Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are tried-and-true tools used to design many of the physical objects we use each day. But CAD software requires extensive expertise to master, and many tools incorporate such a high level of detail they don’t lend themselves to brainstorming or rapid prototyping. In an effort to make design faster and more accessible for non-experts, researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an AI-driven robotic assembly system that allows people to build physical objects by simply describing them in words. Their system uses a generative AI model to build a 3D representation of an object’s geometry based on […]

Today, out of an estimated 1 trillion species on Earth, 99.999 percent are considered microbial — bacteria, archaea, viruses, and single-celled eukaryotes. For much of our planet’s history, microbes ruled the Earth, able to live and thrive in the most extreme of environments. Researchers have only just begun in the last few decades to contend with the diversity of microbes — it’s estimated that less than 1 percent of known genes have laboratory-validated functions. Computational approaches offer researchers the opportunity to strategically parse this truly astounding amount of information. An environmental microbiologist and computer scientist by training, new MIT faculty […]

What if there were a way to solve one of the most significant obstacles to the use of nuclear energy — the disposal of high-level nuclear waste (HLW)? Dauren Sarsenbayev, a third-year doctoral student at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is addressing the challenge as part of his research. Sarsenbayev focuses on one of the primary problems related to HLW: decay heat released by radioactive waste. The basic premise of his solution is to extract the heat from spent fuel, which simultaneously takes care of two objectives: gaining more energy from an existing carbon-free resource while decreasing […]