The catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6 has left more than 41,000 people dead, and many more still not counted under the rubble. More than a million people have been left homeless in Turkey alone. Bilge Yildiz, MIT professor of nuclear science and of materials science and engineering, was born and educated in Turkey. She offers a stark comparison: The number of people without housing is nearly 10 times the entire population of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the wake of the disaster, the Institute’s priority was to contact students from the region as they feared for the ..read more

Want to know if the Golden Gate Bridge is holding up well? There could be an app for that. A new study involving MIT researchers shows that mobile phones placed in vehicles, equipped with special software, can collect useful structural integrity data while crossing bridges. In so doing, they could become a less expensive alternative to sets of sensors attached to bridges themselves. “The core finding is that information about structural health of bridges can be extracted from smartphone-collected accelerometer data,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Sensable City Laboratory and co-author ..read more

Vehicle traffic has long defied description. Once measured roughly through visual inspection and traffic cameras, new smartphone crowdsourcing tools are now quantifying traffic far more precisely. This popular method, however, also presents a problem: Accurate measurements require a lot of data and users. Meshkat Botshekan, an MIT PhD student in civil and environmental engineering and research assistant at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, has sought to expand on crowdsourcing methods by looking into the physics of traffic. During his time as a doctoral candidate, he has helped develop Carb ..read more

The Covid-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the life science ecosystem, uniting the scientific community with a common purpose and re-imagining pathways to address global health challenges. To help accelerate that innovation, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and MilliporeSigma — the U.S. and Canadian life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany — together convened more than 200 thought leaders from around the world to collaboratively capture the disruptions caused by the pandemic, and identify the solutions that wi ..read more

America has over 4 million miles of roads and, as one might expect, monitoring them can be a monumental task.   To collect high-quality data on the conditions of their roads, departments of transportation (DOTs) can expect to spend $200 per mile for state-of-the-art laser profilers. For cities and states, these costs are prohibitive and often force them to resort to rudimentary approaches, like visual inspection. Over the past three years, a collaboration between the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Birzeit University, and the American ..read more

When the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, the health crisis catalyzed a global effort to accelerate innovation and stop the novel virus’s spread. To help streamline that effort, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and MilliporeSigma, the life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, together convened more than 180 thought leaders from around the globe to collaborate asynchronously and rapidly identify solutions. A comprehensive report that synthesizes data-driven insights from this expert ..read more

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you’re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The question that begets 42, at least in the novel, is frustratingly, hilar ..read more

With the world battling the current Covid-19 outbreak, a new project at MIT seeks to develop innovative solutions to fight this and future pandemics. The Pandemic Response CoLab is a joint project by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and founding member MilliporeSigma, the life science business of Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany. The Pandemic Response CoLab is an open, online collaboration platform that invites anyone, from individuals to groups, from communities to businesses, to develop actionable solutions for challenges p ..read more

Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others. But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence. In a p ..read more

Early this year, Philip Kuai MNG '07 and his team were faced with a challenging decision about whether to continue on their pathway to publicly offer their company, Dada Group, in the midst of a global pandemic. While there was much uncertainty in the market at the time, the team’s perseverance and dedication paid off in June when Kuai rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely from Shanghai, China, signaling Dada’s listing in New York. His company’s vision is to “bring people everything on-demand.” It achieves this through two complementary business platforms, Dada Now and JDDJ. Dada Now is a crow ..read more