The poetry of data

Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class.

Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid domestic labor in such a way that the bar and pie graphs spell out the word “MOM.” Another tracks deaths from gun violence across the globe and is presented as a gun-shaped graph. Still others are written in more standard poetic form but include citations that reference documents put out by the US government, the United Nations, and news organizations.

These poems are just a few of the many in Muschenetz’s latest book that wrestle with contemporary social issues using a combination of data-driven insights and the poetic form. The format is a unique one: The first time Hayley Mitchell Haugen, founding editor in chief of Muschenetz’s publisher Sheila-Na-Gig, saw the poems, she thought to herself, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Point Blank

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY WRITERS RESIST, WINTER 2023

While cold, hard numbers and poetry might seem antithetical at first blush, from Muschenetz’s perspective, the two couldn’t be a better fit. A former business consultant at Bain & Company who received her MBA at the Sloan School of Management, she released her first poetry book in her 40s, and she’s enjoyed uncovering what the artistic and scientific approaches to understanding the world have in common.

“Even though it maybe feels unintuitive that poetry and science are interrelated, they both make connections that are not immediately obvious,” she says. “They test out theories; they take risks. There’s a lot of nonlinear thinking that happens in both.”

Many of the poems in Power Point were inspired by watershed moments in global politics and culture, particularly ones that would shape the lives of women. From the partisan political theater on display at the confirmation hearing of US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the passage of laws restricting women’s freedoms in Iran and Afghanistan, these events often left Muschenetz overwhelmed with frustration at the state of women’s rights today.

But knowing that women’s emotions are so often dismissed, she looked for a way to turn those feelings into something that she hoped would be harder to write off than standard poetry while still evoking the openheartedness with which people tend to approach art.

“I wanted something that listed just facts but expressed how angry I am,” she says. “I really wanted it to be fact-based. I wanted my sources to be publicly available and almost unassailable.” Her hope was that by repackaging these facts in the form of statistics-driven poetry, she might allow readers to receive the information in a new way—and get them thinking.

From Ukraine to California

Muschenetz’s childhood primed her to understand how global currents can shape an individual life from an early age. Born Yevgenia Leonidovna Veitzman to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Muschenetz says her family began trying to leave the country before she was born, hoping to escape the discrimination they faced under the Soviet government. But it wasn’t until she was 10 years old that the family was finally able to emigrate. When they were at last cleared to cross the border, they headed for San Diego, where she decided that Jane would be easier for Americans to pronounce than her given first name. (Ultimately, she would change her last name, too, when she married.)

At age 16, she began submitting her poetry to magazines and publishers, which brought her first taste of writerly rejection. “I was like, ‘Oh, well, I tried. Clearly this isn’t for me.’ Even though in my heart, since I was like four years old, I knew I was a writer and I loved literature,” she says. 

Her parents were “completely horrified” about the prospect of her pursuing a career in writing, but they weren’t much more excited about what she eventually landed on instead: a degree in political science at UC San Diego. “The response was always ‘Poets get shot. Politicians get shot,’” she says. 

She might not have been able to articulate it at age 18, but looking back, Muschenetz makes sense of the decision to study political science as driven by her desire to understand the global forces that caused her family to emigrate. “I wanted to know: How do we structure policy? Who makes these choices, and how can we change them and make them better?” she says.

STACY KECK

But the dream of writing was hard to let go of. By the time Muschenetz was a few years out of college, she’d applied for two different programs: an MFA in writing and the MBA program at Sloan. And though she didn’t get accepted to the MFA program, her time at Sloan ended up profoundly shaping the poetry she would write two decades later, giving her the statistical analysis and data interpretation skills that formed the backdrop for Power Point. Those were skills she sharpened even further in the years she spent working as a business consultant at Bain right after earning her MBA.

“I don’t think the average joe could pull off [what she does in that book], because she knows how to present statistics well,” says Haugen. “She knows how to look at them analytically and offer them up in a way that a layperson can understand.”

Muschenetz left the business world after four years at Bain to focus on parenting her two children, as well as serving in various volunteer capacities at their schools and with local community organizations. It wasn’t until the world shut down in 2020 with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic that she found herself getting back in touch with the creative impulses that had animated her previously. Those impulses manifested in part as visual art: Muschenetz began painting a menagerie of animals on the bases of palm fronds she would find on the ground after a big storm in San Diego. “It just felt good, even though it made no sense,” she says. “At the same time, it was keeping me sane.”

“Through my high school and early college years, every margin of every notebook was covered with poems or rhymes,” she says. “And then it was just gone. It was scary for me to realize that I had cut that part out of myself, and how bad that was for me.”

