MIT’s top research stories of 2024

MIT’s research community had another year full of scientific and technological advances in 2024. To celebrate the achievements of the past twelve months, MIT News highlights some of our most popular stories from this year. We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories.

  • 3-D printing with liquid metal: Researchers developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Their technique involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.
     
  • Tamper-proof ID tags: Engineers developed a tag that can reveal with near-perfect accuracy whether an item is real or fake. The key is in the glue that sticks the tag to the item. The team uses terahertz waves to authenticate items by recognizing a unique pattern of microscopic metal particles mixed into the glue.
     
  • Chatting with the future you: Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. The project is aimed at reducing anxiety and guiding young people to make better choices.
     
  • Converting CO2 into useful products: Engineers at MIT designed a new electrode that boosts the efficiency of electrochemical reactions to turn carbon dioxide into ethylene and other products.
     
  • Generative AI for databases: Researchers built GenSQL, a new generative AI tool that makes it easier for database users to perform complicated statistical analyses of tabular data without the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. The tool could help users make predictions, detect anomalies, guess missing values, fix errors, and more.
     
  • Reversing autoimmune-induced hair loss: A new microneedle patch delivers immune-regulating molecules to the scalp. The treatment teaches T cells not to attack hair follicles, promoting hair regrowth and offering a promising solution for individuals affected by alopecia areata and other autoimmune skin diseases.
     
  • Inside the LLM black box: Researchers demonstrated a technique that can be used to probe a large language model to see what it knows about new subjects. The technique showed the models use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge.
     
  • Sound-suppressing silk: An interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed a silk fabric, barely thicker than a human hair, that can suppress unwanted noise and reduce noise transmission in a large room.
     
  • Working out for your nervous system: Researchers found that when muscles work out, they help neurons to grow as well. The findings suggest that biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves.
     
  • Finding AI’s world model lacking: Researchers found that despite its impressive output, generative AI models don’t have a coherent understanding of the world. Large language models don’t form true models of the world and its rules, and can thus fail unexpectedly on similar tasks.

MIT community in 2024: A year in review

The year 2024 saw MIT moving forward on a number of new initiatives, including the launch of President Sally Kornbluth’s signature Climate Project at MIT, as well as two other major MIT collaborative projects, one focused around human-centered disciplines and another around the life sciences. The Institute also announced free tuition for all admitted students with family incomes below $200,000; honored commitments to ensure support for diverse voices; and opened a flurry of new buildings and spaces across campus. Here are some of the top stories from around the MIT community this year.

Climate Project takes flight

In February, President Kornbluth announced the sweeping Climate Project at MIT, a major campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems with all possible speed. The project focuses MIT’s strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed, and mission directors were selected for those areas in July. “The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,” Kornbluth said at a liftoff event in September. “It’s designed to focus the Institute’s talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.”

MIT Collaboratives

In the fall, Kornbluth announced two additional all-Institute collaborative efforts, designed to foster and support new alliances that will take on compelling global problems. The MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) aims to bring together scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences with colleagues across the Institute as a way to amplify MIT’s impact on challenges like climate change, artificial intelligence, pandemics, poverty, democracy, and more. Meanwhile, the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) will draw on MIT’s strengths in life sciences and other fields, including AI and chemical and biological engineering, to accelerate progress in improving patient care. Additional MIT collaborative projects are expected to follow in the months ahead.

Increased financial aid

MIT announced in November that undergraduates with family income below $200,000 —  a figure that applies to 80 percent of American households — can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. In addition, families with income below $100,000 can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses. President Kornbluth called the new cost structure, which will be paid for by MIT’s endowment, “an inter-generational gift from past MIT students to the students of today and tomorrow.”

Encouraging community dialogue

The Institute hosted a series of “Dialogues Across Difference,” guest lectures and campus conversations encouraging community members to speak openly and honestly about freedom of expression, race, meritocracy, and the intersections and potential conflicts among these issues. Invited speakers’ expertise helped cultivate civil discourse, critical thinking, and empathy among members of the community, and served as a platform for public discussions related to Standing Together Against Hate; the MIT Values Statement; the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition; the Faculty Statement on Free Expression; and other ongoing campus initiatives and debates.

Commencement

At Commencement, biotechnology leader Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 urged the MIT Class of 2024 to “accept impossible missions” for the betterment of the world. Afeyan is chair and co-founder of the biotechnology firm Moderna, whose groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccine has been distributed to billions of people in over 70 countries.

President Kornbluth lauded the Class of 2024 for being “a community that runs on an irrepressible combination of curiosity and creativity and drive. A community in which everyone you meet has something important to teach you. A community in which people expect excellence of themselves — and take great care of one another.”

Nobels and other top accolades

In October, Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor, and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with James Robinson of the University of Chicago, for their work on the relationship between economic growth and political institutions. MIT Department of Biology alumnus Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 also shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Gary Ruvkun, who completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute alongside Ambros in the 1980s. The two were honored for their discovery of MicroRNA. Earlier this month, the new laureates received their prizes in Stockholm during Nobel Week.

Earlier in the year, professors Nancy Kanwisher, Robert Langer, and Sara Seager were awarded prestigious Kavli Prizes, for their outstanding advances in the fields of neuroscience, nanoscience, and astrophysics, respectively.

Miguel Zenón, assistant professor of jazz, won a Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album of the year.

At MIT, professor of physics John Joannopoulos won this year’s Killian Award, the Institute’s highest faculty honor.

New and refreshed spaces

Quite a few new buildings opened, partially or in full, across the MIT campus this year. In the spring, the airy Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building, a new addition to the recently refurbished Green Building, was dedicated. The gleaming new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing building also opened its doors and hosted a naming ceremony.

The new home of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard University opened in the heart of Kendall Square in June, while the new Graduate Junction housing complex on Vassar Street opened over the summer.

And earlier this fall, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building opened for a selection of classes and will be fully operational in February 2025.

Student honors and awards

As is often the case, MIT undergraduates earned an impressive number of prestigious awards. In 2024, exceptional students were honored with Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, and Schwarzman scholarships, among many others.

For the fourth year in a row, MIT students earned all five top spots at the Putnam Mathematical Competition. And the women’s cross country team won a national championship for the first time.

Administrative transitions

A number of administrative leaders took on new roles in 2024. Ian Waitz was named vice president for research; Anantha Chandrakasan took on the new role of MIT chief innovation and strategy officer in addition to his existing role as dean of engineering; Melissa Choi was named director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Dimitris Bertsimas was named vice provost for open learning; Duane Boning was named vice provost for international activities; William Green was named director of the MIT Energy Initiative; Alison Badgett was named director of the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center; and Michael John Gorman was named director of the MIT Museum.

