Discovering hidden stories in the Flint water crisis

Graduate student Elena Sobrino looks beyond the headlines to study interactions between the city’s people and institutions.

Alumni-founded robotic kitchen cooks up tasty meals

Spyce, a robot-assisted restaurant located in Boston, was invented to respond to a common MIT student desire: good, low-cost food.

Taming fusion with machine learning

Postdoc Cristina Rea's detour into banking provides a new route back to plasma research.

Dennis Frenchman named head of the MIT Center for Real Estate

Architect and urban designer brings to the role decades of global expertise on the transformation of cities

3 Questions: Historian Caley Horan on the rise of private insurance in the U.S.

Assistant professor explores how risk sharing and mutual aid shifted to individual forms of protection.

Katharine Schwab of Co.Design highlights graduate student Joy Buolamwini and Visiting Scholar J. Nathan Matias as “design heroes” for their commitment to keep technology fair. Schwab writes that Buolamwini has forced companies “to develop better, more equitable technology” while Matias helped “reduced the prevalence of fake news.”

Boston Globe reporter David Weininger highlights a recording of three new works by Prof. Peter Child. Weininger writes that the new pieces, “demonstrate the MIT composer’s remarkable stylistic diversity.”

Prof. Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab, writes for Wired about how scientists are creating new ways to develop meat-free foods. Ito writes that it’s, “feasible to imagine a system that unleashes a culinary bonanza of nutritional, flavor and texture options for future chefs while also lowering the environmental impact of belching cows, concentrated animal-feeding operations, and expensive and energy-inefficient refrigerated supply chains.”

Let it rain! New coatings make natural fabrics waterproof

MIT-developed process could offer nontoxic alternative to environmentally harmful chemicals.

Personalized “deep learning” equips robots for autism therapy

Machine learning network offers personalized estimates of children’s behavior.

The value of late-in-life health care spending

Study debunks notion that large chunks of Medicare go to futile end-of-life care.