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When you think about hands-free devices, you might picture Alexa and other voice-activated in-home assistants, Bluetooth earpieces, or asking Siri to make a phone call in your car. You might not...
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Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the...
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Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF) is a critical congenital heart defect. Babies born with ToF have four cardiac anomalies: an enlarged right ventricle, a hole in the wall separating the right from the left...
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In 2012 at the age of 82, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died of post-surgery complications following what should have been a routine heart surgery. Armstrong had undergone bypass...
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The brain’s ability to learn comes from “plasticity,” in which neurons constantly edit and remodel the tiny connections called synapses that they make with other neurons to form circuits. To study...
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When medical devices such as pacemakers are implanted in the body, they usually provoke an immune response that leads to buildup of scar tissue around the implant. This scarring, known as fibrosis,...
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Need a moment of levity? Try watching videos of astronauts falling on the moon. NASA’s outtakes of Apollo astronauts tripping and stumbling as they bounce in slow motion are delightfully relatable....
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On April 18, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new guidance on airborne disease transmission that seeks to create a consensus around the terminology used to describe the transmission of...
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When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy, the dose of most drugs is calculated based on the patient’s body surface area. This is estimated by plugging the patient’s height and weight into an...
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Farming can be a low-margin, high-risk business, subject to weather and climate patterns, insect population cycles, and other unpredictable factors. Farmers need to be savvy managers of the many...
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Tissue sealants and adhesives offer an attractive alternative to sutures or staples for closing wounds or incisions. These materials offer numerous advantages, particularly for minimally invasive...
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Understanding the surface charge of bacteria and microbes—vital for their interactions within biological and environmental systems—poses significant challenges for scientists and engineers....
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Any drug that is taken orally must pass through the lining of the digestive tract. Transporter proteins found on cells that line the GI tract help with this process, but for many drugs, it’s unknown...
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MIT engineers have developed a small ultrasound sticker that can monitor the stiffness of organs deep inside the body. The sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, can be worn on the skin and is...
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The Covid-19 pandemic taught us how complex the science and management of infectious disease can be, as the public grappled with rapidly evolving science, shifting and contentious policies, and mixed...
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Sequencing all of the RNA in a cell can reveal a great deal of information about that cell’s function and what it is doing at a given point in time. However, the sequencing process destroys the cell...
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When you eat a large meal, your stomach sends signals to your brain that create a feeling of fullness, which helps you realize it’s time to stop eating. A stomach full of liquid can also send these...
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MIT engineers have developed a robotic replica of the heart’s right ventricle, which mimics the beating and blood-pumping action of live hearts.
The robo-ventricle combines real heart tissue with...
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For most metastatic cancer types, there are no reliably effective treatments. Therapies may slow the growth of tumors, but they will not eradicate them. Occasionally, however, treating a tumor in one...
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Diagnosing sleep disorders such as sleep apnea usually requires a patient to spend the night in a sleep lab, hooked up to a variety of sensors and monitors. Researchers from MIT, Celero Systems, and...