Caffeine is well-known for its ability to help people stay alert, but a team of researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has now come up with a novel use for this chemical stimulant — catalysing the formation of polymer materials. Using caffeine as a catalyst, the researchers have devised a way to create gummy, biocompatible gels that could be used for drug delivery and other medical applications.

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself.

One of the major side effects of chemotherapy is a sharp drop in white blood cells, which leaves patients vulnerable to dangerous infections. MIT researchers have now developed a portable device that could be used to monitor patients’ white blood cell levels at home, without taking blood samples. Such a device could prevent thousands of infections every year among chemotherapy patients, the researchers say.

Scraped up knees and elbows are tricky places to securely apply a bandage. More often than not, the adhesive will peel away from the skin with just a few bends of the affected joint. Now MIT engineers have come up with a stickier solution, in the form of a thin, lightweight, rubber-like film. The adhesive film can stick to highly deformable regions of the body, such as the knee and elbow, and maintain its hold even after 100 bending cycles.

MIT researchers have developed a system that can produce images of objects shrouded by fog so thick that human vision can’t penetrate it. It can also gauge the objects’ distance. An inability to handle misty driving conditions has been one of the chief obstacles to the development of autonomous vehicular navigation systems that use visible light, which are preferable to radar-based systems for their high resolution and ability to...

On the 11th of November, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare — an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips apart a passing star. Since this discovery, astronomers have trained other telescopes on this very rare event to learn more about how black holes devour matter and regulate the growth of galaxies.

MIT engineers have developed new technology that could be used to evaluate new drugs and detect possible side effects before the drugs are tested in humans. Using a microfluidic platform that connects engineered tissues from up to 10 organs, the researchers can accurately replicate human organ interactions for weeks at a time, allowing them to measure the effects of drugs on different parts of the body.

The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp. There’s never been anything quite like Nectome, though. At YC’s “demo days,” Nectome’s cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pi...

For the past decade, neuroscientists have been using a modified version of the rabies virus to label neurons and trace the connections between them. Although this technique has proven useful, it has one major drawback: The virus is toxic to cells and can’t be used for studies longer than two weeks. Researchers at MIT and the Allen Institute for Brain Science have now developed a new version of this virus that stops replicating once it ...

MIT has launched its Task Force on the Work of the Future, an Institute-wide effort to understand and shape the evolution of jobs during an age of innovation. The task force’s mission was announced in a letter to the MIT community by Provost Martin A. Schmidt. “The MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future takes as a guiding premise that addressing the social and human implications of technology should not be an afterthought"...

Fragile X syndrome is the most frequent cause of intellectual disability in males, affecting one out of every 3,600 boys born. The syndrome can also cause autistic traits, such as social and communication deficits, as well as attention problems and hyperactivity. Currently, there is no cure for this disorder. Fragile X syndrome is caused by mutations in the FMR1 gene on the X chromosome, which prevent the gene’s expression.

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity measure these signals with electrodes inserted into the brain, a task that is difficult and time-consuming. MIT researchers have now come up with a completely different approach to measuring electrical activity in the brain, which they believe will ...

Many patients with heart disease have a metal stent implanted to keep their coronary artery open and prevent blood clotting that can lead to heart attacks. One drawback to these stents is that long-term use can eventually damage the artery. Several years ago, in hopes of overcoming that issue, a new type of stent made from biodegradable polymers was introduced.

Unpacking groceries is a straightforward albeit tedious task: You reach into a bag, feel around for an item, and pull it out. A quick glance will tell you what the item is and where it should be stored. Now engineers from MIT and Princeton University have developed a robotic system that may one day lend a hand with this household chore, as well as assist in other picking and sorting tasks, from organising products in a warehouse to clearing ...

The team that first unveiled the rapid, inexpensive, highly sensitive CRISPR-based diagnostic tool called SHERLOCK has greatly enhanced the tool’s power, and has developed a miniature paper test that allows results to be seen with the naked eye — without the need for expensive equipment. The SHERLOCK team developed a simple paper strip to display test results for a single genetic signature, borrowing from the visual cues common i...

Try a quick experiment: Take two flashlights into a dark room and shine them so that their light beams cross. Notice anything peculiar? The rather anticlimactic answer is, probably not. That’s because the individual photons that make up light do not interact. Instead, they simply pass each other by, like indifferent spirits in the night. But what if light particles could be made to interact, attracting and repelling each other like ato...

Integrating nanoscale fibres such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into commercial applications, from coatings for aircraft wings to heat sinks for mobile computing, requires them to be produced in large scale and at low cost. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a promising approach to manufacture CNTs in the needed scales, but it produces CNTs that are too sparse and compliant for most applications.

Most recent advances in artificial-intelligence systems such as speech- or face-recognition programs have come courtesy of neural networks, densely interconnected meshes of simple information processors that learn to perform tasks by analysing huge sets of training data. But neural nets are large, and their computations are energy intensive, so they’re not very practical for handheld devices.

  Most sensitive web transactions are protected by public-key cryptography, a type of encryption that lets computers share information securely without first agreeing on a secret encryption key. Public-key encryption protocols are complicated, and in computer networks, they’re executed by software.

Three commercially released facial-analysis programs from major technology companies demonstrate both skin-type and gender biases, according to a new paper researchers from MIT and Stanford University will present later this month at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In the researchers’ experiments, the three programs’ error rates in determining the gender of light-skinned men were never worse than 0.8...