Coming home to poetry

When Muschenetz did start writing again, she thought she might write a collection of poems rooted in domesticity and home life. She was surprised to find that what started flowing out of her instead were poems about her immigrant experience, which had never been the subject of her poetry while she was living it as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Well, shouldn’t I have gotten this out of my system?’ But here I was writing about this aspect of my identity that I never actually had written about before.” 

She eventually had enough poems to pull together what became her first collection, titled All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents. The book reveals her propensity for weaving together dark and light, humor and tragedy, in a range of poems that cover everything from the war in Ukraine to the experience of being stereotyped for her ability to speak Russian, the language of many American movie villains. 

Muschenetz initially thought that writing a book of poetry might be a onetime thing, the kind of undertaking that would allow her to check a box and move on. But as she was promoting her first book, she found herself fixating on a poem she hadn’t even written yet—one in the form of data that would spell out a word. The idea was eventually realized in “100% MOM.” 

100% MOM: A PowerPoint Poem about Women and Labor

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN WHALE ROAD REVIEW, SPRING 2023

That poem was the seed that grew into Power Point, and Muschenetz, whose poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, hasn’t looked back since. In addition to releasing that second volume of poetry, the product of what she calls the “analytic and overachieving brain” that helped her get through (and enjoy) business school, Muschenetz has used those same skills to help the poetry community in San Diego with some of the more practical needs, like grant writing, that are often lacking in communities of artists, says Katie Manning, a local poet and professor emeritus of poetry. 

Muschenetz is mostly just happy to have found a way to use poetry to keep integrating and honoring the many different parts of her identity, from immigrant to business consultant. 

“It is a huge disservice to all humanity when we ask our scientists or mathematicians or poets to only be that one thing, as opposed to being their whole selves,” she says. 

The man who reinvented the hammer

A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera.

These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions.

“I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace of southern Indiana twang. “I invent all the time. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m always doing experiments.”

Schroder grew up on a farm but always knew his future wasn’t in agriculture. With his heart set on studying physics, he applied only to MIT—ignorant, he says, of just how academically rigorous it would be. Once enrolled, he watched as his “super genius” classmates appeared to sail through their classes, while he worked harder than they did but earned only Bs. 

Everything changed when he made his way through the notorious gauntlet of Course 8 Junior Lab, considered one of the most demanding two-term lab classes at the Institute. While tinkering during that advanced experimental physics class, he found his path.

“It eliminates a lot of people, but for some reason it was the easiest class for me,” he remembers now. “I would not only fix the machines and get them working but actually get better measurements than other people did, and figured out ways to use the equipment to do things that no one had noticed.”

But in his regular classes, he still felt he was treading water. “I realized that, okay, I still wanted to be a physicist, but maybe a slightly different kind of physicist,” he says.  

For example, the kind of physicist who manages to improve the everyday hammer—a tool so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it hadn’t been reconceived in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years until Schroder came along. Or the kind who would save an old dog using nanoparticles of silver. Or one who would use a $7 camera to brainstorm his way to a new thermal processing technique that has revolutionized the mass production of electronic circuits.

After MIT, Schroder spent two years designing weapons for the US Navy before enrolling in a doctoral program in plasma physics at the University of Texas at Austin. As he was approaching his final year, he and his wife, Lisa, went to Walmart one day to run an errand. “Like a stereotypical guy, I walked into the tool section and I started looking at the hammers,” Schroder recalls. “I realized all the hammers were designed incorrectly. It became almost an obsession for me.” 

“I became enamored with the fact that I could work on something that everybody had the opportunity to fix and did not.”

What Schroder picked up on wasn’t the design of the tools, exactly, but the fact that the manufacturers were effectively broadcasting a flaw. “The labels of all the hammers said ‘We have a shock-­reduction grip’ or a ‘vibration-reducing grip’ and I would try it and it didn’t work,” he says. “They were saying: ‘This is not a solved problem.’ They just gave me the information I needed. Have you ever heard of a tire company that says ‘Our tires are round’?”

At the time, Schroder was taking another exacting class, this one on mechanics. The professor told students he planned to cover 14 weeks of the syllabus in a mere six weeks and focus on special topics in the remaining time. Many students were intimidated and dropped out, but Schroder stuck with it. (“It was the type of abuse I was used to at MIT,” he jokes, pointing to his brass rat. “So it was just fine.”) Somewhat fortuitously, one of those “special topics” was baseball bats. 

