Go is an ancient board game that demands not only strategy and logic, but intuition, creativity, and subtlety—in other words, it’s a game of quintessentially human abilities. Or so it seemed, until Google’s DeepMind AI program, AlphaGo, roundly defeated the world’s top Go champion. But ask it to read social cues or interpret what another […]
The MIT School of Science has announced seven winners of the Infinite Mile Award for 2018. The award will be presented at a luncheon this May in recognition of staff members whose accomplishments and contributions to their departments, laboratories, and centers far exceed expectations. The 2018 Infinite Mile Award winners are: Hristina Dineva, Department of […]
McGovern investigators study intelligence to answer a practical question for both educators and computer scientists. Can intelligence be improved? A nine-year-old girl, a contestant on a game show, is standing on stage. On a screen in front of her, there appears a twelve-digit number followed by a six-digit number. Her challenge is to divide the […]
Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT has been named a recipient of the 2018 Canada Gairdner International Award — Canada’s most prestigious scientific prize — for his role in the discovery of light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, a technology to control brain activity with light. Boyden’s work has given neuroscientists […]
Humans use an ability known as theory of mind every time they make inferences about someone else’s mental state — what the other person believes, what they want, or why they are feeling happy, angry, or scared. Behavioral studies have suggested that children begin succeeding at a key measure of this ability, known as the […]
Catching a bouncing ball or hitting a ball with a racket requires estimating when the ball will arrive. Neuroscientists have long thought that the brain does this by calculating the speed of the moving object. However, a new study from MIT shows that the brain’s approach is more complex. The new findings suggest that in […]
For the past decade, neuroscientists have been using a modified version of the rabies virus to label neurons and trace the connections between them. Although this technique has proven very useful, it has one major drawback: The virus is toxic to cells and can’t be used for studies longer than about two weeks. Researchers at […]
Edward S. Boyden, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Media Lab, and an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, has been appointed the inaugural Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology. The new professorship has been established at the McGovern Institute by K. Lisa Yang […]
Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity usually measure these signals with electrodes inserted into the brain, a task that is notoriously difficult and time-consuming. MIT researchers have now come up with a completely […]
The team that first unveiled the rapid, inexpensive, highly sensitive CRISPR-based diagnostic tool called SHERLOCK has greatly enhanced the tool’s power, and has developed a miniature paper test that allows results to be seen with the naked eye — without the need for expensive equipment. The SHERLOCK team developed a simple paper strip to […]
