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The poetry of data

These poems are just a few of the many in Muschenetz’s latest book that wrestle with contemporary social issues using a combination of data-driven insights and the poetic form. The format is... Read more »

The man who reinvented the hammer

In the early 2000s, while working at a company then called Nanotechnologies, Schroder was applying the concept of pulsed power, a subfield of physics and electrical engineering he’d studied at MIT, to... Read more »

Studying the uninvited guests

Mitchell has been working with samples collected by a local biotech company developing biotherapeutics for the gut. Its probiotic products, which are used to treat recurrent C. diff infections, contain eight closely... Read more »

Michael ’87 and Kathleen Schoen

As an undergraduate, Michael Schoen ’87 found that joining his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, and participating in team sports helped him make the most of his years at MIT. “MIT changed my life,”... Read more »

Turning a seaweed crisis into an energy opportunity

After mixing wastewater from the rum distillery with sargassum, they ran some experiments in the lab. “And the thing is, it worked!” says Henry, who has a master’s in mechanical engineering from... Read more »

The Download: our relationships with robots, and DOGE’s AI plans

Thankfully, the difference between humans and machines in the real world is easy to discern, at least for now. While machines tend to excel at things adults find difficult—playing world-champion-level chess, say,... Read more »

How AI is used to surveil workers

Elon Musk has long alleged that AI models suppress conservative speech. In response, he promised that his company xAI’s AI model, Grok, would be “maximally truth-seeking” (though, as we’ve pointed out previously,... Read more »

Are friends electric?

This discrepancy between the relative ease of teaching a machine abstract thinking and the difficulty of teaching it basic sensory, social, and motor skills is what’s known as Moravec’s paradox. Named after... Read more »

8,000 pregnant women may die because of US aid cuts to reproductive care

Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching... Read more »

The Download: workplace surveillance, and fighting EV fires

Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-­ending consequences if your productivity flags.  But what matters even more than... Read more »