MIT Technology Review

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 as a member of the Expedition 73 crew. “Wow, 25 years of constant human habitation in space!” he said when he spoke with me from the station in September. “What an accomplishment and a testimony to the teams on the ground and in terms of engineering, science, and diplomacy.” 

Building and…

Building on Dresselhaus’s far-reaching foundational research, scientists and engineers have made enormous advances at the nanoscale—with structures on the order of one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair. Spherical carbon “buckyballs,” cylindrical carbon nanotubes, and two-dimensional carbon sheets known as graphene have already been used for energy storage, medical research, building materials, and paper-thin electronics, among many other applications. Today, these carbon structures…

COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

In the new study, the researchers developed a procedure to insert a titanium rod into the residual femur bone of people who had amputations above the knee. This implant allows for better mechanical control and load bearing than a traditional prosthesis. It also contains 16 wires that collect information from electrodes located on the AMI muscles inside…

Since tropical forests are Earth’s largest land-based carbon sink, such challenges make it harder to fight climate change. But the influence of biodiversity on forests’ ability to absorb carbon has not been fully quantified.

To do that, the researchers looked at data on where seed-dispersing animals live, how many seeds each animal disperses, and how they affect germination. Then they incorporated data revealing the impact of human activity such as hunting and forest degradation. They found, for…

The top candidates they discovered are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics, and they appear to work by novel mechanisms that disrupt bacterial cell membranes. This makes them less vulnerable to antibiotic resistance, a growing problem: It is estimated that drug-­resistant bacterial infections cause nearly 5 million deaths per year worldwide.

Now that they can generate and evaluate compounds that have never been seen before, the researchers hope they can use the same strategy to…

City life is often described as “fast-paced.” A study coauthored by MIT scholars suggests that’s more true than ever: The average walking speed in three northeastern US cities increased 15% from 1980 to 2010, while the number of people lingering in public spaces declined by 14%.

The researchers used machine-learning tools to assess 1980s-era video footage captured in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia by William Whyte, an urbanist and social thinker best known as the author of The Organization…

Like almost any MIT student, Mason Estrada wants to take what he learned on campus and apply it to the working world. Unlike any other current MIT student, Estrada’s primary workplace is a pitcher’s mound.

Estrada, the star pitcher for MIT’s baseball team, has signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who selected him in the seventh round of the Major League Baseball draft on July 14. The right-hander, whose fastball has reached 96 miles per hour, is taking a leave of absence from the…

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 cells. 

Join these cells together in the right way, and they will spontaneously attempt to organize into an embryo—a feat that’s opening up the earliest phases of development to scientific scrutiny and may lead to a new source of tissue for transplant medicine.

Hanna is the vanguard of a wider movement…