On a typical photonic chip, light travels in wires, but a new system precisely broadcasts light off the chip into free space in a scalable way. This could lead to advanced displays, high-speed optical communications, and larger-scale quantum computers.
Song Han is working to shrink and speed up large AI models, cutting their energy use and lowering their cost. As a guest on President Kornbluth’s Curiosity Unbounded podcast, he discussed why AI is so energy-hungry and the benefits of lighter models.
“I’ve loved space for as long as I can remember,” says MechE PhD student Palak Patel. She’s working on advanced materials that could transform human spaceflight: “My research fundamentally tries to figure out how to keep astronauts safe in space.”
The new MIT4America Calculus Project pairs MIT students with high schoolers nationwide to tutor calculus, offering a gateway to STEM careers. The goal, says Eric Klopfer, is to help students “get into great universities … and then into STEM careers.”
Engineers have found that hidden “tacit knowledge” — know-how that we can’t easily explain — shows up in how we focus during tasks. Bringing this concealed knowledge to the surface, they say, could help enhance experts’ performance or train novices.
In a world without MIT, radar wouldn’t have been available to help win World War II. We might not have email, CT scans, time-release drugs, photolithography, or GPS. And we’d lose over 30,000 companies, employing millions of people. Can you imagine?
Since its founding, MIT has been key to helping American science and innovation lead the world. Discoveries that begin here generate jobs and power the economy — and what we create today builds a better tomorrow for all of us.