In the hit T.V. show “Westworld,” Dolores Abernathy, a golden-tressed belle, lives in the days when Manifest Destiny still echoed in America. She begins to notice unusual stirrings shaking up her quaint western town—and soon discovers that her skin is synthetic, and her mind, metal. She’s a cyborg meant to entertain humans. The key to […]
What better way to commemorate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day than to give three of the world’s most accomplished scientists an opportunity to talk about their careers? On March 7, MindHandHeart invited professors Paula Hammond, Ann Graybiel, and Sangeeta Bhatia to share their career journeys, from the progress they have witnessed to the […]
Mark Harnett, an associate professor at MIT, still remembers the first time he saw electrical activity spiking from a living neuron. He was a senior at Reed College and had spent weeks building a patch clamp rig — an experimental setup with an electrode that can be used to gently probe a neuron and measure […]
To engineer proteins with useful functions, researchers usually begin with a natural protein that has a desirable function, such as emitting fluorescent light, and put it through many rounds of random mutation that eventually generate an optimized version of the protein. This process has yielded optimized versions of many important proteins, including green fluorescent protein […]
A new way of imaging the brain with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not directly detect neural activity as originally reported, according to scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute. The method, first described in 2022, generated excitement within the neuroscience community as a potentially transformative approach. But a study from the lab of McGovern Associate Investigator […]
This story also appears in the Spring 2024 issue of BrainScan. ___ Like many people, graduate student Guillermo Herrera-Arcos found himself working from home in the spring of 2020. Surrounded by equipment he’d hastily borrowed from the lab, he began testing electrical components he would need to control muscles in a new way. If it […]
One of the hallmarks of humanity is language, but now, powerful new artificial intelligence tools also compose poetry, write songs, and have extensive conversations with human users. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are widely available at the tap of a button — but just how smart are these AIs? A new multidisciplinary research effort co-led […]
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of Pat McGovern, an extraordinary visionary and philanthropist whose legacy continues to inspire and impact the world. As the founder of International Data Group (IDG)—a premier information technology organization—McGovern was not just a pioneering figure in the technology media world, but also a passionate advocate for using […]
A new study of people who speak many languages has found that there is something special about how the brain processes their native language. In the brains of these polyglots — people who speak five or more languages — the same language regions light up when they listen to any of the languages that they […]
