School of Science Archives

November 14, 2025

MIT researchers invent new human brain model to enable disease research, drug discovery

A new 3D human brain tissue platform developed by MIT researchers is the first to integrate all major brain cell types, including neurons, glial cells, and the vasculature, into a single culture.

Grown from individual donors’ induced pluripotent stem cells, these models — dubbed Multicellular Integrated Brains (miBrains) — replicate key features and functions of human brain tissue, are readily customizable through gene editing, and can be produced in quantities that support large-scale research.

Although each unit is smaller than a dime, miBrains may be worth a great deal to researchers and drug developers who need more complex living lab models to better understand brain biology and treat diseases.

“The miBrain is the only in vitro system that contains all six major cell types that are present in the human brain,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory,

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November 11, 2025

Leading quantum at an inflection point

Danna Freedman is seeking the early adopters.

She is the faculty director of the nascent MIT Quantum Initiative, or QMIT. In this new role, Freedman is giving shape to an ambitious, Institute-wide effort to apply quantum breakthroughs to the most consequential challenges in science, technology, industry, and national security.

The interdisciplinary endeavor, the newest of MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s strategic initiatives, will bring together MIT researchers and domain experts from a range of industries to identify and tackle practical challenges wherever quantum solutions could achieve the greatest impact.

“We’ve already seen how the breadth of progress in quantum has created opportunities to rethink the future of security and encryption, imagine new modes of navigation, and even measure gravitational waves more precisely to observe the cosmos in an entirely new way,” says Freedman, the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry.

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November 6, 2025

MIT physicists observe key evidence of unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle graphene

Superconductors are like the express trains in a metro system. Any electricity that “boards” a superconducting material can zip through it without stopping and losing energy along the way. As such, superconductors are extremely energy efficient, and are used today to power a variety of applications, from MRI machines to particle accelerators.

But these “conventional” superconductors are somewhat limited in terms of uses because they must be brought down to ultra-low temperatures using elaborate cooling systems to keep them in their superconducting state. If superconductors could work at higher, room-like temperatures, they would enable a new world of technologies, from zero-energy-loss power cables and electricity grids to practical quantum computing systems. And so scientists at MIT and elsewhere are studying “unconventional” superconductors — materials that exhibit superconductivity in ways that are different from, and potentially more promising than, today’s superconductors.

In a promising breakthrough, MIT physicists have today reported their observation of new key evidence of unconventional superconductivity in “magic-angle” twisted tri-layer graphene (MATTG) — a material that is made by stacking three atomically-thin sheets of graphene at a specific angle,

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October 28, 2025

Astronomical data collection of Taurus Molecular Cloud-1 reveals over 100 different molecules

MIT researchers recently studied a region of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud-1 (TMC-1) and discovered more than 100 different molecules floating in the gas there — more than in any other known interstellar cloud. They used powerful radio telescopes capable of detecting very faint signals across a wide range of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

With over 1,400 observing hours on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, located in West Virginia — researchers in the group of Brett McGuire collected the astronomical data needed to search for molecules in deep space and have made the full dataset publicly available. From these observations, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (ApJS), the team censused 102 molecules in TMC-1, a cold interstellar cloud where sunlike stars are born. Most of these molecules are hydrocarbons (made only of carbon and hydrogen) and nitrogen-rich compounds,

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October 26, 2025

Neural activity helps circuit connections mature into optimal signal transmitters

Nervous system functions, from motion to perception to cognition, depend on the active zones of neural circuit connections, or “synapses,” sending out the right amount of their chemical signals at the right times. By tracking how synaptic active zones form and mature in fruit flies, researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have revealed a fundamental model for how neural activity during development builds properly working connections.

Understanding how that happens is important, not only for advancing fundamental knowledge about how nervous systems develop, but also because many disorders such as epilepsy, autism, or intellectual disability can arise from aberrations of synaptic transmission, says senior author Troy Littleton, the Menicon Professor in The Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Biology. The new findings, funded in part by a 2021 grant from the National Institutes of Health, provide insights into how active zones develop the ability to send neurotransmitters across synapses to their circuit targets.