Remembering those we lost

Among MIT community members who died this year were Arvind, Hale Van Dorn Bradt, John Buttrick, Jonathan Byrnes, Jerome Connor, Owen Cote, Ralph Gakenheimer, Casey Harrington, James Harris, Ken Johnson, David Lanning, Francis Fan Lee, Mathieu Le Provost, John Little, Chasity Nunez, Elise O’Hara, Mary-Lou Pardue, Igor Paul, Edward Roberts, Peter Schiller, John Vander Sande, Bernhardt Wuensch, Richard Wiesman, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

In case you missed it…

Additional top stories from around the Institute in 2024 include a roundup of new books by faculty and staff, a look at unique license plates of MIT community members, our near-total view of a solar eclipse on campus, and the announcement of a roller rink in Kendall Square.

MIT in the media: 2024 in review

From a new Institute-wide effort aimed at addressing climate change to a collaborative that brings together MIT researchers and local hospitals to advance health and medicine, a Nobel prize win for two economists examining economic disparities and a roller-skating rink that brought some free fun to Kendall Square this summer, MIT faculty, researchers, students, alumni, and staff brought their trademark inventiveness and curiosity-driven spirit to the news. Below please enjoy a sampling of some of the uplifting news moments MIT affiliates enjoyed over the past year.

Kornbluth cheers for MIT to tackle climate change
Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights how MIT President Sally Kornbluth is “determined to harness MIT’s considerable brainpower to tackle” climate change.
Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT’s “high-impact” initiative 
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative is a new effort designed to “spur high-impact discoveries and health solutions through interdisciplinary projects across engineering, science, AI, economics, business, policy, design, and the humanities.” 
Full story via Boston Business Journal

A fireside chat with President Sally Kornbluth
President Sally Kornbluth speaks with undergraduate student Emiko Pope about her personal interests, passions, and life at MIT. Sally “is proud of MIT and how it can provide real solutions to society’s problems,” writes Pope. “She loves that you can get a daily fix of science because you are surrounded by such amazing people and endeavors.”
Full story via MIT Admissions 

Nobel economics prize goes to three economists who found that freer societies are more likely to prosper
Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and Professor Simon Johnson have been honored with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in memory of Alfred Nobel for their work demonstrating “the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity.”
Full story via Associated Press

MIT to cover full tuition for undergrads from households making below $200,000
“We really want to send a message that coming to school at MIT is affordable and that cost should not stand in the way of a student applying,” says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions and student financial services.
Full story via WBUR

MIT adds another architectural standout to its collection
The new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is described as “the most exciting work of academic architecture in Greater Boston in a generation.” 
Full story via The Boston Globe

Free roller skating rink open all summer long in Cambridge 
WBZ NewsRadio’s Emma Friedman visits Rollerama, a free, outdoor pop-up roller skating rink that was “all about bringing the community together and having fun in the space.”
Full story via WBZ News Radio

Three actions extraordinary people take to achieve what seems impossible, from the co-founder of Moderna
“I’m utterly unreasonable and an eternal optimist,” said Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 during his commencement address at MIT, adding that to tackle improbable challenges having “a special kind of optimism” can help.
Full story via NBC Boston 

Applying AI

How AI could transform medical research treatment
Professor Regina Barzilay discusses how artificial intelligence could enable health care providers to understand and treat diseases in new ways. 
Full story via Babbage, a podcast from The Economist

What are sperm whales saying? Researchers find a complex “alphabet”
Using machine learning, MIT researchers have discovered that sperm whales use “a bigger lexicon of sound patterns” that indicates a far more complex communication style than previously thought.
Full story via NPR

“SuperLimbs” could help astronauts recover from falls
Researchers at MIT have developed a “set of wearable robotic limbs to help astronauts recover from falls.”
Full story via CNN

Tiny batteries for tiny robots that could deliver drugs inside our bodies
Professor Michael Strano delves into his team’s work developing tiny batteries that could be used to power cell-sized robots.
Full story via Somewhere on Earth

Origami and computers? Yes, origami and computers.
“We get stuck on a science problem and that inspires a new sculpture, or we get stuck trying to build a sculpture and that leads to new science,” says Professor Erik Demaine of his work combining the art of origami with computer science.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Creating climate impact

This map shows where the shift to clean energy will most affect jobs
MIT researchers have developed a new map detailing how the shift to clean energy could impact jobs around the country.
Full story via Fast Company

Climate change in New England may scorch summer fun, study finds 
Inspired by his daily walks, Professor Elfatih Eltahir and his colleagues have developed a new way to measure how climate change is likely to impact the number of days when it is comfortable to be outdoors. 
Full story via WBUR

Solving problems with Susan Solomon
Professor Susan Solomon speaks about her latest book “Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do it Again.”
Full story via The New York Times

MIT ice flow study takes “big” step towards understanding sea level rise, scientists say
MIT scientists have developed a new model to analyze movements across the Antarctic Ice Sheet, “a critical step in understanding the potential speed and severity of sea level rise.”
Full story via Boston Globe

Meet the MIT professor with eight climate startups and $2.5 billion in funding
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang has used his materials science research to “build an array of companies in areas like batteries, green cement and critical minerals that could really help mitigate the climate crisis.” 
Full story via Forbes

Hacking health

A bionic leg controlled by the brain
New Yorker reporter Rivka Galchen visits the lab of Professor Hugh Herr to learn more about his work aimed at the “merging of body and machine.”
Full story via The New Yorker

From inflatable balloons to vibrating pills, scientists are getting creative with weight loss
Professor Giovanni Traverso speaks about his work developing weight loss treatments that don’t involve surgery or pharmaceuticals.
Full story via GBH

MIT scientists want to create a “Lyme Block” with proteins found in your sweat
MIT researchers have discovered a protein found in human sweat that holds antimicrobial properties and can “inhibit the growth of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.”
Full story via NECN

Wearable breast cancer monitor could help women screen themselves
Professor Canan Dagdeviren delves into her work developing wearable ultrasound devices that could help screen for early-stage breast cancer, monitor kidney health, and detect other cancers deep within the body.
Full story via CNN

The surprising cause of fasting’s regenerative powers
A study by MIT researchers explores the potential health benefits and consequences of fasting.
Full story via Nature

Spooky and surprising space

Planet as light as cotton candy surprises astronomers
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered an exoplanet that “is 50% larger than Jupiter and as fluffy as cotton candy.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

