1+ hour, 29+ min ago   (731+ words) Most materials have an inherent capacity to handle heat. Plastic, for instance, is typically a poor thermal conductor, whereas materials like marble move heat more efficiently. If you were to place one hand on a marble countertop and the other…...

14+ hour, 29+ min ago   (847+ words) A firm that wants to use a large language model (LLM) to summarize sales reports or triage customer inquiries can choose between hundreds of unique LLMs with dozens of model variations, each with slightly different performance. To narrow down the choice,…...

3+ day, 1+ hour ago   (484+ words) In a wide-ranging live conversation, MIT President Sally Kornbluth joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan live in studio for GBH's Boston Public Radio'on Thursday, February 5. They talked about MIT, the pressures facing America's research enterprise, the importance of science, that…...

3+ day, 9+ hour ago   (540+ words) Early in the 1969 film "Midnight Cowboy," Dustin Hoffman, playing the character of Ratso Rizzo, crosses a Manhattan street and angrily bangs on the hood of an encroaching taxi. Hoffman's line " "I'm walking here!" " has since been repeated by thousands of…...

3+ day, 14+ hour ago   (770+ words) Oxygen is a vital and constant presence on Earth today. But that hasn't always been the case. It wasn't until around 2.3 billion years ago that oxygen became a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, during a pivotal period known as the…...

3+ day, 21+ hour ago   (433+ words) The ability to use language to communicate is one of things that makes us human. At MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, scientists led by Evelina Fedorenko have defined an entire network of areas within the brain dedicated to this…...

3+ day, 21+ hour ago   (751+ words) The EnCompass system runs AI agent programs by backtracking and making several attempts, finding an LLM's best set of outputs. It lets programmers easily experiment with different search strategies so they can work with AI agents more efficiently. The work…...

4+ day, 29+ min ago   (596+ words) A longstanding goal of immunotherapies and vaccine research is to induce antibodies in humans that neutralize deadly viruses such as HIV and influenza. Of particular interest are antibodies that are "broadly neutralizing," meaning they can in principle eliminate multiple strains…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (382+ words) MIT Professor Antonio Torralba has been named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow for his work on computer vision, machine learning, and human visual perception, along with three MIT alumni. Antonio Torralba, Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (183+ words) In this Q&A, Collins speaks about his latest work and goals for this research. Q.You're known for collaborating with colleagues across MIT, and at other institutions. How have these collaborations and affiliations helped you with your research? The common…...