Latest Stories
Our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies, coordinating 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments to perform countless nuanced movements and gestures. So far, robots have been notoriously bad at mimicking that dexterity, in part because researchers struggle to capture what is actually going on under our skin in order…
The national conversation about the value of education is currently dominated by speculation about the risks and positive potential of AI. Whatever your own perspective on that debate, I hope you’ll be glad to know that MIT is also working on a deeply important but comparatively old-fashioned challenge: American high school students’ startlingly uneven access…
Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word…
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…
TSMC manufactures the vast majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and its powerful partnerships create entry barriers for potential competitors.
Autonomous agents' drive for self-preservation and resorting to immoral practices to achieve their goals will almost certainly arise from the architecture and training of LLMs.
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…
Recommendations for communicating with the public about the positive impact of scientific work on their everyday lives.
