The share of federal spending on infrastructure has reached an all-time low, falling from 30 percent in 1960 to just 12 percent in 2018. While the nation’s ailing infrastructure will require more funding to reach its full potential, recent MIT research finds that more sustainable and higher performing roads are still possible even with today’s […]

Do the world’s nearly 1 billion urban poor, who subsist without legal housing, reliable water and sewer infrastructure, and predictable employment, lack political engagement as well? Ying Gao does not buy the claim by many social scientists that social and economic marginalization necessarily means political marginalization. “My results contradict the prevailing wisdom about slums and […]

Survival rates for cancer are improving, but it is still the leading cause of death by disease for those over one year of age in the European Union (EU). Could exercise hold one of the keys to combatting cancer?  And if so, how much physical activity is needed to show real benefits in both children […]

As tumors grow within an organ, they also release cells that enter the bloodstream. These cells can travel to other organs, seeding new tumors called metastases. MIT engineers have now developed a technique that, for the first time, allows them to measure the generation rate of these circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in mice. Their approach, […]

Getting a quick and accurate reading of an X-ray or some other medical images can be vital to a patient’s health and might even save a life. Obtaining such an assessment depends on the availability of a skilled radiologist and, consequently, a rapid response is not always possible. For that reason, says Ruizhi “Ray” Liao, […]

When it comes to processing vision, the brain is full of noise. Information moves from the eyes through many connections in the brain. Ideally, the same image would be reliably represented the same way each time, but instead different groups of cells in the visual cortex can become stimulated by the same scenes. So how […]

Exercise is healthy. That is common knowledge. But just how rigorous should that exercise be in order to really impact a person’s fitness level? And, if you sit all day at a desk, but still manage to get out and exercise, does that negate your six, seven, or eight hours of sedentary behavior? These were […]

If further research can identify the substances that the bacteria of the gut are making to help muscles grow following exercise, we might be able to use some of those substances to promote the growth of muscles in people suffering from the loss of muscle as typically seen with aging or cancer. That’s according to […]

Scientists have created a photo-electrosynthetic system that allows cyanobacteria to use both light and electricity to convert carbon dioxide into acetate or ethylene.1 The system is more energy efficient than natural photosynthesis and opens new avenues for coupling renewable electricity to photosynthetic microorganisms to sustainably produce fuels. Photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide to useful carbon-containing […]

Finger tracing has been used by teachers to help students learn for more than a century. In the early 1900s, education pioneer Montessori encouraged young children to trace over letters of the alphabet made from sandpaper with their index fingers, based on the intuition that a multi-sensory approach (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic) to […]