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October 25, 2025

With a new molecule-based method, physicists peer inside an atom’s nucleus

Physicists at MIT have developed a new way to probe inside an atom’s nucleus, using the atom’s own electrons as “messengers” within a molecule.

In a study appearing today in the journal Science, the physicists precisely measured the energy of electrons whizzing around a radium atom that had been paired with a fluoride atom to make a molecule of radium monofluoride. They used the environments within molecules as a sort of microscopic particle collider, which contained the radium atom’s electrons and encouraged them to briefly penetrate the atom’s nucleus.

Typically, experiments to probe the inside of atomic nuclei involve massive, kilometers-long facilities that accelerate beams of electrons to speeds fast enough to collide with and break apart nuclei. The team’s new molecule-based method offers a table-top alternative to directly probe the inside of an atom’s nucleus.

Within molecules of radium monofluoride,

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October 15, 2025

Earthquake damage at deeper depths occurs long after initial activity

Earthquakes often bring to mind images of destruction, of the Earth breaking open and altering landscapes. But after an earthquake, the area around it undergoes a period of post-seismic deformation, where areas that didn’t break experience new stress as a result of the sudden change in the surroundings. Once it has adjusted to this new stress, it reaches a state of recovery.

Geologists have often thought that this recovery period was a smooth, continuous process. But MIT research published recently in Science has found evidence that while healing occurs quickly at shallow depths — roughly above 10 km — deeper depths recover more slowly, if at all.

“If you were to look before and after in the shallow crust, you wouldn’t see any permanent change. But there’s this very permanent change that persists in the mid-crust,” says Jared Bryan, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Earth,

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October 9, 2025

Immune-informed brain aging research offers new treatment possibilities, speakers say

Understanding how interactions between the central nervous system and the immune system contribute to problems of aging, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, and more, can generate new leads for therapeutic development, speakers said at MIT’s symposium “The Neuro-Immune Axis and the Aging Brain” on Sept 18.

“The past decade has brought rapid progress in our understanding of how adaptive and innate immune systems impact the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders,” said Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative (ABI), in her introduction to the event, which more than 450 people registered to attend. “Together, today’s speakers will trace how the neuro-immune axis shapes brain health and disease … Their work converges on the promise of immunology-informed therapies to slow or prevent neurodegeneration and age-related cognitive decline.”

For instance, keynote speaker Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute in Israel described her decades of pioneering work to understand the neuro-immune “ecosystem.” Immune cells,

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October 8, 2025

Engineered “natural killer” cells could help fight cancer

One of the newest weapons that scientists have developed against cancer is a type of engineered immune cell known as CAR-NK (natural killer) cells. Similar to CAR-T cells, these cells can be programmed to attack cancer cells.

MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have now come up with a new way to engineer CAR-NK cells that makes them much less likely to be rejected by the patient’s immune system, which is a common drawback of this type of treatment.

The new advance may also make it easier to develop “off-the-shelf” CAR-NK cells that could be given to patients as soon as they are diagnosed. Traditional approaches to engineering CAR-NK or CAR-T cells usually take several weeks.

“This enables us to do one-step engineering of CAR-NK cells that can avoid rejection by host T cells and other immune cells. And, they kill cancer cells better and they’re safer,” says Jianzhu Chen,

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October 3, 2025

A simple formula could guide the design of faster-charging, longer-lasting batteries

At the heart of all lithium-ion batteries is a simple reaction: Lithium ions dissolved in an electrolyte solution “intercalate” or insert themselves into a solid electrode during battery discharge. When they de-intercalate and return to the electrolyte, the battery charges.

This process happens thousands of times throughout the life of a battery. The amount of power that the battery can generate, and how quickly it can charge, depend on how fast this reaction happens. However, little is known about the exact mechanism of this reaction, or the factors that control its rate.

In a new study, MIT researchers have measured lithium intercalation rates in a variety of different battery materials and used that data to develop a new model of how the reaction is controlled. Their model suggests that lithium intercalation is governed by a process known as coupled ion-electron transfer, in which an electron is transferred to the electrode along with a lithium ion.

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