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A cell that does it all

From “The Troubled Hunt for the Ultimate Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards were given for the most intriguing, controversial, underfunded and hush-hush of scientific pursuits, the search for the human... Read more »

Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

A holistic approach: Gilbert works in the county’s Office of Resilience, which has people designated to work on sea-level rise, carbon mitigation, and waste reduction. “Together,” she says, “we make sure we... Read more »

Why I became a TechTrekker

My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in... Read more »

Long before Hillel, Jews found a home at MIT

Why didn’t Harvard fight for Samuelson? Possibly because he was Jewish. In 1940, Harvard was more than a decade into its program of intentionally suppressing the number of Jewish students and faculty... Read more »

The night sky of Cambridge

By day, Evan Kramer, SM ’22, works on his PhD in the Aero-Astro Space Systems Lab, developing a satellite tasking algorithm. (His goal is to efficiently tap into a network of satellites... Read more »

Richard Smallwood ’57, SM ’58, ScD ’62

The first in his family to graduate from college, Richard Smallwood ’57, SM ’58, ScD ’62, remembers arriving at MIT certain he would flunk out. “Stick it out,” he recalls being urged... Read more »

Like palm oil, but better for the planet

Palm oil is used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces and crackers, but its production can be environmentally devastating. Producers burn down rainforests and swamps to make way for plantations,... Read more »

Large language models may speed drug discovery

Computational models have been a major time saver when it comes to predicting which protein molecules could make effective drugs, but many of those methods themselves take a lot of time and... Read more »

Smart sutures for better healing

To make the updated version even more useful, the MIT team based it on a “decellularized” form of pig tissue they call “De-gut,” which provokes much less of an immune response from... Read more »

Diaper genius

By infusing a salt into a material used in disposable diapers, MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent gel that can soak up a record amount of moisture from even the driest air,... Read more »