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The Download: war in Europe, and the company that wants to cool the planet

Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web,” as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog in the damp forests of Estonia’s eastern... Read more »

LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what’s a parameter?

When a model is trained, each word in its vocabulary is assigned a numerical value that captures the meaning of that word in relation to all the other words, based on how... Read more »

The man who made India digital isn’t done yet

It sounds almost wild-eyed. Yet the finternet project has 30 partners across four continents. Nilekani says it’ll launch next year. A call to service Nilekani was born in Bengaluru, in 1955. His... Read more »

Building materials are getting closer to doubling as batteries

A weight-bearing arch made of electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3) integrates supercapacitor electrodes to power a light.MIT EC³ HUB The researchers achieved this progress by using high-resolution 3D imaging to learn more about... Read more »

Listening to battery failure

“Through some careful scientific work, our team has managed to decode the acoustic emissions,” says Martin Z. Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering and mathematics. They were able to classify them as... Read more »

Under 10% of an earthquake’s energy makes the ground shake

Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over millennia—energy that, once released, we perceive mainly in the form of the ground’s shaking. But a quake also generates a flash of... Read more »

Secrets of the sleep-deprived brain

To explore what might happen to this CSF flow in a sleep-deprived brain, Lewis, who is also a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and her colleagues tested 26... Read more »

Investing in the promise of quantum

Like all MIT’s strategic priorities, QMIT will help ensure that new technologies are used for the benefit of society. Faculty director Danna Freedman, the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry, is leading... Read more »

Hands-on engineering

Located in the basement of Building 26, the BioMaker Space welcomes novices and expert mentors alike, offering workshops in such things as bacterial photography, biobots, lateral flow assay, CRISPR, and DNA origami.... Read more »

Dennis Whyte’s fusion quest

Dennis Whyte, then director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, describes efforts to address climate change through carbon-free power at a conference in 2019.GRETCHEN ERTL The idea is straightforward: Fill the... Read more »