School of Science

During an interview with Lisa Mullins of WBUR’s Here & Now, graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 shares the excitement she felt after winning the 2024 Paralympics silver medal win in the mixed-four crew and delves into her research at MIT focused on developing a low-cost system to gather biomechanical feedback for athletes and help improve their performance. “I really hope to contribute to the sphere and hopefully we can use AI in a way that influences athletes to help them get that one-hundredth of a second, as our coach likes to say,” Eldracher explains. “Because if you add up all the one-hundredths of a second in a race, that could be the difference between a medal or not.” 

Scientists from MIT and elsewhere are using submersible structures to harness the power of ocean waves and make sand accumulate in specific regions to protect islands and potentially grow new ones, reports Amy Gunia for CNN. “With each field experiment, the group says it is advancing its understanding of what materials, configurations, and construction techniques can make sand accumulate in the simplest, most cost-effective, sustainable, long-lasting and scalable way,” explains Gunia. 

Prof. Jeff Gore speaks with Caity Weaver of The New York Times about retiring the U.S. penny and his belief that the penny should be retired. “People think that because it exists and is used, it means that it’s useful,” Gores notes. “We’re taking something that is actually a valuable commodity, something that has actual value, and then we’re converting it into something that people just throw away.” 

Since meeting as undergraduates at MIT, graduate student Ashwin Sah '20 and Mehtaab Sawhney PhD '24 have “written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields,” writes Leila Sloman for Quanta Magazine. Now, in what is being praised as a “huge achievement” and “phenomenally impressive” by fellow mathematicians, Sah and Sawhney have “obtained a long-sought improvement on an estimate of how big sets of integers can get before they must contain sequences of evenly spaced numbers." 

Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 has won a silver medal in the Mixed PR3 Coxed Four A Final at the 2024 Paris Paralympics, reports Brendan Kurie for The Boston Globe. “It was the third consecutive silver medal for the United States in the event, but this year’s boat was filled with first-time medalists,” explains Kurie. 

Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 will complete in the Paris Paralympics as a coxswain in the PR3 Mixed Coxed Four race, reports Henry Dinh-Price, Alexa Podalsky and Aiden Sprole for The Boston Globe. “While studying at MIT, Eldracher designed the first AI-powered heated jacket,” they write.

Researchers at MIT have uncovered a possible reason why legal documents can be so difficult to read, finding that “convoluted legalese often acts as a way to convey authority,” reports Joe Berkowitz for Fast Company. The researchers “tested whether nonlawyers would end up using legalese if asked to write legal documents,” explains Berkowitz. “In the end, all subjects wrote their laws with complex, center-embedded clauses.”

Researchers at MIT have found that the use of legalese in writing “to assert authority over those less versed in such language,” reports Noor Al-Sibai for Futurism. “By studying this cryptic take on the English language, the researchers are hoping to make legal documents much easier to read in the future,” explains Al-Sibai.

A new study led by researchers at MIT suggests that fasting and then refeeding stimulates cell regeneration in the intestines, reports Katharine Lang for Medical News Today. However, notes Lang, researchers also found that fasting “carries the risk of stimulating the formation of intestinal tumors.” 

Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and his colleagues have discovered the potential health benefits and consequences of fasting, reports Max Kozlov for Nature. “There is so much emphasis on fasting and how long to be fasting that we’ve kind of overlooked this whole other side of the equation: what is going on in the refed state,” says Yilmaz.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered an exoplanet that “is 50% larger than Jupiter and as fluffy as cotton candy,” reports Aylin Woodward for The Wall Street Journal. “Basically, for over 15 years now, the astronomy community has been puzzled by a category of gas giants that are bigger than what they should be given their mass,” explains Prof. Julien de Wit. 

MIT researchers have discovered how fasting impacts the regenerative abilities of intestinal stem cells, reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. “The major finding of our current study is that refeeding after fasting is a distinct state from fasting itself,” explain Prof. Ömer Yilmaz and postdocs Shinya Imada and Saleh Khawaled. “Post-fasting refeeding augments the ability of intestinal stem cells to, for example, repair the intestine after injury.” 

In the Wall Street Journal, Cady Coleman '83, a former NASA astronaut and U.S. Air Force colonel, recalls how a talk by astronaut Sally Ride at MIT  inspired her to shoot for the stars. “In her quiet way, Sally Ride shattered assumptions I didn’t know I had,” Coleman writes. “It is extraordinary what a difference it can make to see someone like you doing things you might never have considered doing.”

Forbes reporter Katie Jennings spotlights Phillip (Terry) Ragon '72, and his philanthropic efforts focused on curing HIV. “Ragon’s approach has been to bring together scientists who don’t typically collaborate, including doctors, engineers, physicists, mathematicians and virologists,” writes Jennings.

Writing for Nature, Marinko Sarunic and Cynthia Toth memorialize the life and work of Joseph A. Izatt PhD '91, who “had a special gift, and commitment, to reaching out and working with students and clinicians to create transformative technology." After undergraduate studies at MIT, Izatt focused on applied optics for his graduate work, with his mentors Prof. Michael Feld and Prof. James Fujimoto.