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25 years of research in space

One of MIT’s most experienced NASA astronauts, Mike Fincke ’89, is celebrating that milestone from space. Having already logged 381 days in three previous missions to the ISS, he returned on August 1... Read more »

Infinite folds

“The main reason why I draw the patterns out first, besides the fact that the designs have gotten too complicated for me to hold in my brain and solve on the fly,... Read more »

Engineering better care

For a lab of this size—spread across MIT, the Broad, the Brigham, the Koch Institute, and The Engine—it feels remarkably personal. Traverso, who holds the Karl Van Tassel (1925) Career Development Professorship,... Read more »

The Download: embryo ethics, and reducing chatbot risks

Instead of relying on the same old recipe biology has followed for a billion years, give or take, stem-cell scientist Jacob Hanna is coaxing the beginnings of animal bodies directly from stem... Read more »

New noninvasive endometriosis tests are on the rise

Endometriosis biomarker tests rely on a range of technologies, including single-cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry that can identify thousands of proteins simultaneously. “These instruments are very good at precisely identifying a... Read more »

Why AI should be able to “hang up” on you

In many of these cases, it seems AI models were reinforcing, and potentially even creating, delusions with a frequency and intimacy that people do not experience in real life or through other... Read more »

The astonishing embryo models of Jacob Hanna

Another policy under pressure is the “14-day rule,” a widely employed convention that natural embryos should not be grown longer than two weeks in the lab. Though it’s a mostly arbitrary stopping... Read more »

Fold your own tessellation

Watch the video tutorial on folding Dancing Ribbons here. Yoder’s detailed folding instructions: Once you have your crease pattern on a sheet of paper, cut out the hexagon that contains the pattern.... Read more »

The Download: a promising retina implant, and how climate change affects flowers

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 AWS is recovering from a major outage It’s racing to get hundreds of apps and services back online. (The... Read more »

This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle

Artificial vision systems have been studied for years and one, called the Argus II, even reached the market and was installed in the eyes of about 400 people. But that product was... Read more »