In a paper published in the journal Nature Materials, researchers at MIT describe an adhesive patch that can stick to the tumour site, either before or after surgery, to deliver a triple-combination of drug, gene, and photo (light-based) therapy. Releasing this triple combination therapy locally, at the tumor site, may increase the efficacy of the treatment, according to Natalie Artzi, a research scientist at MIT's IMES and an assistant...

But a new variation of the battery chemistry, which could be used in a conventional, fully sealed battery, promises similar theoretical performance as lithium-air batteries, while overcoming all of these drawbacks. The battery concept, called a nanolithia cathode battery, is described in the journal Nature Energy in a paper by Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT; postdoc Zhi Zhu; and five others...

Synthetic biology allows researchers to program cells to perform novel functions such as fluorescing in response to a particular chemical or producing drugs in response to disease markers. In a step toward devising much more complex cellular circuits, MIT engineers have now programmed cells to remember and respond to a series of events. These cells can remember, in the correct order, up to three different inputs, but this approach should be ...

The air was hot and gritty. Shehazvi had to squint to see past the sun into the edge of town, past the cars and motorcycles whizzing by, past the scorched earth, to where old buildings stood beautiful in their own way, muted pinks and oranges still curving and curling in all the right places. No rain again today. She and her daughter climbed out of the rickshaw and walked down the alley that leads to their home, 200 rupees lighter than when they ...

Ants, it turns out, are extremely good at estimating the concentration of other ants in their vicinity. This ability appears to play a role in several communal activities, particularly in the voting procedure whereby an ant colony selects a new nest. Biologists have long suspected that ants base their population-density estimates on the frequency with which they — literally — bump into other ants while randomly exploring their environ...

Today's robots are awkward co-workers because they are often unable to predict what humans need. In hospitals, robots are employed to perform simple tasks such as delivering supplies and medications, but they have to be explicitly told what to do. A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) thinks that this will soon change, and that robots might be most effective by helping humans perform one of the most com...

A team of small, shoebox-sized satellites, flying in formation around the Earth, could estimate the planet’s reflected energy with twice the accuracy of traditional monolith satellites, according to an MIT-led study published online in Acta Astronautica. If done right, such satellite swarms could also be cheaper to build, launch and maintain.

  Anonymity networks protect people living under repressive regimes from surveillance of their Internet use. But the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in the most popular of these networks - Tor - has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new combination of methods that can provide detailed information about the microstructure of polycrystalline metals. Such materials—composed of a random matrix of multiple small crystals rather than one single large crystal—are widely used for such applications as nuclear reactors, civil infrastructure, and aircraft. However understanding the details of their crystal structure and the ...

Researchers at MIT's research centre in Singapore have developed a microfluidic device that tests the effects of electric fields on cancer cells. They observed that a range of low-intensity, middle-frequency electric fields effectively stopped breast and lung cancer cells from growing and spreading, while having no adverse effect on neighboring healthy cells. The device is designed to help scientists narrow in on safe ranges of electric fields to...

MIT researchers have developed low-cost chemical sensors, made from chemically altered carbon nanotubes, that enable smartphones or other wireless devices to detect trace amounts of toxic gases. Using the sensors, the researchers hope to design lightweight, inexpensive RFID badges to be used for personal safety and security. Such badges could be worn by soldiers on the battlefield to rapidly detect the presence of chemical weapons and by peo...

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found a way of using mid-infrared lasers to turn regions of molecules in the open air into glowing filaments of electrically charged gas, or plasma. The method could make it possible to carry out remote environmental monitoring to detect a wide range of chemicals with high sensitivity. The system makes use of a mid-infrared ultra-fast pulsed laser system to generate the filaments, whose colors can reveal the ...

Engineers at MIT have found a way to prevent hydrogels from dehydrating, with a technique that could lead to longer-lasting contact lenses, stretchy microfluidic devices, flexible bioelectronics, and even artificial skin. The engineers, led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, devised a method to robustly bind hydrogels to elastomers—elastic polymers such a...

What if lost limbs could be regrown? Cancers detected early with blood or urine tests, instead of invasive biopsies? Drugs delivered via nanoparticles to specific tissues or even cells, minimising unwanted side effects? While such breakthroughs may sound futuristic, scientists are already exploring these and other promising techniques.

  As machines become more intelligent, they become embedded in countless facets of life. In some ways, they can act almost as full-fledged members in human-machine teams. In such cases, as with any team, trust is a necessary ingredient for good performance. But the dynamics of trust between people and machines are not yet well-understood.

A transistor, conceived of in digital terms, has two states: on and off, which can represent the 1s and 0s of binary arithmetic. But in analogue terms, the transistor has an infinite number of states, which could, in principle, represent an infinite range of mathematical values. Digital computing, for all its advantages, leaves most of transistors’ informational capacity on the table.

An MIT study has revealed that China has an opportunity to massively increase its use of wind power - if it properly integrates wind into its existing power system. The study forecasts that wind power could provide 26% of China’s projected electricity demand by 2030, up from 3% in 2015. Such a change would be a substantial gain in the global transition to renewable energy, since China produces the most total greenhouse gas emissions of any ...

In the May/June issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' journal Micro, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a chip design they call Swarm, which should make parallel programs not only much more efficient but easier to write, too. In simulations, the researchers compared Swarm versions of six common algorithms with the best existing parallel versions, which had ...

Researchers in MIT's Media Lab have found a way to bypass a major design step in 3D printing, to quickly and efficiently model and print thousands of hair-like structures. Instead of using conventional CAD software to draw thousands of individual hairs on a computer—a step that would take hours to compute—the team built a software platform, called "Cilllia," that lets users define the angle, thickness, density, and height of thousands...

Glimpses of blue sky are becoming a rare sight in Delhi, India's capital, particularly in wintertime, when a thick white haze smothers the city. David Hagan, an MIT PhD candidate studying atmospheric chemistry and a Fellow in the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, says that the city's air quality is now quantifiably among the worst in the world. "Beijing has bad episodes, but Delhi is worse because of the meteorology," says Hagan.