Many diseases, including cirrhosis and hepatitis, can lead to liver failure. More than 17,000 Americans suffering from these diseases are now waiting for liver transplants, but significantly fewer livers are available. To help address that shortage, researchers at MIT, Rockefeller University, and Boston University have developed a new way to engineer liver tissue, by organising tiny subunits that contain three types of cells embedded into a ...

Around half of all medications for chronic diseases are not taken as prescribed, costing the U.S. health care system more than $100 billion in avoidable hospital stays each year. This noncompliance is even more significant in the developing world, where health care budgets are chronically overstretched and patients treated for diseases such as malaria must take multiple drugs with complex dose regimens.

Anthony McDougal, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has developed a model that predicts a single heart cell’s response to dwindling supplies of oxygen. Specifically, it evaluates a cell’s ability to keep producing ATP — a cell’s primary fuel source — and stay alive, even as it is increasingly deprived of oxygen.

There are few things social media users love more than flooding their feeds with photos of food. Yet we seldom use these images for much more than a quick scroll on our cellphones. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe that analysing photos like these could help us learn recipes and better understand people's eating habits.

Catheters, intravenous lines, and other types of surgical tubing are a medical necessity for managing a wide range of diseases. But a patient’s experience with such devices is rarely a comfortable one. Now MIT engineers have designed a gel-like material that can be coated onto standard plastic or rubber devices, providing a softer, more slippery exterior that can significantly ease a patient’s discomfort. The coating can even be ...

When trying to use light and conventional optics to image a biological sample at great detail, one eventually encounters the fact that objects smaller than the light’s wavelength cannot be resolved. While technological tricks have been developed to overcome this limitation in some ways, a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have instead focused on swelling the sample so it is large enough to be examined in detail using light microscopy...

While 3D movies continue to be popular in theaters, they haven't made the leap to our homes just yet—and the reason rests largely on the ridge of your nose. Ever wonder why we wear those pesky 3D glasses? Theaters generally either use special polarised light or project a pair of images that create a simulated sense of depth. To actually get the 3D effect, though, you have to wear glasses, which have proven too inconvenient to create mu...

Humans experience a range of emotions in response to products and experiences on a daily basis. Shoppers may get excited for certain brands and then overwhelmed by choices. Audience members may oscillate between apathy and engagement during performances. Children can become frustrated, bored, or entertained while learning a new subject.

Researchers from MIT and other institutions are hoping to use nanotechnology to develop more targeted treatments for these drug-resistant bugs. In a new study, they report that an antimicrobial peptide packaged in a silicon nanoparticle dramatically reduced the number of bacteria in the lungs of mice infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a disease causing Gram-negative bacterium that can lead to pneumonia.

  In recent years, engineers have worked to shrink drone technology, building flying prototypes that are the size of a bumblebee and loaded with even tinier sensors and cameras. Thus far, they have managed to miniaturise almost every part of a drone, except for the brains of the entire operation — the computer chip.

Hospitals that spend more on initial care following patient emergencies have better outcomes than hospitals that spend less at first and rely more on additional forms of long-term care, according to a new study co-authored by MIT economists. More specifically, hospitals that invest more in inpatient care yield better results, per dollar spent, than those that assign relatively more patients to skilled nursing facilities upon discharge.

As embedded intelligence is finding its way into ever more areas of our lives, fields ranging from autonomous driving to personalised medicine are generating huge amounts of data. But just as the flood of data is reaching massive proportions, the ability of computer chips to process it into useful information is stalling. Now, researchers at Stanford University and MIT have built a new chip to overcome this hurdle.

Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analysing large sets of training data, are responsible for today’s best-performing artificial intelligence systems, from speech recognition systems, to automatic translators, to self-driving cars. But neural nets are black boxes. Once they’ve been trained, even their designers rarely have any idea what they’re doing — what data elements they’re proce...

A team of MIT and Stanford University researchers has developed a way to label neurons when they become active, essentially providing a snapshot of their activity at a moment in time. This approach could offer significant new insights into neuron function by offering greater temporal precision than current cell-labeling techniques, which capture activity across time windows of hours or days.

  People who suffer a stroke often undergo a brain scan at the hospital, allowing doctors to determine the location and extent of the damage. Researchers who study the effects of strokes would love to be able to analyse these images, but the resolution is often too low for many analyses.

In a 1999 paper, Erik Demaine — now an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, but then an 18-year-old PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada — described an algorithm that could determine how to fold a piece of paper into any conceivable 3D shape. It was a milestone paper in the field of computational origami, but the algorithm didn’t yield very practical folding patterns.

  Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fibre-optic camera is inserted into a patient’s abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera — the laparoscope — is often recorded.

Aerospace engineers from MIT have developed a laser sensing technique that can decipher not only where but what kind of space junk may be passing overhead. For example, the technique, called laser polarimetry, may be used to discern whether a piece of debris is bare metal or covered with paint. The difference, the engineers say, could help determine an object’s mass, momentum, and potential for destruction.

A team of MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan. The vehicle can carry 10 to 20 pounds of communications equipment while flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet.

Eight years ago, Ted Adelson’s research group at MIT’s CSAIL unveiled a new sensor technology, called GelSight, that uses physical contact with an object to provide a remarkably detailed 3D map of its surface. Now, by mounting GelSight sensors on the grippers of robotic arms, two MIT teams have given robots greater sensitivity and dexterity. The researchers presented their work in two papers at the International Conference o...