In a two-part paper, a team of scientists from MIT, Caltech and University of Technology in Munich examined network coding and ways to both minimize error and maximize capacity. In its early years, information theory — which grew out of a landmark 1948 paper by MIT alumnus and future professor Claude Shannon — was dominated [...]

While exposure to low-dose-rate radiation from cosmic radiation and natural radioactive isotopes in the environment is part of everyday life, a new study from MIT measures the genetic damage of low doses of radiation delivered over a long period of time. A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine [...]

A new study from MIT shows that staggering the delivery of cancer drugs is far more effective than administering them at the same time. The research team found the using erlotinib between four and 48 hours before doxorubicin dramatically increased cancer-cell death, killing up to 50 percent of triple-negative cells. Doctors have long known that [...]

Focusing on balance between her family, religion and work with carbon nanomaterials, Jing Kong has found a home at MIT and has pioneered a new method of producing large sheets of graphene. A life in academia was a natural career path for Jing Kong, the daughter of two Chinese academics at Tianjin Finance and Economics [...]

Sitting 40 million light-years away, researchers were able to gain a better understand of 55 Cancri e and its environment. Using observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the team found that its temperature is roughly 2,360 degrees Kelvin and that 55 Cancri e orbits its star much like the moon circles Earth. Scientists on a [...]

Customizing spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel is continuing to get easier and more efficient. Developed by an MIT graduate student and Microsoft researcher, a new system lets Excel users customize their spreadsheets by giving a few examples of how they want data processed and some of this work is already being implemented in beta tests. Microsoft’s [...]

Robots may to be moving from the assembly line to neurosurgery before you know it. Using a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm, scientists at Georgia Tech and MIT have developed a method to identify and record neurons in a living mouse brain with better accuracy and speed than a human. Gaining access [...]

If an effort to target bacteria that has become increasingly resistant to existing drugs, engineers specializing in nanomedicine and biomaterials have developed a nanoparticle that is designed to evade the immune system and target infection sites, unleash a focused antibiotic attack. Over the past several decades, scientists have faced challenges in developing new antibiotics even [...]

Hydrogels have been in the marketplace for a long time, offering diverse properties that make them ideal for applications on a number of consumer products. During the last few years, researchers started exploring their use in potential drug delivery applications but were lacking the control they needed, until now. A team of engineers studying the [...]

Personal computers and corporate computers have long been susceptible to hackers, but now savvy hackers are using cloud technology to their advantage to steal a computer’s secrets. The increase in cloud computing allows hackers to load a bit of code on a server in the cloud and eavesdrop on other applications it’s running, luckily cryptographers [...]

In an effort to reduce food loss due to spoilage, MIT researchers developed a new sensor that detects tiny amounts of ethylene, a gas that promotes ripening in plants. The low cost sensors are made from sheets of rolled carbon nanotubes with added copper atoms and cost roughly 25 cents, while adding a RFID chip [...]

Are you tried of foggy windows on rainy days and glare coming off your TV screen? Scientists at MIT have developed a new process of creating glass that uses surface nanotextures that are self-cleaning and resists fogging and glare. The researchers believe this “multifunctional” glass could improve upon a variety of products from photovoltaic panels [...]