News & Stories

A “big push” to lift people out of poverty

A field experiment in India led by MIT antipoverty researchers has produced a striking result: A one-time boost of capital improves the condition of the very poor even a decade later. The experiment, based on a “Targeting the Ultra-Poor” (TUP) program that aids people living in extreme poverty, generated positive effects on consumption, food security, […]

MIT in the media: 2021 in review

From Institute-wide efforts to address the climate crisis to responding to Covid-19, members of the MIT community made headlines this year for their innovative work in a variety of areas. Faculty, students, and staff were on the front lines of addressing many pressing issues this year, raising their voices and sharing their findings. Below are […]

Q&A: David Autor on the long afterlife of the “China shock”

In 2001, the U.S. normalized long-term trade relations with China, and China joined the World Trade Organization — moves many expected to help both economies. Instead, over the next several years, inexpensive imports from China significantly undercut U.S. manufacturing, especially in industries such as textiles and furniture-making. By 2011, this “China shock” from trade was […]

SMART researchers develop method for early detection of bacterial infection in crops

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) of Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their local collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL), have developed a rapid Raman spectroscopy-based method for detecting and quantifying early bacterial infection in crops. The […]

Community policing in the Global South

Community policing is meant to combat citizen mistrust of the police force. The concept was developed in the mid-20th century to help officers become part of the communities they are responsible for. The hope was that such presence would create a partnership between citizens and the police force, leading to reduced crime and increased trust. […]

Report: Economics drives migration from Central America to the U.S.

A new report about migration, co-authored by MIT scholars, shows that economic distress is the main factor pushing migrants from Central America to the U.S. — and highlights the personal costs borne by people as they seek to move abroad. “The core issue is economics, at the end of the day, and this is where […]

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 […]