Two black holes are giving the cosmos a fright
Researchers at MIT have discovered a “black-hole triple, the first known instance of a three-body system that includes a black hole, which is not supposed to be part of the mix.”
Full story via New York Times

Astronomers use wobbly star stuff to measure a supermassive black hole’s spin
MIT astronomers have found a new way to measure how fast a black hole spins, observing the aftermath of a black hole tidal disruption event with a telescope aboard the International Space Station.
Full story via Popular Science

Are some of the oldest stars in the universe right under our noses?
Researchers at MIT have discovered “three of the oldest stars in the universe lurking right outside the Milky Way.”
Full story via Mashable

Waves of methane are crashing on the coasts of Saturn’s bizarre moon Titan
New research by MIT geologists finds waves of methane on Titan likely eroded and shaped the moon’s coastlines.
Full story via Gizmodo

Mastering materials

A vibrating curtain of silk can stifle noise pollution
Researchers at MIT have created a noise-blocking sheet of silkworm silk that could “greatly streamline the pursuit of silence.”
Full story via Scientific American

This is how drinking a nice cold beer can help remove lead from drinking water
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new technique that removes lead from water using repurposed beer yeast. 
Full story via Boston 25 News

Some metals actually grow more resilient when hot
A new study by MIT engineers finds that heating metals can sometimes make them stronger, a “surprising phenomenon [that] could lead to a better understanding of important industrial processes and make for tougher aircraft.”
Full story via New Scientist

The human experience

The economist who figured out what makes workers tick
Wall Street Journal reporter Justin Lahart spotlights the work of Professor David Autor, an economist whose “thinking helped change our understanding of the American labor market.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

If a bot relationship feels real, should we care that it’s not?
Professor Sherry Turkle discusses her research on human relationships with AI chatbots.
Full story via NPR

AI should be a tool, not a curse, for the future of work
The MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative is a new effort aimed at analyzing the forces that are eroding job quality for non-college workers and identifying ways to move the economy onto a more equitable trajectory.
Full story via The New York Times

Phenomenal physics

Physicists captured images of heat’s “second sound.” What?
MIT scientists have captured images of heat moving through a superfluid, a phenomenon that “may explain how heat moves through certain rare materials on Earth and deep in space.” 
Full story via Gizmodo

Think you understand evaporation? Think again, says MIT
Researchers at MIT have discovered that “light in the visible spectrum is enough to knock water molecules loose at the surface where it meets air and send them floating away.”
Full story via New Atlas 

Scientists shrunk the gap between atoms to an astounding 50 nanometers
MIT physicists have “successfully placed two dysprosium atoms only 50 nanometers apart — 10 times closer than previous studies — using ‘optical tweezers.’” 
Full story via Popular Mechanics

Making art and music

Composing for 37 Years at MIT
A celebration in Killian Hall featured recent works composed by Professor Peter Child and honored the musician as he prepares to retire after 37 years of teaching and composing at MIT.
Full story via The Boston Musical Intelligencer

MIT puts finishing touches on new music hub
The new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building will serve as a “hub for music instruction and performance” for MIT’s 30 on-campus ensembles and more than 1,500 students enrolled in music classes each academic year.
Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT art lending program puts contemporary works in dorm rooms
The MIT Student Lending Art Program allows undergraduate and graduate students to bring home original works of art from the List Visual Arts Center for the academic year.
Full story via WBUR

Michael John Gorman named new director of MIT Museum
Michael John Gorman, “a museum professional who has created and run several organizations devoted to science and the arts,” has been named the next director of the MIT Museum.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Engineering impact

A Greek-Indian friendship driven by innovation
Dean Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, and Pavlos-Petros Sotiriadis PhD ’02 discuss MIT’s unique approach to entrepreneurship, the future of AI, and the importance of mentorship.
Full story via Kathimerini

Metabolizing new synthetic pathways
“The potential to educate, encourage, and support the next generation of scientists and engineers in an educational setting gives me a chance to amplify my impact far beyond what I could ever personally do as an individual,” says Professor Kristala Prather, head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering.
Full story via Nature

MIT’s biggest contributions of the past 25 years? They aren’t what you think.
Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner spotlights Professor Mitchel Resnick, Professor Neil Gershenfeld, and the late Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers and their work developing programs that “get kids excited about, and more proficient in, STEM.”
Full story via The Boston Globe 

Barrier breaker shapes aerospace engineering’s future
Professor Wesley Harris has “not only advanced the field of aerospace engineering but has also paved the way for future generations to soar.”
Full story via IEEE Spectrum

Amos Winter: MIT professor, racecar driver, and super tifosi
Lecturer Amy Carleton profiles Professor Amos Winter PhD ’11, a mechanical engineer driven by his Formula 1 passion to find “elegant engineering solutions to perennial problems.”
Full story via Esses Magazine

New documentary features African students at MIT and their journey far from home
Arthur Musah ’04, MEng ’05 and Philip Abel ’15 discuss Musah’s documentary, “Brief Tender Light,” which follows the life of four African-born students on their personal and academic experiences at MIT.
Full story via GBH

Putting pen to paper

Strong universities make for a strong United States
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif cautions against treating universities “like the enemy,” pointing out that “without strong research universities and the scientific and technological advances they discover and invent, the United States could not possibly keep up with China.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

To compete with China on AI, we need a lot more power
Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, makes the case that the United States should not only be building more efficient AI software and better computer chips, but also creating “interstate-type corridors to transmit sufficient, reliable power to our data centers.”
Full story via The Washington Post

“Digital twins” give Olympic swimmers a boost
“Today the advent of sensor technology has turned this idea into a reality in which mathematics and physics produce useful information so that coaches can ‘precision-train’ 2024 Olympic hopefuls,” writes master’s student Jerry Lu. “The results have been enormously successful.”
Full story via Scientific American

The miracle weight-loss drug is also a major budgetary threat
Professor Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings explore the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers.
Full story via The New York Times

What if we never find dark matter?
“Although we can’t say exactly when or even whether we’ll find dark matter, we know that the universe is filled with it,” writes Professor Tracy Slatyer. “We’re optimistic that the next years of our quest will lead us to a deeper understanding of what it is.”
Full story via Scientific American

Celebrating the opening of the new Graduate Junction residence

Over two choreographed move-in days in August, more than 600 residents unloaded their boxes and belongings into their new homes in Graduate Junction, located at 269 and 299 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With smiling ambassadors standing by to assist, residents were welcomed into a new MIT-affiliated housing option that offers the convenience of on-campus licensing terms, pricing, and location, as well as the experienced building development and management of American Campus Communities (ACC).