WYATT MCSPADDEN

Because Schroder was so consumed by the hammer vibration problem—another activity that involves the mechanics of swinging—he read books about the legendary Boston Red Sox batter Ted Williams to learn more. He interviewed carpenters. He spent a fair amount of time with a hammer in his hand. “I got to be pretty good at it myself. I was just hammering all the time,” he says. “I ended up losing part of my hearing because I was doing all this work on anvils.”

He developed tests to measure vibrations and crafted a “cyberglove” that would read them and upload the data into a computer program. After two years of data collection and analysis, he concluded that most attempts to improve hammers involved adding length and therefore weight. That causes fatigue and potentially exacerbates what is known as “hammer elbow” or lateral epicondylitis, a repetitive stress disorder that can plague construction workers. 

Schroder determined that there was a “little spot in a hammer where there’s not much vibration”—the part of the handle most people would naturally grasp. He figured out that if you remove weight from the parts of the handle adjacent to the grip and insert foam there, that insulates the user’s hand from the shock of impact and resulting vibration. Using foam inserts also made it feasible for him to redesign the hammer head to increase the effective length of the hammer—and boost momentum transfer by about 15%—without adding weight. In other words, his design not only reduced vibration but made the hammer hit harder with less effort. 

These modifications also cut manufacturing costs. Today, Schroder’s design improvements have made their way into the majority of hammers sold in the United States, making hammering much easier on users’ elbows—and relieving manufacturers from the mounting threat of lawsuits for vibration-related workplace injuries. 

“It’s kind of a boring thing, really. It’s not something that physicists work on,” he says. “I became enamored with the fact that I could work on something that everybody had the opportunity to fix and did not.”

In the course of tackling the hammer problem, Schroder says, he learned that being an inventor is as much about perseverance and grit as it is about science or imagination. His professors told him he was wasting his time and shouldn’t bother. Then, after he presented his innovations to hammer companies, they said they didn’t think his developments were patentable—yet proceeded to incorporate them into their new designs. Two patents were ultimately issued to Schroder, and 16 years later, after suing the hammer companies, he was finally compensated for his innovations. He paid off his house, took his wife and five kids to Italy, and gave the rest of the proceeds to charity, he says.

By that time, he had already moved on.

In the early 2000s, while working at a company then called Nanotechnologies, Schroder was applying the concept of pulsed power, a subfield of physics and electrical engineering he’d studied at MIT, to synthesize nanoparticles. Pulsed power involves extremely brief, intense bursts of electric current that deliver “a huge amount of power—a ridiculous amount of power—for a short period of time,” Schroder explains. For example, a flash camera might take five seconds to charge, drawing a mere five watts from an AA battery. But when it releases that stored energy in less than a thousandth of a second, the flash is about 20,000 watts.

“Inventing is a skill, not a talent. Everyone can be an inventor.”

For one of its many projects, the company had been developing an electro-­thermal gun, originally intended for military purposes, that Schroder says had “a very intense arc discharge—a spark, but 100,000 amps.” He describes the 50-megawatt prototypes they produced as “a little bit scary” and calls it a “failed device that never got out of the laboratory.” But his predecessors at the company realized that if they pulled the trigger after removing the projectile from the barrel, the high heat of the pulsed arc discharge would erode the silver electrodes inside the barrel, generating plasma that shot out of the device. When the plasma rapidly cooled, these eroded, or ablated, electrodes reacted with gases to form nanoparticles. An inert gas, like helium, would generate silver nanoparticles. A reactive gas would form nanoparticles of a compound, like silver oxide.

Abandoning the idea of an electro­thermal gun altogether, Schroder and his colleagues drew on his expertise in pulsed power and focused on applying it to rods of, say, silver or aluminum to produce nanoparticles of those materials. Then they determined that if they tweaked the length of the pulse, from one millisecond to two or more, they could change the average particle size to suit a broader range of applications. The discovery was “really exciting,” Schroder says now, but it proved difficult to capitalize on given the lack of commercial demand for nanoparticles at the time. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Around this time, in 2001, Schroder inherited an ailing 12-year-old German shepherd named Heidi. “She had these pus-y wounds that were a half-inch in diameter and a half-inch deep in her knees and elbows,” Schroder recalls. “The infection was so bad she couldn’t get up.” He began to treat Heidi with a salve made for dogs and horses, but after a couple of weeks she was not improving. “I thought, darn it, I don’t want to put her down,” Schroder remembers.

