The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. There’s a fake confidence you can carry around when you’re learning a new technology. You watch a few videos, skim some docs, get a toy example working, and tell yourself, “Yeah, I’ve got this.” I’ve done that. It never lasts. A…
Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. First, understanding and implementing the tech itself. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are significant, the human element can be even more consequential; fear and ambiguity can stall momentum of even the most promising…
Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with…
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…
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…
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…
When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand…
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is genuinely useful. It gives people who develop AI tools a standardized way to call functions and access data from external systems. Instead of building custom integrations for each data source, you can expose databases, APIs, and internal tools through a common protocol that any AI can understand. However, I’ve…
During early development, tissues and organs begin to bloom through the shifting, splitting, and growing of many thousands of cells. A team of MIT engineers has now developed a way to predict, minute by minute, how individual cells will fold, divide, and rearrange during a fruit fly’s earliest stage of growth. The new method may…
The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t look all that different from others that I’ve seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, the machine zaps a palette of different elements to create vaporized particles, which then fly through the chamber and land to create a thin film, using a technique…