With the building occupied and residents settled, the staff has turned their attention to creating connections between new community members and celebrating the years of a collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff to plan and create a building that expands student choice, enhances neighborhood amenities, and meets sustainability goals. 

Gathering recently for a celebratory block party, residents and their families, staff, and project team members convened in the main lounge space of building W87 to mingle and enjoy the new community. Children twirled around while project managers, architects, staff from MIT and ACC, and residents reflected on the partnership-driven work to bring the new building to fruition. With 351 units, including studios, one-, two-, and four-bedroom apartments, the building added a total of 675 new graduate housing beds and marked the final step in exceeding the Institute’s commitment made in 2017 to add 950 new graduate beds.

The management staff has also planned several other events to help residents feel more connected to their neighbors, including a farmers market in the central plaza, fall crafting workshops, and coffee breaks. “Graduate Junction isn’t just a place to live — it’s a community,” says Kendra Lowery, American Campus Communities’ general manager of Graduate Junction. “Our staff is dedicated to helping residents feel at home, whether through move-in support, building connections with neighbors, or hosting events that celebrate the unique MIT community.” 

Partnership adds a new option for students

Following a careful study of student housing preferences, the Graduate Housing Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — helped inform the design that includes unit styles and amenities that fit the needs of MIT graduate students in an increasingly expensive regional housing market.

“Innovative places struggle to build housing fast enough, which limits who can access them. Building housing keeps our campus’s innovation culture open to all students. Additionally, new housing for students reduces price pressure on the rest of the Cambridge community,” says Nick Allen, a member of the working group and a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He noted the involvement of students from the outset: “A whole generation of graduate students has worked with MIT to match Grad Junction to the biggest gaps in the local housing market.” For example, the building adds affordable four-bed, two-bath apartments, expanded options for private rooms, and new family housing.

Neighborhood feel with sustainability in mind

The location of the residence further enhances the residential feel of West Campus and forms additional connections between the MIT community and neighboring Cambridgeport. Situated on West Campus next to Simmons Hall and across from Westgate Apartments, the new buildings frame a central, publicly accessible plaza and green space. The plaza is a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the newly reopened pedestrian railroad crossing enhances connections between the residences and the surrounding Cambridgeport neighborhood.

Striving for the LEED v4 Multifamily Midrise Platinum certification, the new residence reflects a commitment to energy efficiency through an innovative design approach. The building has efficient heating and cooling systems and a strategy that reclaims heat from the building’s exhaust to pre-condition incoming ventilation air. The building’s envelope and roofing were designed with a strong focus on thermal performance and its materials were chosen to reduce the project’s climate impact. This resulted in an 11 percent reduction of the whole building’s carbon footprint from the construction, transportation, and installation of materials. In addition, the development teams installed an 11,000 kilowatt-hour solar array and green roof plantings.

Bacteria in the human gut rarely update their CRISPR defense systems

Within the human digestive tract are trillions of bacteria from thousands of different species. These bacteria form communities that help digest food, fend off harmful microbes, and play many other roles in maintaining human health.

These bacteria can be vulnerable to infection from viruses called bacteriophages. One of bacterial cells’ most well-known defenses against these viruses is the CRISPR system, which evolved in bacteria to help them recognize and chop up viral DNA.

A study from MIT biological engineers has yielded new insight into how bacteria in the gut microbiome adapt their CRISPR defenses as they encounter new threats. The researchers found that while bacteria grown in the lab can incorporate new viral recognition sequences as quickly as once a day, bacteria living in human gut add new sequences at a much slower rate — on average, one every three years.

The findings suggest that the environment within the digestive tract offers many fewer opportunities for bacteria and bacteriophages to interact than in the lab, so bacteria don’t need to update their CRISPR defenses very often. It also raises the question of whether bacteria have more important defense systems than CRISPR.

“This finding is significant because we use microbiome-based therapies like fecal microbiota transplant to help treat some diseases, but efficacy is inconsistent because new microbes do not always survive in patients. Learning about microbial defenses against viruses helps us to understand what makes a strong, healthy microbial community,” says An-Ni Zhang, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Zhang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal Cell Genomics. Eric Alm, director of MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the paper’s senior author.

Infrequent exposure

In bacteria, CRISPR serves as a memory immune response. When bacteria encounter viral DNA, they can incorporate part of the sequence into their own DNA. Then, if the virus is encountered again, that sequence produces a guide RNA that directs an enzyme called Cas9 to snip the viral DNA, preventing infection.

These virus-specific sequences are called spacers, and a single bacterial cell may carry more than 200 spacers. These sequences can be passed onto offspring, and they can also be shared with other bacterial cells through a process called horizontal gene transfer.

Previous studies have found that spacer acquisition occurs very rapidly in the lab, but the process appears to be slower in natural environments. In the new study, the MIT team wanted to explore how often this process happens in bacteria in the human gut.

“We were interested in how fast this CRISPR system changes its spacers, specifically in the gut microbiome, to better understand the bacteria-virus interactions inside our body,” Zhang says. “We wanted to identify the key parameters that impact the timescale of this immunity update.”

To do that, the researchers looked at how CRISPR sequences changed over time in two different datasets obtained by sequencing microbes from the human digestive tract. One of these datasets contained 6,275 genomic sequences representing 52 bacterial species, and the other contained 388 longitudinal “metagenomes,” that is, sequences from many microbes found in a sample, taken from four healthy people.

“By analyzing those two datasets, we found out that spacer acquisition is really slow in human gut microbiome: On average, it would take 2.7 to 2.9 years for a bacterial species to acquire a single spacer in our gut, which is super surprising because our gut is challenged with viruses almost every day from the microbiome itself and in our food,” Zhang says.

The researchers then built a computational model to help them figure out why the acquisition rate was so slow. This analysis showed that spacers are acquired more rapidly when bacteria live in high-density populations. However, the human digestive tract is diluted several times a day, whenever a meal is consumed. This flushes out some bacteria and viruses and keeps the overall density low, making it less likely that the microbes will encounter a virus that can infect them.

Another factor may be the spatial distribution of microbes, which the researchers believe prevents some bacteria from encountering viruses very frequently.

“Sometimes one population of bacteria may never or rarely encounter a phage because the bacteria are closer to the epithelium in the mucus layer and farther away from a potential exposure to viruses,” Zhang says.

Bacterial interactions

Among the populations of bacteria that they studied, the researchers identified one species — Bifidobacteria longum — that had gained spacers much more recently than others. The researchers found that in samples from unrelated people, living on different continents, B. longum had recently acquired up to six different spacers targeting two different Bifidobacteria bacteriophages.

