Galactic investigator + knotty mystery + online learning

California blackworms tangle themselves up by the thousands, then separate in a split second. Their trick may inspire the design of self-detangling materials and fibers.

A collaborative research team from the MIT-Takeda Program combined physics and machine learning to characterize rough particle surfaces in pharmaceutical pills and powders.

CEO Stephanie Khurana describes the nonprofit, whose work is aimed at those without easy access to degree and credential programs.

Assistant Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi examines how the increasing use of artificial intelligence could impact medical care. “When you take state-of-the-art machine-learning methods and systems and then evaluate them on different patient groups, they do not perform equally,” says Ghassemi.

The MIT China Strategy Group explores how U.S. universities can manage the pressures posed by rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, outlining the approach they developed to “help MIT advance knowledge and the needs of the United States and the world — without damaging U.S. interests in national security or the economy, without endangering human rights, and in ways consistent with the core values of our institution.”