Prof. Nancy Kanwisher has been named a recipient of the 2024 Champalimaud Foundation’s Vision Award, reports the Associated Press. The award highlights the collective work of four researchers who have “driven significant progress in the field of visual neuroscience."
The Boston Globe’s Angelina Parrillo interviews Jasmina Aganovic ’09 about her beauty company Arcaea, which reconstructs data from extinct flowers to produce fragrances. “I viewed fragrance as this remarkable emotional storytelling category and people don’t view science as being associated with creativity, emotion, or storytelling,” Aganovic says. “I think that that’s very far from the truth.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found a “unique atomic-level interaction that shields collagen from the damaging effects of water molecules,” reports Mrigakshi Dixit for Interesting Engineering. “Proteins deteriorate when the peptide bonds that link the component amino acids are attacked by water molecules, which results in the cleavage of the peptide bonds,” explains Prof. Ronald Raines. “We discovered a chemical interaction in collagen that protects its peptide bonds from attack and cleavage.”
During an interview with Lisa Mullins of WBUR’s Here & Now, graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 shares the excitement she felt after winning the 2024 Paralympics silver medal win in the mixed-four crew and delves into her research at MIT focused on developing a low-cost system to gather biomechanical feedback for athletes and help improve their performance. “I really hope to contribute to the sphere and hopefully we can use AI in a way that influences athletes to help them get that one-hundredth of a second, as our coach likes to say,” Eldracher explains. “Because if you add up all the one-hundredths of a second in a race, that could be the difference between a medal or not.”
Scientists from MIT and elsewhere are using submersible structures to harness the power of ocean waves and make sand accumulate in specific regions to protect islands and potentially grow new ones, reports Amy Gunia for CNN. “With each field experiment, the group says it is advancing its understanding of what materials, configurations, and construction techniques can make sand accumulate in the simplest, most cost-effective, sustainable, long-lasting and scalable way,” explains Gunia.
Prof. Jeff Gore speaks with Caity Weaver of The New York Times about the future of the U.S. penny and his belief that the penny should be retired. “People think that because it exists and is used, it means that it’s useful,” Gore notes. “We’re taking something that is actually a valuable commodity, something that has actual value, and then we’re converting it into something that people just throw away.”
Since meeting as undergraduates at MIT, graduate student Ashwin Sah '20 and Mehtaab Sawhney PhD '24 have “written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields,” writes Leila Sloman for Quanta Magazine. Now, in what is being praised as a “huge achievement” and “phenomenally impressive” by fellow mathematicians, Sah and Sawhney have “obtained a long-sought improvement on an estimate of how big sets of integers can get before they must contain sequences of evenly spaced numbers."
Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 has won a silver medal in the Mixed PR3 Coxed Four A Final at the 2024 Paris Paralympics, reports Brendan Kurie for The Boston Globe. “It was the third consecutive silver medal for the United States in the event, but this year’s boat was filled with first-time medalists,” explains Kurie.
A team of MIT researchers discovered a hard limit for the “spooky” phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, reports Ben Brubaker for Quanta Magazine. The researchers found that quantum entanglement does not weaken as temperatures increase, but rather it vanishes above specific temperatures, a behavior dubbed the “sudden death” of entanglement. “It’s a very, very strong statement,” says Prof. Soonwon Choi of the findings. “I was very impressed.”
Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 will complete in the Paris Paralympics as a coxswain in the PR3 Mixed Coxed Four race, reports Henry Dinh-Price, Alexa Podalsky and Aiden Sprole for The Boston Globe. “While studying at MIT, Eldracher designed the first AI-powered heated jacket,” they write.
Researchers at MIT have uncovered a possible reason why legal documents can be so difficult to read, finding that “convoluted legalese often acts as a way to convey authority,” reports Joe Berkowitz for Fast Company. The researchers “tested whether nonlawyers would end up using legalese if asked to write legal documents,” explains Berkowitz. “In the end, all subjects wrote their laws with complex, center-embedded clauses.”
Researchers at MIT have found that the use of legalese in writing “to assert authority over those less versed in such language,” reports Noor Al-Sibai for Futurism. “By studying this cryptic take on the English language, the researchers are hoping to make legal documents much easier to read in the future,” explains Al-Sibai.
A new study led by researchers at MIT suggests that fasting and then refeeding stimulates cell regeneration in the intestines, reports Katharine Lang for Medical News Today. However, notes Lang, researchers also found that fasting “carries the risk of stimulating the formation of intestinal tumors.”
Prof. Christoph Kehle and his colleagues have demonstrated “that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole,” reports Steve Nadis for Quanta Magazine. The mathematical proof is “beautiful, technically innovative and physically surprising,” says Princeton University Professor Mihalis Dafermos. It hints at a potentially richer and more varied universe in which “extremal black holes could be out there astrophysically.”
Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and his colleagues have discovered the potential health benefits and consequences of fasting, reports Max Kozlov for Nature. “There is so much emphasis on fasting and how long to be fasting that we’ve kind of overlooked this whole other side of the equation: what is going on in the refed state,” says Yilmaz.