Tag: Research

Reducing carbon emissions from residential heating: A pathway forward

In the race to reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, the buildings sector is falling behind. While carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the U.S. electric power sector dropped by 34 percent between 2005 and 2021, emissions in the building sector declined by only 18 percent in that same time period. Moreover, in extremely cold locations, burning natural […]

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Microsoft Says It Has Created a New State of Matter to Power Quantum Computers

Anyone who has sat through a third-grade science class knows there are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Microsoft now says it has created a new state of matter in its quest to make a powerful machine, called a quantum computer, that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines […]

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Scientists Describe Rare Syndrome Following Covid Vaccinations

The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study. Some people with this syndrome […]

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Is This Common Herbicide Harming Your Health?

As part of his pledge to “Make America Healthy Again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he wants to build an “off-ramp” from the country’s reliance on insecticides and herbicides to grow food. “The chemicals pollute our bodies the same way that they pollute the soil,” Mr. Kennedy said in 2024. This week, Mr. Kennedy, […]

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Like human brains, large language models reason about diverse data in a general way

While early language models could only process text, contemporary large language models now perform highly diverse tasks on different types of data. For instance, LLMs can understand many languages, generate computer code, solve math problems, or answer questions about images and audio.    MIT researchers probed the inner workings of LLMs to better understand how they […]

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Unlocking the secrets of fusion’s core with AI-enhanced simulations

Creating and sustaining fusion reactions — essentially recreating star-like conditions on Earth — is extremely difficult, and Nathan Howard PhD ’12, a principal research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), thinks it’s one of the most fascinating scientific challenges of our time. “Both the science and the overall promise of fusion […]

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The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely

Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words and sentences don’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to dig up. A genetic study published on Tuesday offers an important new clue. Researchers found that, between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, a gene known as NOVA1 underwent a profound evolutionary change in our ancestors. […]

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Engineers turn the body’s goo into new glue

Within the animal kingdom, mussels are masters of underwater adhesion. The marine molluscs cluster atop rocks and along the bottoms of ships, and hold fast against the ocean’s waves thanks to a gluey plaque they secrete through their foot. These tenacious adhesive structures have prompted scientists in recent years to design similar bioinspired, waterproof adhesives. […]

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The Vast Dangers of Trump’s War On Information

“Those data are in demand by people who need them for the programs that they run, or grant applications, or for research projects that are going to result in people getting their degrees,” said O’Hara. “It’s the pipeline of people that build knowledge in the country, and they need access to timely, accurate data and […]

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Is Fake Meat Better for You Than Real Meat?

You’ve probably heard these two bits of nutrition advice: Eat more plants, and cut back on ultraprocessed foods. So where does that leave fake-meat burgers, sausages, nuggets and other products sold by companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods? They are made from plants like soybeans and peas, but they are also highly processed. If […]

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Louis Pasteur’s Relentless Hunt for Germs Floating in the Air

Louis Pasteur was at his most comfortable when working in his Paris laboratory. It was there that he had some of his greatest scientific triumphs, including experiments that helped confirm germs can cause disease. “Everything gets complicated away from the laboratory,” he once complained to a friend. But in 1860, years before he became famous […]

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As Trump Targets Research, Scientists Share Grief and Resolve to Fight

At the annual gathering in Boston this past week of one of America’s oldest scientific societies, the discussions touched on threats to humankind: runaway artificial intelligence, toxic “forever chemicals,” the eventual end of the universe. But the most urgent threats for many scientists were the ones aimed at them, as the Trump administration slashes the […]

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Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54

Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54. Her death, at a hospice facility, was […]

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RFK Jr. Just Kneecapped the CDC on His First Day

“This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion,” a source familiar with the meeting told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.” Bove had moved the case to the Public Integrity Section from the Southern District of New York after its acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, resigned Thursday rather than drop the charges. […]

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Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education […]

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Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education […]

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AI model deciphers the code in proteins that tells them where to go

Proteins are the workhorses that keep our cells running, and there are many thousands of types of proteins in our cells, each performing a specialized function. Researchers have long known that the structure of a protein determines what it can do. More recently, researchers are coming to appreciate that a protein’s localization is also critical […]

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After Abortion Bans, Infant Mortality and Births Increased, Research Finds

Infant mortality increased along with births in most states with abortion bans in the first 18 months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to new research. The findings, in two studies published Thursday in the journal JAMA, also suggest that abortion bans can have the most significant effects on people who are […]

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Engineers enable a drone to determine its position in the dark and indoors

In the future, autonomous drones could be used to shuttle inventory between large warehouses. A drone might fly into a semi-dark structure the size of several football fields, zipping along hundreds of identical aisles before docking at the precise spot where its shipment is needed. Most of today’s drones would likely struggle to complete this […]

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Study reveals the Phoenix galaxy cluster in the act of extreme cooling

The core of a massive cluster of galaxies appears to be pumping out far more stars than it should. Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a key ingredient within the cluster that explains the core’s prolific starburst. In a new study published in Nature, the scientists report using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) […]

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Less supervision, better results: Study shows AI models generalize more effectively on their own

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Language models can generalize better when left to create their own solutions, a new study by Hong Kong University and University of California, Berkeley, shows. The findings, which apply to both large language models (LLMs) and […]

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Ozempic Can Curb Drinking, New Research Shows

Some people who take drugs like Ozempic have noticed a surprising but welcome side effect: They drink less. A paper published Wednesday offers the strongest evidence yet that this is more than just anecdote, or a placebo effect: It found that semaglutide, the substance in Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy, could in fact […]

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How Did DeepSeek Build Its A.I. With Less Money?

Last month, U.S. financial markets tumbled after a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek said it had built one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems using far fewer computer chips than many experts thought possible. A.I. companies typically train their chatbots using supercomputers packed with 16,000 specialized chips or more. But DeepSeek said it needed […]

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MIT engineers develop a fully 3D-printed electrospray engine

An electrospray engine applies an electric field to a conductive liquid, generating a high-speed jet of tiny droplets that can propel a spacecraft. These miniature engines are ideal for small satellites called CubeSats that are often used in academic research. Since electrospray engines utilize propellant more efficiently than the powerful, chemical rockets used on the […]

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Birds of Paradise Glow on Their Mating Parade

Elaborate poses, tufts of feathers, flamboyant shuffles along an immaculate forest floor — male birds-of-paradise have many ways to woo a potential mate. But now, by examining prepared specimens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, scientists have discovered what could be yet another tool in the kit of the tropical birds […]

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Trump Openly Threatens Judges Who Blocked His Orders

“There is … a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said at the end of […]

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To keep hardware safe, cut out the code’s clues

Imagine you’re a chef with a highly sought-after recipe. You write your top-secret instructions in a journal to ensure you remember them, but its location within the book is evident from the folds and tears on the edges of that often-referenced page. Much like recipes in a cookbook, the instructions to execute programs are stored […]

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Court Halt on Trump Cuts for Medical Research Is Extended Nationwide

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to hold off on a plan that would cut $4 billion in federal funding for research at the nation’s universities, cancer centers and hospitals. The funds disbursed by the National Institutes of Health cover the administrative and overhead costs for a vast swath of biomedical research, some of […]

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President Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes He Might Not Know How to Govern

The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the servicemember news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its […]

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Chinese Companies Use Legal Threats to Halt Foreign Research

A little over a year ago, a group of researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in England published a report documenting a Chinese clothing company’s potential ties to forced labor. Members of the British Parliament cited the report ahead of a November debate that criticized China for “slavery and forced labor from another era.” But Smart […]

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