School of Science

The MIT Educational Justice Initiative has developed a 12-week program called Brave Behind Bars that teaches inmates “basic coding languages such as JavaScript and HTML in hopes of opening the door for detainees to one day pursue high-paying jobs,” reports Washington Post reporter Emily Davies. “The level of 21st century technology skills they just learned, I can’t do those things,” said Amy Lopez, deputy director of college and career readiness for the D.C. Department of Corrections. “They are transferrable, employable skills.”

A study by MIT researchers finds that the screening test used for autism creates a gender gap that impedes diagnosis and treatment for women and girls, reports Sydney Murphy for Health Day. The researchers found that “a screening test often used to decide who can take part in autism studies seems to exclude a much higher percentage of women than men,” writes Murphy.

The Venus Life Finder (VLF) developed by scientists at MIT will be launched on a Rocket lab Electronic in May of 2023 to search for life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, reports Mark R. Whittington for The Hill. “When it plunges into Venus’ atmosphere it will use an instrument called the ‘autofluorescing nephelometer’ that will use a laser to illuminate organic molecules that may or may not exist 50 kilometers above the planet’s surface,” writes Whittington.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that women being excluded from studies on autism can hinder diagnoses and the development of useful interventions for women and girls, reports Gianna Melillo for The Hill. “Female diagnoses could be missed altogether and an already small pool of study subjects is further reduced,” writes Melillo.

Prof. Edward Boyden has developed a new imaging technique called expansion-revealing microscopy that can reveal tiny protein structures in tissues, reports The Economist. “Already his team at MIT has used it to reveal detail in synapses, the nanometer-sized junctions between nerve cells, and also to shed light on the mechanisms at play in Alzheimer’s disease, revealing occasional spirals of amyloid-beta protein around axons, which are the threadlike parts of nerve cells that carry electrical impulses.”

Helen Santoro, a participant in Prof. Evelina Fedorenko’s “Interesting Brain Project,” writes about her experience for The New York Times. “In April, I wrote Dr. Fedorenko an email telling her about my missing left temporal lobe and offering to be part of her research,” explains Santoro. “She replied four and a half hours later, and soon I was booking an airplane ticket from my home in rural Colorado to Boston.”

Researchers at MIT have discovered that pictures of food appear to stimulate strong reactions among specific sets of neurons in the human brain, a trait that could have evolved due to the importance of food for humans, reports Sascha Pare for The Guardian. “The researchers posit these neurons have gone undetected because they are spread across the other specialized cluster for faces, places, bodies and words, rather than concentrated in one region,” writes Pare.

Prof. Sara Seager and her team have organized three  missions to Venus to search for signs of life in the clouds surrounding the planet, reports David Axe for the Daily Beast. Each mission “would fling a probe into the toxic planet’s acidic atmosphere and collect data on the presence, or absence, of something resembling life,” explains Axe.

Prof. Jörn Dunkel and his colleagues have proposed the use of nematic liquid crystals as the potential future basic building blocks for computers, reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for New Scientist. According to Dunkel, “because the liquid crystal computer wouldn’t use only 0s and 1s, some of its computations would be analogous to how quantum computers work, as they can simultaneously process more information than conventional computers,” writes Padavic-Callaghan.

Prof. Mircea Dincă and Grama Sorin co-founded Transaera, a company dedicated to designing air conditioners that require significantly less energy, reports Scott Kirsner for The Boston Globe. “Grama and Dincă cofounded Transaera in 2018 and supported their early work with about $2 million in state and federal grants, from agencies that included the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center,” writes Kirsner.

Forbes contributor Russell Flannery spotlights how Prof. Tyler Jacks has “made a mark in cancer work not only by his research but his ability to bring different organizations together.” Jacks discussed the Biden administration’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative and noted that: “Having specific goals and an action plan for cancer is important. Having a strategy about how to approach the cancer problem is equally important.”

Prof. Julien de Wit speaks with Newsweek reporter Ed Browne about the wealth of information that the James Webb telescope will be providing about the universe. "In terms of information content, we're pretty much going from listening to the radio, to having television," said de Wit.

Prof. Yoel Fink speaks with Washington Post reporter Pranshu Verma about the growing field of smart textiles and his work creating fabrics embedded with computational power. Fink and his colleagues “have created fibers with hundreds of silicon microchips to transmit digital signals — essential if clothes are to automatically track things like heart rate or foot swelling. These fibers are small enough to pass through a needle that can be sown into fabric and washed at least 10 times.”

MIT researchers have found a way to amplify the signals from particles in quantum relationships to make them easier to read, reports Juandre for Popular Mechanics. “Their method could lead the way to better measurements of many tiny phenomena, from atomic clocks to the search for elusive dark matter,” writes Juandre.

MIT scientists have used custom software and maple plywood to create “The Cosmic Cliffs Infinite Galaxy Puzzle” based on the newfound images from the James Webb Space Telescope, reports Elissaveta M. Brandon for Fast Company. The 264-count puzzle contains “squiggly pieces that can be reconfigured in endless ways” writes Brandon.