This acquisition was driven by horizontal gene transfer — a process that allows bacteria to gain new genetic material from their neighbors. The findings suggest that there may be evolutionary pressure on B. longum from those two viruses.

“It has been highly overlooked how much horizontal gene transfer contributes to this dynamic. Within communities of bacteria, the bacteria-bacteria interactions can be a main contributor to the development of viral resistance,” Zhang says.

Analyzing microbes’ immune defenses may offer a way for scientists to develop targeted treatments that will be most effective in a particular patient, the researchers say. For example, they could design therapeutic microbes that are able to fend off the types of bacteriophages that are most prevalent in that person’s microbiome, which would increase the chances that the treatment would succeed.

“One thing we can do is to study the viral composition in the patients, and then we can identify which microbiome species or strains are more capable of resisting those local viruses in a person,” Zhang says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Broad Institute and the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

Why open secrets are a big problem

Imagine that the head of a company office is misbehaving, and a disillusioned employee reports the problem to their manager. Instead of the complaint getting traction, however, the manager sidesteps the issue and implies that raising it further could land the unhappy employee in trouble — but doesn’t deny that the problem exists.

This hypothetical scenario involves an open secret: a piece of information that is widely known but never acknowledged as such. Open secrets often create practical quandaries for people, as well as backlash against those who try to address the things that the secrets protect.

In a newly published paper, MIT philosopher Sam Berstler contends that open secrets are pervasive and problematic enough to be worthy of systematic study — and provides a detailed analysis of the distinctive social dynamics accompanying them. In many cases, she proposes, ignoring some things is fine — but open secrets present a special problem.

After all, people might maintain friendships better by not disclosing their salaries to each other, and relatives might get along better if they avoid talking politics at the holidays. But these are just run-of-the-mill individual decisions.

By contrast, open secrets are especially damaging, Berstler believes, because of their “iterative” structure. We do not talk about open secrets; we do not talk about the fact that we do not talk about them; and so on, until the possibility of addressing the problems at hand disappears.

“Sometimes not acknowledging things can be very productive,” Berstler says. “It’s good we don’t talk about everything in the workplace. What’s different about open secrecy is not the content of what we’re not acknowledging, but the pernicious iterative structure of our practice of not acknowledging it.  And because of that structure, open secrecy tends to be hard to change.”

Or, as she writes in the paper, “Open secrecy norms are often moral disasters.”

Beyond that, Berstler says, the example of open secrets should enable us to examine the nature of conversation itself in more multidimensional terms; we need to think about the things left unsaid in conversation, too.

Berstler’s paper, “The Structure of Open Secrets,” appears in advance online form in Philosophical Review. Berstler, an assistant professor and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, is the sole author.

Eroding our knowledge

The concept of open secrets is hardly new, but it has not been subject to extensive philosophical rigor. The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about them in the early 20th century, but mostly in the context of secret societies keeping quirky rituals to themselves. Other prominent thinkers have addressed open secrets in psychological terms. To Berstler, the social dynamics of open secrets merit a more thorough reckoning.

“It’s not a psychological problem that people are having,” she says. “It’s a particular practice that they’re all conforming to. But it’s hard to see this because it’s the kind of practice that members, just in virtue of conforming to the practice, can’t talk about.”

In Berstler’s view, the iterative nature of open secrets distinguishes them. The employee expecting a candid reply from their manager may feel bewildered about the lack of a transparent response, and that nonacknowledgement means there is not much recourse to be had, either. Eventually, keeping open secrets means the original issue itself can be lost from view.

“Open secrets norms are set up to try to erode our knowledge,” Berstler says.

In practical terms, people may avoid addressing open secrets head-on because they face a familiar quandary: Being a whistleblower can cost people their jobs and more. But Berstler suggests in the paper that keeping open secrets helps people define their in-group status, too.

“It’s also the basis for group identity,” she says.

Berstler avoids taking the position that greater transparency is automatically a beneficial thing. The paper identifies at least one kind of special case where keeping open secrets might be good. Suppose, for instance, a co-worker has an eccentric but harmless habit their colleagues find out about: It might be gracious to spare them simple embarrassment.

That aside, as Berstler writes, open secrets “can serve as shields for powerful people guilty of serious, even criminal wrongdoing. The norms can compound the harm that befalls their victims … [who] find they don’t just have to contend with the perpetrator’s financial resources, political might, and interpersonal capital. They must go up against an entire social arrangement.” As a result, the chances of fixing social or organizational dysfunction diminish.

Two layers of conversation

Berstler is not only trying to chart the dynamics and problems of open secrets. She is also trying to usefully complicate our ideas about the nature of conversations and communication.

Broadly, some philosophers have theorized about conversations and communication by focusing largely on the information being shared among people. To Berstler, this is not quite sufficient; the example of open secrets alerts us that communication is not just an act of making things more and more transparent.

“What I’m arguing in the paper is that this is too simplistic a way to think about it, because actual conversations in the real world have a theatrical or dramatic structure,” Berstler says. “There are things that cannot be made explicit without ruining the performance.”

At an office holiday party, for instance, the company CEO might maintain an illusion of being on equal footing with the rest of the employees if the conversation is restricted to movies and television shows. If the subject turns to year-end bonuses, that illusion vanishes. Or two friends at a party, trapped in an unwanted conversation with a third person, might maneuver themselves away with knowing comments, but without explicitly saying they are trying to end the chat.

Here Berstler draws upon the work of sociologist Erving Goffman — who closely studied the performative aspects of everyday behavior — to outline how a more multi-dimensional conception of social interaction applies to open secrets. Berstler suggests open secrets involve what she calls “activity layering,” which in this case suggests that people in a conversation involving open secrets have multiple common grounds for understanding, but some remain unspoken.

Further expanding on Goffman’s work, Berstler also details how people may be “mutually collaborating on a pretense,” as she writes, to keep an open secret going.

“Goffman has not really systematically been brought into the philosophy of language, so I am showing how his ideas illuminate and complicate philosophical views,” Berstler says.

Combined, a close analysis of open secrets and a re-evaluation of the performative components of conversation can help us become more cognizant about communication. What is being said matters; what is left unsaid matters alongside it.

“There are structural features of open secrets that are worrisome,” Berstler says. “And because of that we have to more aware [of how they work].”

Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace

MIT students are adept at producing research and innovations at the cutting edge of their fields. But addressing a problem as large as climate change requires understanding the world’s energy landscape, as well as the ways energy technologies evolve over time.

Since 2010, the course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation) has equipped students with the skills they need to evaluate the various energy decarbonization pathways available to the world. The work is designed to help them maximize their impact on the world’s emissions by making better decisions along their respective career paths.

