Here’s a problem you probably didn’t solve in school: You’re an ambitious young plumber from Brooklyn in a world inhabited by violent human-size mushrooms called Goombas. The love of your life has been kidnapped, so you embark on a quest to rescue her, venturing through stretches of pipe-filled and monster-­ridden terrain where your only means…

Rob Morris, SM ’09, PhD ’15, didn’t know where to turn when he first felt symptoms of depression as a teenager: “I had no exposure to healthy coping strategies. I had no vocabulary for what was happening to me.”  That experience, he says, has driven his work on Koko, a tech nonprofit that grew out of…

If you’ve been to an eye doctor and had an image taken of the inside of your eye, chances are good it was done with optical coherence tomography (OCT)—a technology invented by clinician-scientist David Huang ’85, SM ’89, PhD ’93, and now used in 40 million procedures per year.  OCT is a noninvasive technique used…

A long stretch of humid heat followed by a powerful thunderstorm is a familiar weather pattern in the tropics, but it’s also becoming more common in midlatitude regions such as the US Midwest. A recent study by two MIT scientists identifies a key atmospheric condition that determines how hot, humid, and stormy such a region…

Heat generated by electronic devices is usually a problem, but a team led by Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has found a way to use it for data processing that doesn’t rely on electricity. In this analog computing method, input data is encoded not as binary 1s and 0s…

Around 2.3 billion years ago, a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life on Earth. But MIT geobiologists and colleagues have found evidence that some early forms of life evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before that. By mapping enzyme sequences from…

How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It’s hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an emerging tool called transcranial focused ultrasound. This noninvasive technology…

Embedded in the body’s mucosal surfaces, proteins called lectins bind to sugars found on cell surfaces. A team led by MIT chemistry professor Laura Kiessling has found that one such protein, intelectin-2, both helps fortify the mucosal barrier and offers broad-spectrum protection against harmful bacteria found in the GI tract.  Intelectin-2 binds to a sugar…

Single-use plastics are a persistent source of environmental pollution, and the need to house a growing global population puts increasing pressure on resources such as timber. MIT engineers have an idea that could make a dent in both problems at once. In a recent study, a team led by mechanical engineering professor David Hardt, SM…

Brenda Schafer Kennedy, SM ’93, knows that sometimes the best medicine comes with four legs and fur. Kennedy is the chief veterinary and research officer for Canine Companions, a California-based, nationwide organization that provides assistance dogs at no cost to children, veterans, and adults with disabilities.  “The need is enormous: One in four people in…