The MIT School of Science has announced the 2017 winners of the Infinite Kilometer Award. The Infinite Kilometer Award was established in 2012 to highlight and reward the extraordinary — but often underrecognized — work of the school’s research staff and postdocs. Recipients of the award are exceptional contributors to their research programs. In many cases, they are […]
This year, we hope you enjoy “Postcards from the Brain” — an illustrative journey that features brain regions studied by McGovern researchers.
When McGovern Investigator Mark Harnett gets a text from his collaborator at Massachusetts General Hospital, it’s time to stock up on Red Bull and coffee. Because very soon—sometimes within a few hours—a chunk of living human brain will arrive at the lab, marking the start of an epic session recording the brain’s internal dialogue. And […]
Timing is critical for playing a musical instrument, swinging a baseball bat, and many other activities. Neuroscientists have come up with several models of how the brain achieves its exquisite control over timing, the most prominent being that there is a centralized clock, or pacemaker, somewhere in the brain that keeps time for the entire […]
Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University. This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by […]
Making decisions is not always easy, especially when choosing between two options that have both positive and negative elements, such as deciding between a job with a high salary but long hours, and a lower-paying job that allows for more leisure time. MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that making decisions in this type of situation, […]
Researchers at MIT and Paris Descartes University have developed a new optogenetic technique that sculpts light to target individual cells bearing engineered light-sensitive molecules, so that individual neurons can be precisely stimulated. Until now, it has been challenging to use optogenetics to target single cells with such precise control over both the timing and location […]
And the winner of this year’s costume contest (by popular vote) goes to the Gabrieli Lab for their depiction of John Gabrieli!
The Broad Institute and MIT scientists who first harnessed CRISPR for mammalian genome editing have engineered a new molecular system for efficiently editing RNA in human cells. RNA editing, which can alter gene products without making changes to the genome, has profound potential as a tool for both research and disease treatment. In a paper […]
The ability to measure time and to control the timing of actions is critical for almost every aspect of behavior. Yet the mechanisms by which our brains process time are still largely mysterious. We experience time on many different scales—from milliseconds to years— but of particular interest is the middle range, the scale of seconds […]