“The question guiding my teaching and research is how do we solve big societal challenges with technology, and how can we be more deliberate in developing and supporting technologies to get us there?” says Professor Jessika Trancik, who started the course to help fill a gap in knowledge about the ways technologies evolve and scale over time.

Since its inception in 2010, the course has attracted graduate students from across MIT’s five schools. The course has also recently opened to undergraduate students and been adapted to an online course for professionals.

Class sessions alternate between lectures and student discussions that lead up to semester-long projects in which groups of students explore specific strategies and technologies for reducing global emissions. This year’s projects span several topics, including how quickly transmission infrastructure is expanding, the relationship between carbon emissions and human development, and how to decarbonize the production of key chemicals.

The curriculum is designed to help students identify the most promising ways to mitigate climate change whether they plan to be scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, urban planners, or just more informed citizens.

“We’re coming at this issue from both sides,” explains Trancik, who is part of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Engineers are used to designing a technology to work as well as possible here and now, but not always thinking over a longer time horizon about a technology evolving and succeeding in the global marketplace. On the flip side, for students at the macro level, often studies in policy and economics of technological change don’t fully account for the physical and engineering constraints of rates of improvement. But all of that information allows you to make better decisions.”

Bridging the gap

As a young researcher working on low-carbon polymers and electrode materials for solar cells, Trancik always wondered how the materials she worked on would scale in the real world. They might achieve promising performance benchmarks in the lab, but would they actually make a difference in mitigating climate change? Later, she began focusing increasingly on developing methods for predicting how technologies might evolve.

“I’ve always been interested in both the macro and the micro, or even nano, scales,” Trancik says. “I wanted to know how to bridge these new technologies we’re working on with the big picture of where we want to go.”

Trancik’ described her technology-grounded approach to decarbonization in a paper that formed the basis for IDS.065. In the paper, she presented a way to evaluate energy technologies against climate-change mitigation goals while focusing on the technology’s evolution.

“That was a departure from previous approaches, which said, given these technologies with fixed characteristics and assumptions about their rates of change, how do I choose the best combination?” Trancik explains. “Instead we asked: Given a goal, how do we develop the best technologies to meet that goal? That inverts the problem in a way that’s useful to engineers developing these technologies, but also to policymakers and investors that want to use the evolution of technologies as a tool for achieving their objectives.”

This past semester, the class took place every Tuesday and Thursday in a classroom on the first floor of the Stata Center. Students regularly led discussions where they reflected on the week’s readings and offered their own insights.

“Students always share their takeaways and get to ask open questions of the class,” says Megan Herrington, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “It helps you understand the readings on a deeper level because people with different backgrounds get to share their perspectives on the same questions and problems. Everybody comes to class with their own lens, and the class is set up to highlight those differences.”

The semester begins with an overview of climate science, the origins of emissions reductions goals, and technology’s role in achieving those goals. Students then learn how to evaluate technologies against decarbonization goals.

But technologies aren’t static, and neither is the world. Later lessons help students account for the change of technologies over time, identifying the mechanisms for that change and even forecasting rates of change.

Students also learn about the role of government policy. This year, Trancik shared her experience traveling to the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

“It’s not just about technology,” Trancik says. “It’s also about the behaviors that we engage in and the choices we make. But technology plays a major role in determining what set of choices we can make.”

From the classroom to the world

Students in the class say it has given them a new perspective on climate change mitigation.

“I have really enjoyed getting to see beyond the research people are doing at the benchtop,” says Herrington. “It’s interesting to see how certain materials or technologies that aren’t scalable yet may fit into a larger transformation in energy delivery and consumption. It’s also been interesting to pull back the curtain on energy systems analysis to understand where the metrics we cite in energy-related research originate from, and to anticipate trajectories of emerging technologies.”

Onur Talu, a first-year master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, says the class has made him more hopeful.

“I came into this fairly pessimistic about the climate,” says Talu, who has worked for clean technology startups in the past. “This class has taught me different ways to look at the problem of climate change mitigation and developing renewable technologies. It’s also helped put into perspective how much we’ve accomplished so far.”

Several student projects from the class over the years have been developed into papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They have also been turned into tools, like carboncounter.com, which plots the emissions and costs of cars and has been featured in The New York Times.

Former class students have also launched startups; Joel Jean SM ’13, PhD ’17, for example, started Swift Solar. Others have drawn on the course material to develop impactful careers in government and academia, such as Patrick Brown PhD ’16 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Overall, students say the course helps them take a more informed approach to applying their skills toward addressing climate change.

“It’s not enough to just know how bad climate change could be,” says Yu Tong, a first-year master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s also important to understand how technology can work to mitigate climate change from both a technological and market perspective. It’s about employing technology to solve these issues rather than just working in a vacuum.”

Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images

Try taking a picture of each of North America’s roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.

While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren’t yet as useful as they could be. It’s time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You’d be better off with an automated research assistant — or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They’re trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo.

But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with image retrieval? A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), University College London, iNaturalist, and elsewhere designed a performance test to find out. Each VLM’s task: locate and reorganize the most relevant results within the team’s “INQUIRE” dataset, composed of 5 million wildlife pictures and 250 search prompts from ecologists and other biodiversity experts. 

Looking for that special frog

In these evaluations, the researchers found that larger, more advanced VLMs, which are trained on far more data, can sometimes get researchers the results they want to see. The models performed reasonably well on straightforward queries about visual content, like identifying debris on a reef, but struggled significantly with queries requiring expert knowledge, like identifying specific biological conditions or behaviors. For example, VLMs somewhat easily uncovered examples of jellyfish on the beach, but struggled with more technical prompts like “axanthism in a green frog,” a condition that limits their ability to make their skin yellow.

Their findings indicate that the models need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. MIT PhD student Edward Vendrow, a CSAIL affiliate who co-led work on the dataset in a new paper, believes that by familiarizing with more informative data, the VLMs could one day be great research assistants. “We want to build retrieval systems that find the exact results scientists seek when monitoring biodiversity and analyzing climate change,” says Vendrow. “Multimodal models don’t quite understand more complex scientific language yet, but we believe that INQUIRE will be an important benchmark for tracking how they improve in comprehending scientific terminology and ultimately helping researchers automatically find the exact images they need.”

The team’s experiments illustrated that larger models tended to be more effective for both simpler and more intricate searches due to their expansive training data. They first used the INQUIRE dataset to test if VLMs could narrow a pool of 5 million images to the top 100 most-relevant results (also known as “ranking”). For straightforward search queries like “a reef with manmade structures and debris,” relatively large models like “SigLIP” found matching images, while smaller-sized CLIP models struggled. According to Vendrow, larger VLMs are “only starting to be useful” at ranking tougher queries.

