News & Stories

New 10-minute test detects Covid-19 immunity

Researchers have successfully developed a rapid point-of-care test for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies (NAbs). This simple test, only requiring a drop of blood from a fingertip, can be performed within 10 minutes without the need for a laboratory or specially trained personnel. Currently, no similar NAb tests are commercially available within Singapore or […]

Design’s new frontier

In the 1960s, the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) sparked a revolution in design. For his PhD thesis in 1963, MIT Professor Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a game-changing software program that enabled users to draw, move, and resize shapes on a computer. Over the course of the next few decades, CAD software reshaped how everything […]

Scientists project increased risk to water supplies in South Africa this century

In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa’s second most populous city, came very close to running out of water as the multi-year “Day Zero” drought depleted its reservoirs. Since then, researchers from Stanford University determined that climate change had made this extreme drought five to six times more likely, and warned that a lot more Day Zero events could […]

Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages

Automated speech-recognition technology has become more common with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, but many of these systems only perform well with the most widely spoken of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages. Because these systems largely don’t exist for less common languages, the millions of people who speak them are cut off from […]

A new way to generate light using pre-existing defects in semiconductors

Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, together with collaborators at MIT, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have discovered a new method of generating long-wavelength (red, orange, and yellow) light using intrinsic […]

Dragging your feet? Lack of sleep affects your walk, new study finds

Good sleep can be hard to come by. But a new study finds that if you can make up for lost sleep, even for just a few weekend hours, the extra zzz’s could help reduce fatigue-induced clumsiness, at least in how you walk. There’s plenty of evidence to show sleep, and how much we get […]

Ingenuity, design, and human spirit

The Azraq refugee camp in Jordan hosts about 35,000 people displaced by the Syrian civil war, who live in rows of small white steel sheds. Several years ago, a camp resident named Majid Al-Kanaan undertook a project to combat the visual and existential monotony of camp life. Using clay and stones from camp terrain, he […]

Punishment for the people

By some lights, it seems curious how authoritarian leaders can sustain their public support while limiting liberties for citizens. Yes, it can be hard to overthrow an entrenched leader; that does not mean people have to like their ruling autocrats. And yet, many do. After all, authoritarian China consistently polls better on measures of trust […]

Maria Zuber testifies before Congress on striking the right balance between research security and openness

The United States must perform a careful balancing act to secure federally funded research against improper interference from China and other foreign governments without shutting down valuable international scientific research collaborations, MIT Vice President for Research Maria T. Zuber said this week in testimony before Congress. Speaking at a virtual hearing held by two subcommittees […]

Citizens emerge from the slums

Do the world’s nearly 1 billion urban poor, who subsist without legal housing, reliable water and sewer infrastructure, and predictable employment, lack political engagement as well? Ying Gao does not buy the claim by many social scientists that social and economic marginalization necessarily means political marginalization. “My results contradict the prevailing wisdom about slums and […]