From MIT Technology Review
-
A linguistic warning sign for dementia
Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early—when any available treatments are likely…
-
The energy transition’s effects on jobs
A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on…
-
An invisibility cloak for would-be cancers
One of the immune system’s roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to survive. A new study on colon cancer from MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one reason why: they turn on a gene called SOX17, which renders them essentially invisible…
-
What’s one memento you kept from your time at MIT?
Alumni leave MIT armed with knowledge and a whole lot of memories. During Tech Reunions in 2023, the MIT Alumni Association asked returning alums what else they had held onto since leaving campus. Here are just a few of their responses. Check out the recent MIT alumni video about physical objects grads have kept—and why…
-
I went to COP28. Now the real work begins.
As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I’ve experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation’s struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can’t always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation,…
-
Taking on climate change, Rad Lab style
When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT’s Climate Project. Now that it’s underway, I’d like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise. In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president’s job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously…
-
Raman to go
For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the…
-
A walking antidote to political cynicism
Burhan Azeem ’19 had never been to a city council meeting before he showed up to give a public comment on an affordable-housing bill his senior year. Walking around Cambridge, he saw a “young, dynamic, racially diverse city,” but when he stepped inside City Hall, most of the others who had arrived to present comments…
-
“I wanted to work on something that didn’t exist”
In 2017 Polina Anikeeva, PhD ’09, was invited to a conference in the Netherlands to give a talk about magnetic technologies that she and her team had developed at MIT and how they might be used for deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease. After sitting through a long day of lectures, she was struck…
-
A Grammy for Miguel Zenón
Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors are nearly routine at MIT, but a Grammy Award is something we don’t see every year. That’s what Miguel Zenón, an assistant professor of music and theater arts, has won: El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2, which he recorded with the pianist and composer Luis Perdomo, received the Grammy…
-
The Download: saving seals with artificial snow, and AI’s effects on politics
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change For millennia, during Finland’s blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved…
-
These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change
Just before 10 a.m., hydrobiologist Jari Ilmonen and his team of six step out across a flat, half-mile-wide disk of snow and ice. For half the year this vast clearing is open water, the tip of one arm of the labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland’s biggest lake, which reaches almost to Russia’s western border. As each…