Graduate students Chuck Downing and Zhichu Ren PhD '24 highlight the potential uses of AI in the research process, reports Amanda Heidt for Nature. “I didn’t know much going in, but I learnt quite a bit, and so I use these deep dives all the time now,” says Downing on using deep-research tools when approaching unfamiliar topics. “It’s better than anything else I’ve used so far at finding good papers and in presenting the information in a way that I can easily understand.”
Kodiak Brush '17 speaks with Fast Company reporter Jesus Diaz about his work tackling football helmet design. The Apache helmet Brush designed for Light Helmets is the “lightest on the market—and yet it has achieved the highest safety score ever recorded by Virginia Tech’s independent helmet testing lab.” Diaz notes that for Brush, “success isn’t measured by sales figures or accolades—it’s about changing how people think about football safety and avoiding traumatic brain injuries.”
Graduate student Will Parker joins Dana Taylor of the USA Today podcast The Excerpt to discuss his research on the impact of climate change on satellites. “We're seeing a cooling effect in the upper atmosphere where most of our satellites are operating, and because of that cooling effect, we're seeing that the entire atmosphere is contracting, so it's retreating away from low Earth orbit where we rely on that atmosphere for drag on our satellites,” explains Parker. “The effect of that retreat, that shrinking of the atmosphere, is that it's not doing as good a job at cleaning out low Earth orbit, and again, we rely on that cleaning force because we have no other way to remove most of this debris.”
Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto about the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance. “A great amount of innovation happens in academia. We have a longer view into the future,” says Chandrakasan. He adds that while companies like GE Vernova have “the ability to get products out quickly to scale up, to manufacture, we have the ability to think past the short-term. ... It’s super smart of them to surround themselves with this incredible talent in academia. That will allow us to make the kind of breakthroughs that will keep U.S. competitiveness at its peak.”
“AT MIT innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-earth creativity,” notes Chronicle during a visit to campus to peek behind the scenes at the innovations underway at the Institute. Classes taught by Prof. Erik Demaine are a “mix of rigorous math and creative collaboration,” host Anthony Everett explains, highlighting how Demaine’s work in computational origami has found its way into practical applications in such fields as medicine, architecture and space exploration. “I think origami provides a really powerful tool for making transformable shapes,” Demaine relates.
Chronicle visits Prof. Skylar Tibbits and the Self-Assembly Lab to see how they are embedding intelligence into the materials around us, including furniture, clothing and buildings. Prof. Caitlin Mueller and graduate student Sandy Curth are digging into eco-friendly construction with programmable mud by “taking a low-cost material and a really fast manufacturing system to make buildings out of very, very low climate impact materials.” Says Tibbits: “MIT is a really wild place, and most people know of it for its technical expertise…But what I am really inspired by is on the creative end, the design spectrum. I think the mix of those two is super special.” He adds: “We can ask the right questions and discover new science, and we can also solve the right problems through engineering.”
E&E News reporter Christa Marshall writes that the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance will “scale sustainable energy systems across the globe” and advance breakthrough low-carbon technologies.
MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”
Prof. Pulkit Agrawal speaks with NPR Short Wave host Regina Barber and science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel about his work developing a new technique that allows robots to train in simulations of scanned home environments. “The power of simulation is that we can collect very large amounts of data,” explains Agrawal. “For example, in three hours' worth of simulation, we can collect 100 days' worth of data.”
Travel + Leisure’s Michael Cappetta speaks with aviation experts about the best location to sit on an airplane. According to Professor John Hansman, “seats in the rear of the aircraft are generally the safest,” since during some accidents, “the front of the airplane acts as a shock absorber.”
MIT researchers have developed “self-injectable contraceptive shots that work similarly to contraceptive implants,” reports Margherita Bassi for Gizmodo. “The shots would result in a highly effective and long-term contraceptive method more accessible to women who lack easy access to medical infrastructure,” explains Bassi. “Additionally, the design could be used to administer other long-term medications, such as those for HIV.”
Rachel Feltman of Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” podcast visits MIT.nano to learn more about MIT’s “clean laboratory facility that is critical to nanoscale research, from microelectronics to medical nanotechnology.” Prof. Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano, explains: “Maybe a fifth of all of M.I.T.’s research depends on this facility…from microelectronics to nanotechnology for medicine to different ways of rethinking what will [the] next quantum computation look like. Any of these are really important elements of what we need to discover, but we need all of them to be explored at the nanoscale to get that ultimate performance.”
“A breakthrough from MIT researchers and AgZen, a spinoff company, is making agricultural spraying more efficient—cutting pesticide waste, lowering costs, and reducing environmental impact,” reports Rural Radio Network. “The technology works with existing sprayers, eliminating the need for costly equipment changes. In field tests, it doubled product retention on crops like soybeans and kale. AgZen’s spray-monitoring system, RealCoverage, has already helped farmers reduce pesticide use by 30 to 50 percent, and the new coating could improve efficiency even further.”
Prof. David Sontag, Monica Agrawal PhD '23, Luke Murray SM '22, and Divya Gopinath '19, MEng '20 co-founded Layer Health - an AI healthcare startup that is applying large language models (LLMs) to help clinicians with medical chart reviews and data abstraction, reports Seth Joseph for Forbes. “The same chart review problem we’re solving with our clinical registry module is faced by clinicians at the point of care,” says Sontag. “For example, one of our next modules will focus on real-time clinical decision support to help automate clinical care pathways, leading to more reliable, high-quality care."
Prof. Erik Demaine and his colleagues have solved a longstanding mathematical puzzle called “Dudeney’s dissection,” which involves dissecting an equilateral triangle into the smallest number of pieces that could be rearranged into a square, reports Lyndie Chiou for Scientific American. “Each of those pieces could have arbitrarily many edges to it, and the coordinates of those cuts start at arbitrary points,” says Demaine, of what makes the puzzle so challenging. “You have these continuous parameters where there’s lots and lots of infinities of possible choices that makes it so annoyingly hard. You can’t just brute-force it with a computer.”