But then he thought of the silver nanoparticles that his company had developed. “I had heard that some of the stuff might be antimicrobial,” he says. So he mixed the nanoparticles into the salve and applied it to Heidi’s wounds. Within two weeks, they had healed, and Heidi could stand and even run. Now the nanoparticle-­infused salve is an FDA-approved product that hospitals use to treat burn victims. “We referred to her, lovingly, as Heidi the Nano Dog,” Schroder says.

Today, Schroder is best known for his second nanoparticle invention, which he dreamed up when he became fascinated with the idea of printed electronics.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if you could take an inkjet printer cartridge, jailbreak it, and [add metallic] nanoparticles and make a dispersion, make an ink?” he says. “You could print wires on a piece of paper and make the cheapest circuit in the world.”

COURTESY OF KURT SCHRODER ’90

The problem is that cheaper substrates, including paper and plastic, will ignite at the high temperatures necessary to sinter, or cure, the nanoparticles into wires. (Melting silver requires a temperature of 962 °C, but paper ignites at 233 °C, or the novelistically famous Fahrenheit 451.) Equally problematic, the ovens in which this sintering takes place are often very large and slow, and they require a lot of energy.  

This is where a disposable camera enters the picture.

“The first one I got from Walgreens. It cost me seven bucks, but I jailbroke it so I could keep on flashing it,” he recalls. Schroder says he figured that he could use the intense flash of light to heat only the nanoparticles (which are black and readily absorb light), sintering them together into wires so fast that the paper or plastic substrate on which he’d printed them did not have a chance to melt or warp. The idea, Schroder explains, was to harness the intensity of the flash (the pulsed power) to generate millisecond bursts of high power using minimal energy. “It was one of those rare times in technological development in which faster, better, and cheaper all happened simultaneously,” he says.

He and his colleagues ultimately scaled up the flash concept into an industrial system known as PulseForge, which can generate bursts of heat hot enough to cure nanoparticles into conductive traces—and do it so quickly that their substrates survive the heat.

“With this flash lamp technology—­photonic curing, that’s what I called it—we can go up to about 400 °C. But we can do in one millisecond what normally would take 10 minutes or longer,” Schroder says. “This replaces an oven, which can be hundreds of meters long and take up an entire building and use tons and tons of energy.” Today, he is CTO of the company, which is now known as PulseForge. It offers digital thermal processing systems that make manufacturing more sustainable and more affordable.

Though he can’t be specific about what the company’s clients manufacture, Schroder says PulseForge’s technology is used to make consumer electronics that most people own today.  

After 30 years of experimentation in many fields—including mechanical engineering, chemistry, pulsed power, nanotechnology, and printed electronics—Schroder holds 41 US patents and more than 70 international ones. He’s won the prestigious R&D 100 Award twice. In 2012, the Texas State Bar named him Inventor of the Year, and in 2023, the Austin Intellectual Property Law Association did the same.

Schroder says he won’t live long enough to explore all the ideas bouncing around in his head. But one thing he’d like to do is provide some guidance to fledgling inventors—a kind of practical and personal road map to success. He’s already started writing a book, called simply How to Invent.

The book was partially inspired by a gathering he organized a few years ago for his oldest daughter, who was then 11, and 40 or so of her friends from a scouting group. Schroder called it an “invention fair.”

“I told them: I want you to identify problems in the world,” he says. “You’re going to try to solve them.”

He was so impressed with the girls’ ideas, including his daughter’s—a backpack that dispenses M&Ms—that something struck him. “Inventing is a skill, not a talent,” he says. “Everyone can be an inventor, and seeing these 40 little girls come up with some pretty darn good inventions—I realized there’s a process for this.”

One of his hard-won pieces of advice is to find joy in that process—to be happy simply because an experiment works. “Don’t focus too much [on] if you’re going to make a zillion dollars or be in charge of it,” he says. “Because guess what? There are a hundred more inventions after that.”

There is, however, one intangible trait that every inventor should have: the outlook that a glass is neither half full nor half empty.

“The inventor says: ‘I can make a better glass,’” he says. “An inventor always sees a future in which everything is better.” 

An environmentally friendly alternative to plastic microbeads

The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-­lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used to encapsulate nutrients such as vitamin A to fortify foods, which could help some of the 2 billion people around the world who suffer from nutrient deficiencies.

To develop the material, graduate student Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang and her colleagues turned to poly-beta-amino esters, a class of polymers previously developed in the lab of Institute Professor Robert Langer, ScD ’74, which have shown promise for medical applications.

By changing the composition of these materials’ building blocks, researchers can optimize properties such as hydrophobicity (ability to repel water), mechanical strength, and pH sensitivity. One property the team targeted, with an eye to using the polymer to add nutrients to food, was the ability to dissolve when exposed to acidic environments such as the stomach.

