How to bend and stretch a diamond

The brittle material can turn flexible when made into ultrafine needles, researchers find.

Integrating optical components into existing chip designs

Technique would allow addition of optical communication components to existing chips with little modification of their designs.

Building AI systems that make fair decisions

Harini Suresh, a PhD student at MIT CSAIL, studies how to make machine learning algorithms more understandable and less biased.

On the cutting edge

Olympic medalist and MIT senior Jordan Malone uses his engineering skills to enhance the sport of speedskating.

Machine-learning system processes sounds like humans do

Neuroscientists train a deep neural network to analyze speech and music.

Using several comparative models, a new study led by MIT researchers reveals that China’s pledge to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 could cut down on as many as 160,000 premature deaths. “Politically, the research confirms why Chinese officials have their own internal reasons to cut CO2 even though the U.S. is abandoning Paris and disengaging internationally on climate,” writes Ben Geman for Axios.

Ryan Mandelbaum of Gizmodo writes that MIT scientists have found that diamonds can bend without snapping when in the form of nano-needles. These needles can potentially be used to “store data or to deliver drugs directly into cells, or simply as ultra-strong nanostructures,” explains Mandelbaum.

Graduate student Maher Damak is a winner of the 2018 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for creating an additive that makes pesticide droplets stick to crops rather than runoff into drinking water, writes John Converse Townsend of Fast Company. The mixture is also “FDA-approved, and since they’re made from plant and animal extracts, they’re also biodegradable–and safe to eat,” notes Townsend.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to headline Solve at MIT annual meeting

May 16-18 event, hosted by MIT Solve, will include remarks from Eric Schmidt, Ursula Burns, Yo-Yo Ma, and Luis Alberto Moreno, among other luminaries.

Parag Pathak wins John Bates Clark Medal

MIT economist lauded for work on education, market-design mechanisms.

Institute for Data, Systems, and Society to launch new MicroMasters and PhD programs

Interdisciplinary doctoral program in statistics and online MicroMasters program in statistics and data science begin this fall.