Nightingale Health’s blood analysis technology has been chosen from hundreds of applications to be presented at the Solve pitch event at United Nations headquarters in March. Solve is a program led by MIT seeking solutions for the world's most challenging problems: refugee education, carbon emissions and in this case, chronic diseases. Nightingale Health is a pioneering healthcare company. Their unique solution was chosen as one of 15 ...

Engineers and biologists at MIT have teamed up to design a “living material” — a tough, stretchy, biocompatible sheet of hydrogel injected with live cells that are genetically programmed to light up in the presence of certain chemicals. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate the new material’s potential for sensing chemicals, both in the environmen...

Determining the exact configuration of proteins and other complex biological molecules is an important step toward understanding their functions, including how they bind with receptors in the body. But such imaging is difficult to do. It usually requires the molecules to be crystallised first so that X-ray diffraction techniques can be applied — and not all such molecules can be crystallised.

Sequencing messenger RNA molecules from individual cells offers a glimpse into the lives of those cells, revealing what they’re doing at a particular time. However, the equipment required to do this kind of analysis is cumbersome and not widely available. MIT researchers have now developed a portable technology that can rapidly prepare the RNA of many cells for sequencing simultaneously, which they believe will enable more widespread u...

The search for planets beyond our solar system is about to gain some new recruits. Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is now available to the public, along with an open-source softwar...

Counterfeit chargers for portable electronics are a major problem. At the end of 2016, Apple claimed that of 100 Apple-branded charging accessories it bought on Amazon, 90 were counterfeits. Around the same time, Britain’s Chartered Trading Standards Institute reported that of 400 counterfeit chargers it bought from a range of online retailers, 397 failed a basic safety test.

  For the first time, a team at MIT has probed the mechanical properties of a sulfide-based solid electrolyte material, to determine its mechanical performance when incorporated into batteries.

Engineers at MIT have fabricated transparent, gel-based robots that move when water is pumped in and out of them. The bots can perform a number of fast, forceful tasks, including kicking a ball underwater, and grabbing and releasing a live fish. The robots are made entirely of hydrogel — a tough, rubbery, nearly transparent material that’s composed mostly of water. Each robot is an assemblage of hollow, precisely designed hydroge...

  Equipped with high-tech versions of common city fixtures — namely, smart benches and digital information signs — and fueled by a “deploy or die” attitude, MIT Media Lab spinout Changing Environments is hoping to accelerate the development of “smart” cities that use technology to solve urban challenges.

  MIT and Conservation International (CI) will participate in a multiyear collaboration to develop and advance nature-based solutions to global climate change, through research, education, and outreach efforts, the organisations announced.

Compilers are programs that convert computer code written in high-level languages intelligible to humans into low-level instructions executable by machines. But there’s more than one way to implement a given computation, and modern compilers extensively analyse the code they process, trying to deduce the implementations that will maximise the efficiency of the resulting software.

MIT engineers have designed sensors that can detect single protein molecules as they are secreted by cells or even a single cell. These sensors, which consist of chemically modified carbon nanotubes, could help scientists with any application that requires detecting very small amounts of protein, such as tracking viral infection, monitoring cells’ manufacturing of useful proteins, or revealing food contamination, the researchers say.

A team of chemists at MIT and Boston College has discovered a new type of catalyst that can incorporate a trifluoromethyl group within a variety of organic molecules. The availability of these exceptionally efficient and selective catalysts should allow researchers to rapidly generate potential new fluorinated drugs, including antibiotics and anticancer agents, for testing. The catalysts use a nontoxic foam-blowing agent (which is convention...

The age of big data has seen a host of new techniques for analysing large data sets. But before any of those techniques can be applied, the target data has to be aggregated, organised, and cleaned up. That turns out to be a shockingly time-consuming task. In a 2016 survey, 80 data scientists told the company CrowdFlower that, on average, they spent 80% of their time collecting and organising data and only 20% analysing it.

  MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice.

Are humans taking more resources from the Earth than the planet can safely produce? The answer lies partly in whether we can “dematerialise,” or reduce the amount of materials needed to produce goods and services. While some scientists believe that the world can achieve significant dematerialisation through improvements in technology, a new MIT-led study finds that technological advances alone will not bring about dematerialisati...

A coating called LiquiGlide is set to make the transition from the laboratory to consumer and industrial markets, according to MIT mechanical engineer Kripa Varanasi and his students. LiquiGlide renders a surface highly slippery and allows every last drop of ketchup — or almost any other viscous product, from paint, to glue, to cosmetics — to flow from its container without sticking, saving billions of gallons of product fro...

The top 2 inches of topsoil on all of Earth’s landmasses contains an infinitesimal fraction of the planet’s water — less than one-thousandth of a percent. Yet because of its position at the interface between the land and the atmosphere, that tiny amount plays a crucial role in everything from agriculture to weather and climate, and even the spread of disease.

MIT engineers have genetically reprogrammed a strain of yeast so that it converts sugars to fats much more efficiently, an advance that could make possible the renewable production of high-energy fuels such as diesel. The researchers, led by Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at MIT, modified the metabolic pathways of yeast that naturally produce large quantities of lipids, to ma...

3D printing technology makes it possible to rapidly manufacture objects by depositing layer upon layer of polymers in a precisely determined pattern. Once these objects are completed, the polymers that form the material are “dead” — that is, they cannot be extended to form new polymer chains. MIT chemists have now developed a technique that allows them to print objects and then go back and add new polymers that alter the ma...