School of Science

MIT researchers have discovered space matter that has been ‘missing’ since the 1990s using Fast Radio Bursts, individual flashes of radio waves traveling through space and coming from the distant universe, reports WCVB 5’s Cindy Fitzgibbon. “The takeaway of the study is that by discovering the distribution of the missing matter around galaxies, we have found evidence for strong activities in galaxies,” says graduate student Haochen Wang, a co-author on the study. “In other words, galaxies are busier and messier than we thought.” 

Prof. Salvatore Vitale and graduate student Cailin Plunkett join John Batchelor and David Livingston, hosts of the Hotel Mars podcast, to discuss their discovery that 14% of black holes were created from the merger of two smaller ones, and their goal to use gravitational wave detectors to uncover the origins of the black hole in the Milky Way. “In ten years [with added gravitational wave technology and observatories], we’ll go from seeing the first gravitational wave ever to seeing them irrespective of where they happen in the universe—which would of course, be fantastic,” says Vitale.  

New Scientist’s Jacklin Kwan highlights Prof. Christoph Kehle’s work demonstrating that extremal black holes, a variety of black hole that has zero temperature, could exist. “Extremal black holes were thought of as an idealised, unattainable limit: something you could write down as a solution, but which could never be reached [through any real physical] process, but we proved that wrong,” says Kehle. 

Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum discusses whether AI systems will perform better if they have increased awareness of the world around them with New Scientist’s Daniel Cossins. “One of the big misconceptions is that intelligence is a single thing, that there is a single world model in the brain,” says Tenenbaum. “What we actually have is the ability to run many different models depending on the context, task and goal.” 

In an article for The Hill, contributor Juan Williams celebrates the homecoming of his nephew, MIT alumnus and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams PhD ‘12, who travelled 102 miles over the course of eight months on the International Space Station. “Inside the space station he [Christopher] and fellow astronauts measured how eyes change in zero gravity,” writes Juan. “They checked on how the human brain orients its sense of direction in space. They also tracked bone density and DNA changes to gauge the impact a long space journey has on the human body.” 

Prof. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai, speaks to Fast Company reporter Victor Dey about his vision for a faster and cheaper AI grid that could serve as an alternative to large data centers, and more effectively route inference workloads. “Many inference tasks do not need the largest model or the largest cluster or the most expensive compute,” says Leighton. “What they need is the ability to marry the right model, in the right place, data and moment, at the most effective cost.” 

By studying ‘smears’ in fast radio bursts, fleeting flashes of radiation, MIT researchers discovered diffuse clouds of baryonic gas may contain the missing ordinary matter in the universe, writes Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee. “These diffuse clouds may be flung outside galaxies through black hole jets,” Lee explains. 

Prof. Sebastian Lourido speaks to Boston Globe reporter Lindsay Crudele about the safety of local produce amidst the current cyclospora outbreak. “There are many features of local agriculture that are less susceptible to the spread of these kinds of diseases,” says Lourido. 

The life and work of the late Nobel laureate Prof. Susumu Tonegawa, founding director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is spotlighted by The New York Times’ Dylan Loeb McClain. “Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly,” says Prof. Myriam Heiman, director of the Picower Institute. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience.” 

A new study by MIT researchers finds high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets may increase the risk of certain intestinal cancers, writes Newsweek’s Daniella Gray. “The researchers say future studies will be needed to better understand how specific dietary fats influence cancer risk and whether modifying the composition of ketogenic diets could reduce potential harms while preserving any health benefits,” writes Gray.  

Prof. Brett McGuire joins Peter O'Dowd, host of WBUR’s “Here & Now,” to discuss astronomers’ discovery of Erythrulose, the sugar found in raspberries, in clouds of gas about 25,000 light-years away from Earth. “By a chemist's formal definition this is a sugar—given its structure, the way its atoms are bonded together,” says McGuire. "It’s not the sort of sugar that we think of as involved in making things sweet for us. But it is still a sugar in that it is a compound that stores energy and is involved in biological processes that access that energy and allow it to be used by living organisms." 

MIT researchers found that the keto diet, which emphasizes low carbs and sugar, could increase the risk of tumors in the small intestine, explains New York Post reporter Allie Yang. The researchers found that “cells burning fat (from ketosis) start a chain reaction which leads to stem cells multiplying rapidly, increasing the chance they go out of control and become cancer,” Yang explains.  

The Guardian’s David Kohn points to a study by Prof. Siniša Hrvatin that proposes targeting the preoptic area of the brain to induce torpor (a hibernation-like state) as a solution for astronauts to survive long term space travel. “Key aspects of the circuit appear to be conserved across different animals,” says Hrvatin. “I think we can use it to modify metabolism.” 

GBH Curiosity Desk host Edgar B. Herwick III comes to MIT for a scoop of science, daring Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero to embark on a twisty challenge: describing his work in the field of twistronics in the amount of time it takes to eat a soft serve outside the Eastern Edge Food Hall. “We were just curious,” says Jarillo-Herrero of the inspiration for his work. “We have never been able to change the angle between materials. Whenever you explore or look at something where you’ve never been able to do it, interesting things are going to happen.” 

After analyzing data from the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA gravitational wave detectors, MIT researchers have found that 14% of black holes may be second-generation, formed by the merger of two smaller black holes, writes Gayoung Lee for Gizmodo. The scientists “created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above,” Lee explains.