Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT
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In recent years, scientists have developed many strains of engineered bacteria that can be used as sensors to detect environmental contaminants such as heavy metals. If deployed in the natural environment, these sensors could help scientists track how pollutant levels change over time, over a wide geographic area.
MIT engineers have now devised a way to make this kind of deployment safer, by encasing bacterial sensors in a tough hydrogel shell that prevents them from escaping into the environment and potentially spreading modified genes to other organisms.
“Right now there are a lot of whole-cell biosensors being developed, but applying them in the real world is a challenge because we don’t want any genetically modified organisms to be able to exchange genetic material with wild-type microbes,” says MIT graduate student Tzu-Chieh Tang, one of the lead authors of the new stu
Caption: First row, left to right: Navid Azizan, Rodrigo Freitas, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Jack Hare. Second row, left to right: Samuel Hopkins, Michael Howland, Yoon Kim, Adrian Lozano-Duran, Kelly Metcalf Pate. Third row, left to right: Anand Natarajan, Jelena Notaros, Carlos Portela, Ashia Wilson, Sixian You.
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The School of Engineering is welcoming 15 new faculty members to its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. With research and teaching activities ranging from the development of robotics and AI technologies to the modeling and optimization of renewable energy systems, they are poised to make significant contributions in new directions across the school and to a wide range of research efforts around the Institute.
Credits: Photos: Samantha Smiley
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The field of artificial intelligence is moving at a staggering clip, with breakthroughs emerging in labs across MIT. Through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), undergraduates get to join in. In two years, the MIT Quest for Intelligence has placed 329 students in research projects aimed at pushing the frontiers of computing and artificial intelligence, and using these tools to revolutionize how we study the brain, diagnose and treat disease, and search for new materials with mind-boggling properties.
Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has enlisted several Quest-funded undergraduates in his mission to discover new molecules and materials with the help of AI. “They bring a blue-sky open mind and a lot of energy,” he says. “Through the Quest, we had the chance to connect with students from other majors who
The field of artificial intelligence is moving at a staggering clip, with breakthroughs emerging in labs across MIT. Through the Undergraduate Research.
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