Author: zppiot

Engineers are renowned clock-problem solvers. They’re also notorious for treating every problem like a clock. Increasing specialization and cultural expectations play a role in this tendency. But so do engineers themselves, who are typically the ones who get to frame the problems they’re trying to solve in the first place.  In his latest book, Wicked Problems, Guru Madhavan argues that the growing number of cloudy problems in our world demands a broader, more civic-minded approach to engineering. “Wickedness” is Madhavan’s way of characterizing what he calls “the cloudiest of problems.” It’s a nod to a now-famous coinage by Horst Rittel…

Last week, my colleague James O’Donnell wrote about a report by the think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that analyzed the role of drones in a potential war in the Taiwan Strait. Right now, both Ukraine and Russia are still finding ways to source drones or drone parts from Chinese companies, but it’d be much harder for Taiwan to do so, since it would be in China’s interest to block its opponent’s supply. “So Taiwan is effectively cut off from the world’s foremost commercial drone supplier and must either make its own drones or find alternative manufacturers,…

And with that, play starts to become something different. Not that it can’t still be fun and joyful! Even watching other people play will bring us joy. We enjoy watching other people play so much and get so much joy by proxy from watching their achievements that we spend massive amounts of money to do so. According to StubHub, the average price of a ticket to the Super Bowl this year was $8,600. The average price for a Super Bowl ad was a cool $7 million this year, according to Ad Age.  This kind of interest doesn’t just apply to…

Being one of those few women was not easy. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she continued at MIT for graduate school, the field of biology had a culture of what she calls “unchecked harassment.” There was no way to complain without retribution. “That kind of culture created intimidation,” she says. “If you go through incidents of harassment, you become more vigilant.” Male colleagues had to be treated as male colleagues, not as colleagues. Still, she says, there were “a lot of helpful people.” Many of those helpful people were those she encountered in the Margaret Cheney Room, a Building…

Chen’s research suggests it doesn’t have to be that way. She investigates the interaction between sex differences, stress, and mental illnesses, and her work could lead to some of the first female-specific treatments for depression, PTSD, and anxiety.  Chen finds it baffling that women and men receive the same medical treatments for psychiatric disorders when the differences between them are so significant—not only biologically, but also in terms of howthey experience the same illnesses. Women, for example, are more likely to have anxiety alongside depression. In men, on the other hand, depression is likelier to coincide with substance abuse disorders. …

Unshrinking joins the growing literature on anti-fat bias, including the work of sociologist Sabrina Strings, whose book Fearing the Black Body details its racist origins, tracing the shift from the admiration of plumpness as a sign of wealth to the vilification of fat that she argues developed alongside the transatlantic slave trade. Like recent books by Aubrey Gordon and journalist Virginia Sole-Smith, Manne’s uses scientific research to debunk pervasive misconceptions—for example, about the extent to which people can control the size of their bodies—and even to counter the idea that obesity is a disease that requires a cure or large-scale…

It’s hard not to laugh at NASA’s blooper reel of astronauts falling and bouncing in slow motion on the moon. But coping with inertia where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth is no laughing matter when you’re wearing a constricting space suit and need to finish an exhausting task. So mechanical engineering professor Harry Asada (center) and colleagues are developing wearable robotic limbs to help astronauts get back on their feet after a fall. Based on the “SuperLimbs” Asada designed to assist construction workers and ship builders, the limbs extend from a backpack that would also contain the astronaut’s life…

What they propose is a series of vertical cylinders, each surrounded by four long, rudder-like slats. The engineers found that this structure efficiently breaks a wave into turbulent jets, ultimately dissipating most of its total energy.   MIT researchers test the wave-breaking performance of two artificial reef structures in the MIT Towing Tank.COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS Researchers at the MIT Sea Grant had noticed that cylindrical blowout-preventing valves in offshore oil and gas wells generated a high amount of drag and wondered if a similar structure could help tame waves. They collaborated on the design with researchers at the Center…

