribution of data points. But fitting data to probability distributions, such as the familiar bell curve, is just as common. If, however, a data set has just a few corrupted entries — say, outlandishl...

Almost all solid materials, from rubber and glass to granite and steel, inevitably expand when heated. Only in very rare instances do certain materials buck this thermodynamic trend and shrink with heat. For instance, cold water will contract when heated between 0 and 4ºC, before expanding. Engineers from MIT, the University of Southern California, and elsewhere are now adding to this curious class of heat-shrinking materials.

Researchers from MIT, Boston Children's Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital have joined forces in an ambitious new project to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate the health of fetuses. Typically, fetal development is monitored with ultrasound imaging, which is cheap and portable and can gauge blood flow through the placenta, the organ in the uterus that delivers nutrients to the fetus.

Last year, MIT researchers presented a system that automated a crucial step in big-data analysis: the selection of a “feature set,” or aspects of the data that are useful for making predictions. The researchers entered the system in several data science contests, where it outperformed most of the human competitors and took only hours instead of months to perform its analyses.

MIT researchers have developed an imaging technique that, for the first time, enables three-dimensional mapping of serotonin as it’s reabsorbed into neurons, across multiple regions of the living brain. This technique, the researchers say, gives an unprecedented view of serotonin dynamics, and could be a powerful tool for the research and development of antidepressants.

MIT neuroscientists have discovered that brain cells called glial cells play a critical role in controlling appetite and feeding behaviour. In a study of mice, the researchers found that activating these cells stimulates overeating, and that when the cells are suppressed, appetite is also suppressed. The findings could offer scientists a new target for developing drugs against obesity and other appetite-related disorders, the researchers say...

Researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School have developed a biocompatible and highly stretchable optical fibre made from hydrogel — an elastic, rubbery material composed mostly of water. The fibre, which is as bendable as a rope of licorice, may one day be implanted in the body to deliver therapeutic pulses of light or light up at the first sign of disease. The researchers say the fiber may serve as a long-lasting implant that wou...

On Friday, Sept. 30, at 9:25 p.m. EDT, scientists and engineers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center made a leap forward in the pursuit of clean energy. The team set a new world record for plasma pressure in the Institute’s Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. Plasma pressure is the key ingredient to producing energy from nuclear fusion, and MIT’s new result achieves over 2 atmospheres of pressure for the first tim...

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a way of driving fluid droplets across surfaces in a precisely controlled way. The method could open up new possibilities for highly adaptable microfluidic devices, as well as for de-icing technologies, self-cleaning surfaces, and highly efficient condensers. The new system uses differences in temperature to push droplets of water or other fluids across a smooth surface, allowing precise contro...

In the coming years, as more transistors are packed into ever smaller areas within computer chips, MIT engineers say cellphones, laptops, and other electronic devices may face a higher risk of overheating, as a result of interactions between electrons and heat-carrying particles called phonons. The researchers have found that these previously underestimated interactions can play a significant role in preventing heat dissipation in microelect...

3D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface. But this week, a team from MIT's CSAIL will present “Foundry,” a system for custom-designing a v...

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have for the first time developed a supercapacitor that uses no conductive carbon at all, and that could potentially produce more power than existing versions of this technology. The team’s findings are being reported in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by Mircea Dincă, an MIT associate professor of chemistry; Yang Shao-Horn, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy; and four others.

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the developed world, with around 60,000 people diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Although there is no cure for the disease, there are treatments that can reduce the severity of a patient’s symptoms. But for these treatments to be effective, clinicians need a method to regularly monitor the patient’s symptoms in the home.