The collision of a pair of colossal, stellar-mass black holes has made itself heard, nearly 3 billion light years away, through a cosmic microphone on Earth. On Jan. 4, the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) picked up a barely perceptible signal that scientists quickly determined to be a gravitational wave — a ripple of energy passing through the curvature of spacetime. The event, published in Physical Review Le...

MIT researchers, collaborating with investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the IT’IS Foundation, have come up with a way to stimulate regions deep within the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. This approach could make deep brain stimulation noninvasive, less risky, less expensive, and more accessible to patients.

A surgical technique devised by MIT researchers could allow prosthetic limbs to feel much more like natural limbs. Through coordination of the patient’s prosthetic limb, existing nerves, and muscle grafts, amputees would be able to sense where their limbs are in space and to feel how much force is being applied to them. This type of system could help to reduce the rejection rate of prosthetic limbs, which is around 20%.

Effects of human behaviour are not limited to Earth's climate or atmosphere; they are also seen in the natural space weather surrounding our planet. 'Space weather' in this context includes conditions in the space surrounding Earth, including the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere. A recent survey by a team of scientists including Phil Erickson, assistant director of MIT Haystack Observatory, has resulted in an article in the journa...

Mid-infrared wavelengths of light are invisible to the eye but can be useful for a number of technologies, including night vision, thermal sensing, and environmental monitoring. Now, a new phenomenon in an unconventional metal, found by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, could provide a new way of making highly sensitive detectors for these elusive wavelengths. The phenomenon is closely related to a particle that has been predicted by high-energy p...

There’s a limit to how fast autonomous vehicles can fly while safely avoiding obstacles. That’s because the cameras used on today’s drones can only process images so fast, frame by individual frame. Beyond roughly 30 miles per hour, a drone is likely to crash simply because its cameras can’t keep up. Recently, researchers in Zurich invented a new type of camera, known as the DVS, that continuously visualises a sc...

Quantum computers are experimental devices that offer large speedups on some computational problems. One promising approach to building them involves harnessing nanometer-scale atomic defects in diamond materials. But practical, diamond-based quantum computing devices will require the ability to position those defects at precise locations in complex diamond structures, where the defects can function as qubits, the basic units of information ...

MIT researchers are finding ways to make the dining experience interactive and fun, with food that can transform its shape when water is added. The researchers, from MIT’s Tangible Media Group, have concocted something akin to edible origami, in the form of flat sheets of gelatin and starch that, when submerged in water, instantly sprout into three-dimensional structures, including common pasta shapes such as macaroni and rotini.

A reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital-currency scheme designed to wrest control of the monetary system from central banks. With Bitcoin, anyone can mint money, provided he or she can complete a complex computation quickly enough. Through a set of clever protocols, that computational hurdle prevents the system from being coopted by malicious hackers.

A team of MIT researchers has designed a breathable workout suit with ventilating flaps that open and close in response to an athlete’s body heat and sweat. These flaps, which range from thumbnail- to finger-sized, are lined with live microbial cells that shrink and expand in response to changes in humidity. The cells act as tiny sensors and actuators, driving the flaps to open when an athlete works up a sweat, and pulling them closed when ...

Most women diagnosed with ovarian cancer undergo surgery to remove as many of the tumors as possible. However, it is usually impossible to eliminate all of the cancer cells because they have spread throughout the abdomen. Surgery is therefore followed by 18 weeks of chemotherapy. Delivering chemotherapy drugs directly to the abdomen through a catheter offers better results than other methods, but this regimen suffers from significant complic...

  In one of MIT’s most eagerly awaited annual events, Thursday night dozens of robots designed and built by undergraduates in a mechanical engineering class endured hours of intense, boisterous, and often jubilant competition as they scrambled to rack up points in one-on-one clashes on special “Star Wars”-themed playing arenas.

Lung adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer that accounts for about 40% of U.S. lung cancer cases, is believed to arise from benign tumors known as adenomas. MIT biologists have now identified a major switch that occurs as adenomas transition to adenocarcinomas in a mouse model of lung cancer. They’ve also discovered that blocking this switch prevents the tumors from becoming more aggressive.

Most robots are programmed using one of two methods: learning from demonstration, in which they watch a task being done and then replicate it, or via motion-planning techniques such as optimisation or sampling, which require a programmer to explicitly specify a task’s goals and constraints. Both methods have drawbacks. Robots that learn from demonstration can’t easily transfer one skill they’ve learned to another situation ...

  When it comes to removing very dilute concentrations of pollutants from water, existing separation methods tend to be energy- and chemical-intensive. Now, a new method developed at MIT could provide a selective alternative for removing even extremely low levels of unwanted compounds.

The answer to developing graphene-based nanocomposite materials with enhanced properties could lie within mother-of-pearl and mussel threads. The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, have employed the structure of mother of pearl (also known as nacre), and the extreme adhesiveness of mussel threads to create a graphene oxide-polydopamine (GO-PDA) composite with improved electrical conductivity and tensile strength...

Carrying out maintenance tasks inside a nuclear plant puts severe strains on equipment, due to extreme temperatures that are hard for components to endure without degrading. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a radically new way to make actuators that could be used in such extremely hot environments. The system relies on oxide materials similar to those used in many of today’s rechargeable batteries, in that ions m...

MIT spinout New Valence Robotics (NVBOTS) has brought to market the only fully automated commercial 3D printer that’s equipped with cloud-based queuing and automatic part removal, making print jobs quicker and easier for multiple users, and dropping the cost per part. To use the printer, called NVPro, a user submits a project from any device, which queues up in the NVCloud software.

When animals hunt or forage for food, they must constantly weigh whether the chance of a meal is worth the risk of being spotted by a predator. The same conflict between cost and benefit is at the heart of many of the decisions humans make on a daily basis. The ability to instantly consider contradictory information from the environment and decide how to act is essential for survival. It’s also a key feature of mental health.

Plastic, rubber, and many other useful materials are made of polymers — long chains arranged in a cross-linked network. At the molecular level, these polymer networks contain structural flaws that weaken them. Several years ago, MIT researchers were the first to measure certain types of these defects, called 'loops,' which are caused when a chain in the polymer network binds to itself instead of another chain.