MIT News

Headlines from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology News Office.

• Model helps computers sort data more like humans

  In an advance that may impact the field of artificial intelligence, a new model developed at MIT can help computers recognize patterns the same way that humans do. The model can analyze a set of data and figure out which type of organizational structure best fits it.

• Invoking da Vinci, Hockfield welcomes freshmen

  MIT President Susan Hockfield invoked the spirit of the intellectually ravenous Leonardo da Vinci as she welcomed the Institute's newest students and challenged them to cultivate their own insatiable desire for knowledge.

• Call of the wild

  What started out as an MIT project aimed at monitoring owls in their natural environment has grown into an international collaboration on how to use widespread networks of citizen-scientists to gain new insights into a wide variety of species.

• Beyond jewelry: Engineering new uses for gold

  The glitter of gold may hold more than just beauty, or so says a team of MIT researchers that is working on ways to use tiny gold rods to fight cancer, deliver drugs and more. But first they must overcome one major difficulty: the rods' surface.

• U.S. News ranks MIT 4th overall

  MIT ranks fourth among national universities and first in undergraduate engineering, according to U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings released today. In the overall university rankings, MIT shares the number four slot with Stanford.

• MIT zeroes in on Alzheimer's structures

  MIT engineers report a new computer-based approach to identifying protein structures key to Alzheimer's disease, an important step toward the development of new drugs that could prevent such structures from forming.

• Understanding climate change complacency

  Why is the general public not more concerned about the potential consequences of climate change? MIT Professor John Sterman's research suggests that people don't have good mental models for understanding the phenomenon.

• MIT engineers work toward cell-sized batteries

  Forget 9-volts, AAs, AAAs or D batteries: The energy for tomorrow's miniature electronic devices could come from MIT-developed microbatteries that are about half the size of a human cell and built with viruses.

• Energy policies fuel economist's comments

  As jittery consumers contemplate the price at the pump, energy issues have become a major factor in the U.S. presidential race. Have the candidates forthrightly addressed the country's energy needs? Not really, says MIT professor Robert S. Pindyck.

• Building microchips from the bottom up

  Using a novel system based on molecules that can assemble themselves into precise patterns, MIT researchers have overcome size limitations that would otherwise crimp improvements in data-storage media and electronic microchips.