Science Archives - Page 2 of 18

November 2, 2025

Injectable antenna could safely power deep-tissue medical implants

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab have developed an antenna — about the size of a fine grain of sand — that can be injected into the body to wirelessly power deep-tissue medical implants, such as pacemakers in cardiac patients and neuromodulators in people suffering from epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

“This is the next major step in miniaturizing deep-tissue implants,” says Baju Joy, a PhD student in the Media Lab’s Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. “It enables battery-free implants that can be placed with a needle, instead of major surgery.”

A paper detailing this work was published in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Joy is joined on the paper by lead author Yubin Cai, PhD student at the Media Lab; Benoît X. E. Desbiolles and Viktor Schell, former MIT postdocs; Shubham Yadav, an MIT PhD student in media arts and sciences;

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November 1, 2025

New nanoparticles stimulate the immune system to attack ovarian tumors

Cancer immunotherapy, which uses drugs that stimulate the body’s immune cells to attack tumors, is a promising approach to treating many types of cancer. However, it doesn’t work well for some tumors, including ovarian cancer.

To elicit a better response, MIT researchers have designed new nanoparticles that can deliver an immune-stimulating molecule called IL-12 directly to ovarian tumors. When given along with immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, IL-12 helps the immune system launch an attack on cancer cells.

Studying a mouse model of ovarian cancer, the researchers showed that this combination treatment could eliminate metastatic tumors in more than 80 percent of the mice. When the mice were later injected with more cancer cells, to simulate tumor recurrence, their immune cells remembered the tumor proteins and cleared them again.

“What’s really exciting is that we’re able to deliver IL-12 directly in the tumor space.

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October 31, 2025

Using classic physical phenomena to solve new problems

Quenching, a powerful heat transfer mechanism, is remarkably effective at transporting heat away. But in extreme environments, like nuclear power plants and aboard spaceships, a lot rides on the efficiency and speed of the process.

It’s why Marco Graffiedi, a fifth-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is researching the phenomenon to help develop the next generation of spaceships and nuclear plants.

Growing up in small-town Italy

Graffiedi’s parents encouraged a sense of exploration, giving him responsibilities for family projects even at a young age. When they restored a countryside cabin in a small town near Palazzolo, in the hills between Florence and Bologna, the then-14-year-old Marco got a project of his own. He had to ensure the animals on the property had enough accessible water without overfilling the storage tank. Marco designed and built a passive hydraulic system that effectively solved the problem and is still functional today.

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October 30, 2025

Study reveals the role of geography in the opioid crisis

The U.S. opioid crisis has varied in severity across the country, leading to extended debate about how and why it has spread.

Now, a study co-authored by MIT economists sheds new light on these dynamics, examining the role that geography has played in the crisis. The results show how state-level policies inadvertently contributed to the rise of opioid addiction, and how addiction itself is a central driver of the long-term problem.

The research analyzes data about people who moved within the U.S., as a way of addressing a leading question about the crisis: How much of the problem is attributable to local factors, and to what extent do people have individual characteristics making them prone to opioid problems?

“We find a very large role for place-based factors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t person-based factors as well,” says MIT economist Amy Finkelstein, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings.

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October 29, 2025

New method could improve manufacturing of gene-therapy drugs

Some of the most expensive drugs currently in use are gene therapies to treat specific diseases, and their high cost limits their availability for those who need them. Part of the reason for the cost is that the manufacturing process yields as much as 90 percent non-active material, and separating out these useless parts is slow, leads to significant losses, and is not well adapted to large-scale production. Separation accounts for almost 70 percent of the total gene therapy manufacturing cost. But now, researchers at MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Biomedical Innovation have found a way to greatly improve that separation process.

The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by MIT Research Scientist Vivekananda Bal, Edward R. Gilliland Professor Richard Braatz, and five others.

“Since 2017, there have been around 10,000 clinical trials of gene therapy drugs,” Bal says.

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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 24, 2025

The brain power behind sustainable AI

How can you use science to build a better gingerbread house?

That was something Miranda Schwacke spent a lot of time thinking about. The MIT graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) is part of Kitchen Matters, a group of grad students who use food and kitchen tools to explain scientific concepts through short videos and outreach events. Past topics included why chocolate “seizes,” or becomes difficult to work with when melting (spoiler: water gets in), and how to make isomalt, the sugar glass that stunt performers jump through in action movies.

Two years ago, when the group was making a video on how to build a structurally sound gingerbread house, Schwacke scoured cookbooks for a variable that would produce the most dramatic difference in the cookies.

“I was reading about what determines the texture of cookies,

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October 23, 2025

A “seating chart” for atoms helps locate their positions in materials

If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light — which is a thousand times larger than the atom’s width — is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf an atom, missing it entirely as it passes by. This gulf in size has long made it impossible for scientists to see and resolve individual atoms using optical microscopes alone.

Only recently have scientists found ways to break this “diffraction limit,” to see features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. With new techniques known as super-resolution microscopy, scientists can see down to the scale of a single molecule.

And yet, individual atoms have still been too small for optical microscopes — which are much simpler and less expensive than super-resolution techniques — to distinguish, until now.

In an open-access paper appearing today in Nature Communications,

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