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Barbie meets Dr. Who

On the first day of fall class registration, a Barbie-themed TARDIS, the time-traveling spaceship from Doctor Who, appeared in the president’s office, courtesy of incoming first-years in Interphase EDGE/x, a scholar enrichment... Read more »

Superhero U

The brass rat Stark wears in the 2008 movie Iron Man is no coincidence. Readers of the 1996 comic Iron Man: The Legend learn that he graduated from MIT at 17 with... Read more »

Tapping into the ocean to combat climate change

Dean hopes to be involved in answering that question soon. At press time, WHOI was seeking EPA approval to undertake the first open-ocean test of OAE in the summer of 2024. The... Read more »

Shuffling the deck

Praneeth Namburi, PhD ’16  From neuroscience to biophysics of movement Twelve years ago, Praneeth Namburi made a detour in what turned out to be the right direction. Then a neuroscience grad student... Read more »

Heat-storing batteries are scaling up to solve one of climate’s dirtiest problems

The technology behind Antora’s thermal storage is surprisingly simple. Its modular battery system resembles a steel shipping container, filled with blocks of solid carbon—imagine a three-foot-tall, extremely hot cube—capable of remaining very... Read more »

The Download: poisoning generative AI, and heat-storing batteries

What’s happening: A new tool lets artists make invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it... Read more »

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

Every decision the spacecraft designers make has cascading effects. Science goals affect the instrument payload necessary for a successful mission. The instrument payload affects the command and data subsystems (which handle signals... Read more »

Death to captchas

That might solve some problems, but it would create others. The more complicated the challenge, the more cumbersome it is to do what you want to do on the web. And some... Read more »

How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor

“I don’t know what his secret has been. But he has been a tremendously successful advisor,” says Michael Sipser, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT who was advised by Blum, referring to... Read more »

This new tool could give artists an edge over AI

But artists are the canary in the coal mine. Their fight belongs to anyone who has ever posted anything they care about online. Our personal data, social media posts, song lyrics, news... Read more »