Vendrow and his colleagues also evaluated how well multimodal models could re-rank those 100 results, reorganizing which images were most pertinent to a search. In these tests, even huge LLMs trained on more curated data, like GPT-4o, struggled: Its precision score was only 59.6 percent, the highest score achieved by any model.

The researchers presented these results at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) earlier this month.

Inquiring for INQUIRE

The INQUIRE dataset includes search queries based on discussions with ecologists, biologists, oceanographers, and other experts about the types of images they’d look for, including animals’ unique physical conditions and behaviors. A team of annotators then spent 180 hours searching the iNaturalist dataset with these prompts, carefully combing through roughly 200,000 results to label 33,000 matches that fit the prompts.

For instance, the annotators used queries like “a hermit crab using plastic waste as its shell” and “a California condor tagged with a green ‘26’” to identify the subsets of the larger image dataset that depict these specific, rare events.

Then, the researchers used the same search queries to see how well VLMs could retrieve iNaturalist images. The annotators’ labels revealed when the models struggled to understand scientists’ keywords, as their results included images previously tagged as irrelevant to the search. For example, VLMs’ results for “redwood trees with fire scars” sometimes included images of trees without any markings.

“This is careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science,” says Sara Beery, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-senior author of the work. “It’s proved vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of VLMs in these potentially impactful scientific settings. It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators.”

“Our findings imply that some vision models are already precise enough to aid wildlife scientists with retrieving some images, but many tasks are still too difficult for even the largest, best-performing models,” says Vendrow. “Although INQUIRE is focused on ecology and biodiversity monitoring, the wide variety of its queries means that VLMs that perform well on INQUIRE are likely to excel at analyzing large image collections in other observation-intensive fields.”

Inquiring minds want to see

Taking their project further, the researchers are working with iNaturalist to develop a query system to better help scientists and other curious minds find the images they actually want to see. Their working demo allows users to filter searches by species, enabling quicker discovery of relevant results like, say, the diverse eye colors of cats. Vendrow and co-lead author Omiros Pantazis, who recently received his PhD from University College London, also aim to improve the re-ranking system by augmenting current models to provide better results.

University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Justin Kitzes highlights INQUIRE’s ability to uncover secondary data. “Biodiversity datasets are rapidly becoming too large for any individual scientist to review,” says Kitzes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This paper draws attention to a difficult and unsolved problem, which is how to effectively search through such data with questions that go beyond simply ‘who is here’ to ask instead about individual characteristics, behavior, and species interactions. Being able to efficiently and accurately uncover these more complex phenomena in biodiversity image data will be critical to fundamental science and real-world impacts in ecology and conservation.”

Vendrow, Pantazis, and Beery wrote the paper with iNaturalist software engineer Alexander Shepard, University College London professors Gabriel Brostow and Kate Jones, University of Edinburgh associate professor and co-senior author Oisin Mac Aodha, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Assistant Professor Grant Van Horn, who served as co-senior author. Their work was supported, in part, by the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, the U.S. National Science Foundation/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, a Royal Society Research Grant, and the Biome Health Project funded by the World Wildlife Fund United Kingdom.

Tiny, wireless antennas use light to monitor cellular communication

Monitoring electrical signals in biological systems helps scientists understand how cells communicate, which can aid in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.

But devices that record electrical signals in cell cultures and other liquid environments often use wires to connect each electrode on the device to its respective amplifier. Because only so many wires can be connected to the device, this restricts the number of recording sites, limiting the information that can be collected from cells.

MIT researchers have now developed a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires. Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals.

Small electrical changes in the surrounding liquid environment alter how the antennas scatter the light. Using an array of tiny antennas, each of which is one-hundredth the width of a human hair, the researchers could measure electrical signals exchanged between cells, with extreme spatial resolution.

The devices, which are durable enough to continuously record signals for more than 10 hours, could help biologists understand how cells communicate in response to changes in their environment. In the long run, such scientific insights could pave the way for advancements in diagnosis, spur the development of targeted treatments, and enable more precision in the evaluation of new therapies.

“Being able to record the electrical activity of cells with high throughput and high resolution remains a real problem. We need to try some innovative ideas and alternate approaches,” says Benoît Desbiolles, a former postdoc in the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper on the devices.

He is joined on the paper by Jad Hanna, a visiting student in the Media Lab; former visiting student Raphael Ausilio; former postdoc Marta J. I. Airaghi Leccardi; Yang Yu, a scientist at Raith America, Inc.; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Assistant Professor in the Media Lab and MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab. The research appears today in Science Advances.

“Bioelectricity is fundamental to the functioning of cells and different life processes. However, recording such electrical signals precisely has been challenging,” says Sarkar. “The organic electro-scattering antennas (OCEANs) we developed enable recording of electrical signals wirelessly with micrometer spatial resolution from thousands of recording sites simultaneously. This can create unprecedented opportunities for understanding fundamental biology and altered signaling in diseased states as well as for screening the effect of different therapeutics to enable novel treatments.”

Biosensing with light

The researchers set out to design a biosensing device that didn’t need wires or amplifiers. Such a device would be easier to use for biologists who may not be familiar with electronic instruments.

“We wondered if we could make a device that converts the electrical signals to light and then use an optical microscope, the kind that is available in every biology lab, to probe these signals,” Desbiolles says.

Initially, they used a special polymer called PEDOT:PSS to design nanoscale transducers that incorporated tiny pieces of gold filament. Gold nanoparticles were supposed to scatter the light — a process that would be induced and modulated by the polymer. But the results weren’t matching up with their theoretical model.

The researchers tried removing the gold and, surprisingly, the results matched the model much more closely.

“It turns out we weren’t measuring signals from the gold, but from the polymer itself. This was a very surprising but exciting result. We built on that finding to develop organic electro-scattering antennas,” he says.

The organic electro-scattering antennas, or OCEANs, are composed of PEDOT:PSS. This polymer attracts or repulses positive ions from the surrounding liquid environment when there is electrical activity nearby. This modifies its chemical configuration and electronic structure, altering an optical property known as its refractive index, which changes how it scatters light.

When researchers shine light onto the antenna, the intensity of the light changes in proportion to the electrical signal present in the liquid.

Six-by-six array of tiny lights that glow brighter as voltage goes from 0 to -0.8.
The brightness of light scattered by the tiny antennas the researchers developed, called OCEANs, changes in response to changing electrical signals in the liquid environment that surrounds them, as shown here. By capturing and measuring the light with an optical microscope, researchers could decode the intricate signals used for cellular communication.

Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

With thousands or even millions of tiny antennas in an array, each only 1 micrometer wide, the researchers can capture the scattered light with an optical microscope and measure electrical signals from cells with high resolution. Because each antenna is an independent sensor, the researchers do not need to pool the contribution of multiple antennas to monitor electrical signals, which is why OCEANs can detect signals with micrometer resolution.

Intended for in vitro studies, OCEAN arrays are designed to have cells cultured directly on top of them and put under an optical microscope for analysis.

“Growing” antennas on a chip

Key to the devices is the precision with which the researchers can fabricate arrays in the MIT.nano facilities.

They start with a glass substrate and deposit layers of conductive then insulating material on top, each of which is optically transparent. Then they use a focused ion beam to cut hundreds of nanoscale holes into the top layers of the device. This special type of focused ion beam enables high-throughput nanofabrication.

“This instrument is basically like a pen where you can etch anything with a 10-nanometer resolution,” he says.

They submerge the chip in a solution that contains the precursor building blocks for the polymer. By applying an electric current to the solution, that precursor material is attracted into the tiny holes on the chip, and mushroom-shaped antennas “grow” from the bottom up.

The entire fabrication process is relatively fast, and the researchers could use this technique to make a chip with millions of antennas.

“This technique could be easily adapted so it is fully scalable. The limiting factor is how many antennas we can image at the same time,” he says.

The researchers optimized the dimensions of the antennas and adjusted parameters, which enabled them to achieve high enough sensitivity to monitor signals with voltages as low as 2.5 millivolts in simulated experiments. Signals sent by neurons for communication are usually around 100 millivolts.

“Because we took the time to really dig in and understand the theoretical model behind this process, we can maximize the sensitivity of the antennas,” he says.

OCEANs also responded to changing signals in only a few milliseconds, enabling them to record electrical signals with fast kinetics. Moving forward, the researchers want to test the devices with real cell cultures. They also want to reshape the antennas so they can penetrate cell membranes, enabling more precise signal detection.

In addition, they want to study how OCEANs could be integrated into nanophotonic devices, which manipulate light at the nanoscale for next-generation sensors and optical devices.

This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program expands to invite Palestinian scholars

When the Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) initiative launched in February 2024 as a pilot program for Ukrainian researchers, its architects expressed hope that GMAF would eventually expand to include visiting scholars from other troubled areas of the globe. That time arrived this fall, when MIT launched GMAF-Palestine, a two-year pilot that will select up to five fellows each year currently either in Palestine or recently displaced to continue their work during a semester at MIT.

Designed to enhance the educational and research experiences of international faculty and researchers displaced by humanitarian crises, GMAF brings international scholars to MIT for semester-long study and research meant to benefit their regions of origin while simultaneously enriching the MIT community.

Referring to the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, GMAF-Palestine Director and MIT Professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi says that “investing in scientists is an important way to address this significant conflict going on in our world.” Youcef-Toumi says it’s hoped that this program “will give some space for getting to know the real people involved and a deeper understanding of the practical implications for people living through the conflict.”

Professor Duane Boning, vice provost for international activities, considers the GMAF program to be a practical way for MIT to contribute to solving the world’s most challenging problems. “Our vision is for the fellows to come to MIT for a hands-on, experiential joint learning and research experience that develops the tools necessary to support the redevelopment of their regions,” says Boning.

“Opening and sustaining connections among scholars around the world is an essential part of our work at MIT,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “New collaborations so often spark new understanding and new ideas; that’s precisely what we aim to foster with this kind of program.”  

Crediting Program Manager Dorothy Hanna with much of the legwork that got the fellowship off the ground, Youcef-Toumi says fellows for the program’s inaugural year will be chosen from early- and mid-career scientists via an open application and nominations from the MIT community. Following submission of applications and interviews in January, five scholars will be selected to begin their fellowships at MIT in September 2025.

Eligible applicants must have held academic or research appointments at a Palestinian university within the past five years; hold a PhD or equivalent degree in a field represented at MIT; have been born in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or refugee camps; have a reasonable expectation of receiving a U.S. visa, and be working in a research area represented at MIT. MIT will cover all fellowship expenses, including travel, accommodations, visas, health insurance, instructional materials, and living stipends.

To build strong relationships during their time at MIT, GMAF-Palestine will pair fellows with faculty mentors and keep them connected with other campus communities, including the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women, an over 10-year-old program that Youcef-Toumi’s team also oversees. 

“MIT has a special environment and mindset that I think will be very useful. It’s a competitive environment, but also very supportive,” says Youcef-Toumi, a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty, director of the Mechatronics Research Laboratory, and co-director of the Center for Complex Engineering Systems. “In many other places, if a person is in math, they stay in math. If they are in architecture, they stay in architecture and they are not dealing with other departments or other colleges. In our case, because students’ work is often so interdisciplinary, a student in mechanical engineering can have an advisor in computer science or aerospace, and basically everything is open. There are no walls.”

Youcef-Toumi says he hopes MIT’s collegial environment among diverse departments and colleagues is a value fellows will retain and bring back to their own universities and communities.

“We are all here for scholarship. All of the people who come to MIT … they are coming for knowledge. The technical part is one thing, but there are other things here that are not available in many environments — you know, the sense of community, the values, and the excellence in academics,” Youcef-Toumi says. “These are things we will continue to emphasize, and hopefully these visiting scientists can absorb and benefit from some of that. And we will also learn from them, from their seminars and discussions with them.”

Referencing another new fellowship program launched by MIT, Kalaniyot for Israeli scholars, led by MIT professors Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel, Youcef-Toumi says, “Getting to know the Kalaniyot team better has been great, and I’m sure we will be helping each other. To have people from that region be on campus and interacting with different people … hopefully that will add a more positive effect and unity to the campus. This is one of the things that we hope these programs will do.”

As with any first endeavor, GMAF-Palestine’s first round of fellowships and the experiences of the fellows, and the observations of the GMAF team, will inform future iterations of the program. In addition to Youcef-Toumi, leadership for the program is provided by a faculty committee representing the breadth of scholarship at MIT. The vision of the faculty committee is to establish a sustainable program connecting the Palestinian community and MIT.

“Longer term,” Youcef-Toumi says, “we hope to show the MIT community this is a really impactful program that is worth sustaining with continued fundraising and philanthropy. We plan to stay in touch with the fellows and collect feedback from them over the first five years on how their time at MIT has impacted them as researchers and educators. Hopefully, this will include ongoing collaborations with their MIT mentors or others they meet along the way at MIT.”