In the latest issue of the journal Lab on a Chip, researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories report a new microencapsulation technique that yields particles of very consistent size, while also affording a high rate of production.

Exhibiting behaviour that researchers had never anticipated: The material gives off oxygen and begins oscillating, almost resembling a living, breathing organism, is exposing one type of an oxide structure called perovskite to both water vapour and streams of electrons.

Anyone who’s watched drone videos or an episode of “BattleBots” knows that robots can break — and often it’s because they don’t have the proper padding to protect themselves. But this week researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a method for 3D printing soft materials that make robots safer and more precise in their movements —...

The two-year-old organisation, Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) is aiming to confront the challenge of climate change, and is committed to support the Paris climate agreement’s target of capping the rise in mean global surface temperature since preindustrial times at 2°C by 2100.

To devise new designs for a more safe, and efficient nuclear reactor, you need to be able to simulate the reactors’ performance at a very high level of detail. As the nuclear reactions take place, the reactors cores are quite complex and such simulations can strain the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputer systems.

In a new study from the neuroscientists at MIT, it has been discovered that mice have brain cells that are dedicated to storing memories of other mice. Found in a region of the hippocampus known as the ventral CA1, store ‘social memories’ these cells help shape the mice’s behaviour toward each other.

Researchers from MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a technique using porous microwells that pushes the precision and scalability of LSMAs to a new extreme. This new method, described in the Sept. 5 issue of Nature Materials, uses fluid flow to guide tens of thousands of microparticles at once, pushing them into microwells as the fluid moves through small open pores at the bottom of the porous well arrays.

Once adapted for humans, this type of sensor could be used to determine how aggressive a tumour is and help doctors choose the best treatment, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In certain parts of the ocean, towering, slow-motion rollercoasters called internal tides trundle along for miles, rising and falling for hundreds of feet in the ocean’s interior while making barely a ripple at the surface. These giant, hidden swells are responsible for alternately drawing warm surface waters down to the deep ocean and pulling marine nutrients up from the abyss.

In the future, our health may be monitored and maintained by tiny sensors and drug dispensers, deployed within the body and made from graphene — one of the strongest, lightest materials in the world. Graphene is composed of a single sheet of carbon atoms, linked together like razor-thin chicken wire, and its properties may be tuned in countless ways, making it a versatile material for tiny, next-gen implants.

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have created tiny freeze-dried pellets that include all of the molecular machinery needed to translate DNA into proteins, which could form the basis for on-demand production of drugs and vaccines. The pellets, which contain dozens of enzymes and other molecules extracted from cells, can be stored for an extended period of time at room temperature. Upon the addition of water and freeze-dried DNA, the ...

  For children with speech and language disorders, early-childhood intervention can make a great difference in their later academic and social success. But many such children — one study estimates 60 percent — go undiagnosed until kindergarten or even later.

A year ago, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory unveiled a fundamentally new way of managing memory on computer chips, one that would use circuit space much more efficiently as chips continue to comprise more and more cores, or processing units. In chips with hundreds of cores, the researchers’ scheme could free up somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of on-chip memory, enabling much more effi...

  Ireland’s first world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ‘Hacking Medicine’ event took place at DCU Alpha (Dublin City University’s Innovation Campus), over the weekend, seeking to uncover treatment outcomes for patients.

  In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.

Physicists at MIT have cooled a gas of potassium atoms to several nanokelvins and trapped the atoms within a 2D sheet of an optical lattice created by crisscrossing lasers. Using a high-resolution microscope, the researchers took images of the cooled atoms residing in the lattice. By looking at correlations between the atoms’ positions in hundreds of such images, the team observed individual atoms interacting in some rather peculiar wa...

Nanoparticles offer a promising way to deliver cancer drugs in a targeted fashion, helping to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissue. However, most nanoparticles that have been developed so far are limited to carrying only one or two drugs. MIT chemists have now shown that they can package three or more drugs into a novel type of nanoparticle, allowing them to design custom combination therapies for cancer.

In today’s computer chips, memory management is based on what computer scientists call the principle of locality: If a program needs a chunk of data stored at some memory location, it probably needs the neighboring chunks as well. But that assumption breaks down in the age of big data, now that computer programs more frequently act on just a few data items scattered arbitrarily across huge data sets.

An SUV-sized spacecraft, loaded with instruments and an extendable robotic arm, will soon be barreling toward a space rock, on a round-trip journey that promises to return an unprecedented souvenir: extraterrestrial soil, taken directly from an asteroid, that could hold clues to the very early universe.

Devices called ultracapacitors have recently become attractive forms of energy storage: They recharge in seconds, have very long lifespans, work with close to 100% efficiency, and are much lighter and less volatile than batteries. But they suffer from low energy-storage capacity and other drawbacks, meaning they mostly serve as backup power sources for things like electric cars, renewable energy technologies, and consumer devices.