Proteins are far more than nutrients we track on a food label. Present in every cell of our bodies, they work like nature’s molecular machines. They walk, stretch, bend, and flex to do their jobs, pumping blood, fighting disease, building tissue, and many other jobs too small for the eye to see. Their power doesn’t come from shape alone, but from how they move.  In recent years, artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to design entirely new protein structures not found in nature tailored for specific functions, such as binding to viruses, or mimicking the mechanical properties of silk for sustainable […]

Growing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo ’25 couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others, like Salcedo’s, were less fortunate. “I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.”  Salcedo, the Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation, earned an BS in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making from MIT, where he explored signal processing in machine learning and how a classical understanding of signals can inform how we understand AI. Now he’s one of five master’s […]

Inside a giant autonomous warehouse, hundreds of robots dart down aisles as they collect and distribute items to fulfill a steady stream of customer orders. In this busy environment, even small traffic jams or minor collisions can snowball into massive slowdowns. To avoid such an avalanche of inefficiencies, researchers from MIT and the tech firm Symbotic developed a new method that automatically keeps a fleet of robots moving smoothly. Their method learns which robots should go first at each moment, based on how congestion is forming, and adapts to prioritize robots that are about to get stuck. In this way, […]