December 18, 2024

The Download: AI tracking birds, and a pig kidney transplant

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their…

The Download: introducing the Food issue

October 23, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Food issue What are we going to eat? It is the eternal question. We humans have been asking ourselves this for as long as we have been human. The question itself…

Introducing: The AI Hype Index

October 23, 2024
There’s no denying that the AI industry moves fast. Each week brings a bold new announcement, product release, or lofty claim that pushes the bounds of what we previously thought was possible. Separating AI fact from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you…

GMOs could reboot chestnut trees

October 23, 2024
Under a slice-of-heaven sky, 150 acres of rolling green hills stretch off into the distance. About a dozen people—tree enthusiasts, conservationists, research biologists, biotech entrepreneurs, and a venture capitalist in long socks and a floppy hat—have driven to this rural spot in New York state on a perfect late-July day.  We are here to see…

Green Revolution redux

October 23, 2024
In the 1960s, Norman Borlaug, an American biologist, helped spark a period of transformative agricultural innovation known as the Green Revolution by selectively breeding a grain-packed, dwarf variety of wheat. (He would win a Nobel Peace Prize for this work.) In Asia, the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) had similar success with rice. By…

The algorithms around us

October 23, 2024
A metronome ticks. A record spins. And as a feel-good pop track plays, a giant compactor slowly crushes a Jenga tower of material creations. Paint cans burst. Chess pieces topple. Camera lenses shatter. An alarm clock shrills and then goes silent. A guitar neck snaps. Even a toy emoji is not spared, its eyes popping…

A Note from the Editor

October 23, 2024
What are we going to eat? It is the eternal question. We humans have been asking ourselves this for as long as we have been human. The question itself can be tedious, exciting, urgent, or desperate, depending on who is asking and where. There are many parts of the world where there is no answer. …

“I wanted to save lives”

October 22, 2024
When Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell ’06 won the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the country’s top honor for early-career researchers, she sat on a panel with her two fellow awardees, surrounded by the academic luminaries on the National Science Board. The atmosphere was formal, even weighty, but when asked by a board member…

How MIT’s Rad Lab rescued D-Day

October 22, 2024
On June 6, 1944, the Allies deposited nearly 160,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy, France, in what still stands as the largest land invasion by sea in world history. D-Day would, of course, prove to be a critical milestone leading to the Allied victory in World War II. But were it not for the…

The Renaissance man from Port Gamble Bay

October 22, 2024
When Anthony Jones ’08 reminisces about his childhood, he thinks of clams. Growing up on the reservation of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, about an hour from Seattle, he spent a lot of time playing outside with his brothers—fishing, digging clams, and gathering oysters on the beach. Those idyllic childhood memories wouldn’t have been possible,…