The study also revealed that the liver is more susceptible to infections such as malaria at certain points in the circadian cycle, when fewer inflammatory proteins are being produced—possibly because its response to pathogens declines after meals, when it has typically been exposed to an influx of microorganisms that might trigger inflammation even if they are not harmful.  “One of the earliest applications for this method could be fine-tuning drug regimens of already approved drugs to maximize their efficacy and minimize their toxicity,” says Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer…

The finding could help explain a phenomenon that has mystified climate scientists for more than 80 years, in which clouds are measured to be absorbing more sunlight than conventional physics holds possible: the additional evaporation could account for the discrepancy. This realization could alter calculations of how climate change affects cloud cover and precipitation. The photomolecular effect could also be harnessed for industrial processes such as desalinating water or drying materials. “I think this has a lot of applications,” says engineering professor Gang Chen, who wrote a paper on the work with postdocs Guangxin Lv and Yaodong Tu and graduate student…

Colonoscopies are a boon for preventing colon cancer, but patients may develop gastrointestinal bleeding or dangerous small tears in the intestine if doctors end up having to remove polyps in the process. Now MIT researchers have developed a gel that can be sprayed through an endoscope onto the surgical sites, where it instantly forms a tough but flexible layer that protects the damaged area, reinforces the tissue, and allows it to heal. In an animal study, the researchers showed that the gel, called GastroShield, is simple to apply in the course of current endoscopic procedures and provides wound protection for…

Most people’s sweat contains a protein that can prevent Lyme disease, researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have discovered. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a less protective variant that makes the tick-borne infection more likely. By running a genome-wide association study, the researchers identified three variants more common in people who’d had Lyme disease. One—in a gene for a secretoglobin, a type of protein that in this case is produced primarily in the sweat glands—was previously unknown. In vitro, it significantly inhibited growth of Lyme-causing bacteria, but a variant version required twice as…

Measurements-Based Radar Signature Modeling: An Analysis FrameworkBy Joseph T. Mayhan, senior staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the late John A. Tabaczynski ’60, former leader of the Ballistic Missile Defense Analysis Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory  MIT PRESS, 2024, $125 Molecular Mechanisms in Materials: Insights from Atomistic Modeling and SimulationBy Sidney Yip, professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering and materials science MIT PRESS, 2023, $50 Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust StatisticsBy Ilias Diakonikolas and Daniel M. Kane ’07CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2023, $59.99 Private Equity: A MemoirBy Carrie Sun ’07PENGUIN PRESS, 2024, $29 African Cinema in a Global AgeBy Kenneth W. Harrow…

At Cardiff University in Wales, Christopher Thomas, Oliver Castell, and Sion Coulman had similar success building an instrument capable of printing cells. The researchers study skin diseases, lipids (fatty compounds) in the body, and wound healing. Ethically obtained samples are hard to find, so they created a 3D bioprinter out of Lego pieces that is capable of “printing” a human skin analogue, laying down layers of bio-ink that contains living cells. These printers normally cost over a quarter of a million dollars, but they built their version for a mere $550. At first, their colleagues were skeptical that components typically…

Two voice actors are suing an artificial intelligence startup in a proposed federal class action lawsuit for violating trademark laws, to train their AI.Paul Skey Lehrman and Linnea Sage were hired by Lovo, an AI company, back in 2019 and 2020 to provide voice clips for what they were told would be internal research.”On three occasions in writing they had given me assurances of how and where it would be used for internal purposes only and never forward facing,” Lehrman said. But two years later, Lehrman said he was shocked when he heard his voice on a YouTube video and…

Economic innovations, notably AI and electric vehicles, are also increasing industrial demand for water. “When you look at advanced manufacturing and the way technology is changing, we’re requiring more, higher volumes of ultrapure water [UPW]. This is a big driver of the industrial water market,” Simm says. AI, computing, and the electric vehicle industries all generate immense quantities of heat and require sophisticated cooling and cleaning. Manufacturing silicon wafers for semiconductor production involves intricate cleaning processes, requiring up to 5 million gallons of high-quality UPW daily. With rising demand for semiconductors, improvements in water treatment and reuse are imperative to…