Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists have identified several regions of the brain that are responsible for processing language. However, discovering the specific functions of neurons in those regions has proven difficult because fMRI, which measures changes in blood flow, doesn’t have high enough resolution to reveal what small populations of neurons are doing. […]
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has announced three MIT professors among the members of the 2024 class of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF). The fellowship is the DoD’s flagship single-investigator award for research, inviting the nation’s most talented researchers to pursue ambitious ideas that defy conventional boundaries. Domitilla Del Vecchio, professor of mechanical […]
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) today announced its 2024 investigators, four of whom hail from the School of Science at MIT: Steven Flavell, Mary Gehring, Mehrad Jazayeri, and Gene-Wei Li. Four others with MIT ties were also honored: Jonathan Abraham, graduate of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program; Dmitriy Aronov PhD ’10; Vijay Sankaran, graduate of the Harvard/MIT […]
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has named McGovern Institute neuroscientist Mehrdad Jazayeri as one of 26 new HHMI investigators—a group of visionary scientists who HHMI will support with more than $300 million over the next seven years. Support from HHMI is intended to give its investigators, who work at institutions across the United States, […]
What does your license plate say about you? In the United States, more than 9 million vehicles carry personalized “vanity” license plates, in which preferred words, digits, or phrases replace an otherwise random assignment of letters and numbers to identify a vehicle. While each state and the District of Columbia maintains its own rules about […]
Polina Anikeeva PhD ’09, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor at MIT, has been named the new head of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), effective July 1. “Professor Anikeeva’s passion and dedication as both a researcher and educator, as well as her impressive network of connections across the wider Institute, make her incredibly […]
There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce unconsciousness in patients. Exactly how these drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question, but MIT neuroscientists have now answered that question for one commonly used anesthesia drug. Using a novel technique for analyzing neuron activity, the researchers discovered that the […]
State-of-the-art prosthetic limbs can help people with amputations achieve a natural walking gait, but they don’t give the user full neural control over the limb. Instead, they rely on robotic sensors and controllers that move the limb using predefined gait algorithms. Using a new type of surgical intervention and neuroprosthetic interface, MIT researchers, in collaboration […]