The researchers showed that they could use particles of the polymer to encapsulate vitamins A, D, E, and C, as well as zinc and iron. Many of these nutrients are susceptible to heat and light degradation, but the team found that the particles could protect them from boiling water for two hours. They also showed that even after being stored for six months at high temperature and high humidity, more than half of the encapsulated vitamins were undamaged.

To demonstrate the particles’ potential for fortifying food, the researchers incorporated them into bouillon cubes—a common ingredient in Africa, where nutrient deficiencies are common, says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and a senior author, with Langer, of a paper on the work. 

In this study, the researchers also tested the particles’ safety by exposing them to cultured human intestinal cells. At the amounts that would be used in food, the particles were not found to damage the cells.

To explore the particles’ potential for use in cleansers, the researchers mixed them with soap foam. This mixture, they found, removed permanent marker and waterproof eyeliner much more effectively than soap alone. Soap mixed with the new microparticles was also more effective than a cleanser that includes polyethylene microbeads, and the particles did a better job of absorbing potentially toxic elements such as heavy metals.

The researchers plan to run a small human trial later this year and are gathering data that could be used to apply for GRAS (generally recognized as safe) classification from the US Food and Drug Administration. They are also planning a clinical trial of foods fortified with the particles.

Their work on the polymer, they hope, could help significantly reduce the amount of microplastic released into the environment from health and beauty products. “One way to mitigate the microplastics problem is to figure out how to clean up existing pollution,” Jaklenec says. “But it’s equally important to look ahead and focus on creating materials that won’t generate microplastics in the first place.” 

Tiny tubes wrap around brain cells

Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells.

These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging them. They could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity. They could also serve as synthetic myelin for axons that have lost this insulation, helping to address neuronal degradation in diseases like multiple sclerosis.

The devices are made from thin sheets of a soft polymer called azobenzene, which roll when exposed to light. Researchers can precisely control the direction of the rolling and the size and shape of the tubes by varying the intensity and polarization of the light. This enables the devices to snugly, but gently, wrap around curved axons and dendrites.

“To have intimate interfaces with these cells, the devices must be soft and able to conform to these complex structures. That is the challenge we solved in this work,” says Deblina Sarkar, an assistant professor in the Media Lab and the senior author of a paper on the research. “We were the first to show that azobenzene could even wrap around living cells.”

The researchers, who developed a scalable fabrication technique that doesn’t require the use of a cleanroom, have demonstrated that the devices can be combined with optoelectrical materials that can stimulate cells. Moreover, atomically thin materials can be patterned on top of the tubes, offering opportunities to integrate sensors and circuits.

In addition, because they make such a tight connection with cells, they could make it possible to stimulate subcellular regions with very little energy. This could enable a researcher or clinician to treat brain diseases by modulating neurons’ electrical activity. 

A Nobel laureate on the economics of artificial intelligence

For all the talk about artificial intelligence upending the world, its economic effects remain uncertain. But Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel winner Daron Acemoglu has some insights.

Despite some predictions that AI will double US GDP growth, Acemoglu expects it to increase GDP by 1.1% to 1.6% over the next 10 years, with a roughly 0.05% annual gain in productivity. This assessment is based on recent estimates of how many jobs are affected—but his view is that the effect will be targeted.

“We’re still going to have journalists, we’re still going to have financial analysts, we’re still going to have HR employees,” he says. “It’s going to impact a bunch of office jobs that are about data summary, visual matching, pattern recognition, etc. And those are essentially about 5% of the economy.”

He does think the technology has more potential, but he’s concerned that AI companies so far have focused on innovations that could replace human workers at the expense of those that could make them more productive. “My argument is that we currently have the wrong direction for AI,” Acemoglu says. “We’re using it too much for automation and not enough for providing expertise and information to workers.”

Innovations that keep people employed should sustain growth better, he believes. But “I don’t think complementary uses of AI will miraculously appear by themselves unless the industry devotes significant energy and time to them,” he says. And even then, whether the advances benefit workers themselves is far from guaranteed.

Given this mix of benefits and drawbacks, Acemoglu and his colleagues think it may be best to adopt AI more slowly than market fundamentalists might like. While government regulation is one way to promote that measured pace, he also thinks that if the cycle of “hype” around AI diminishes, then the rush to use it “will naturally slow down.” 

“I think that hype is making us invest badly in terms of the technology,” he says.

“The faster you go, and the more hype you have, that course correction becomes less likely. It’s very difficult, if you’re driving 200 miles an hour, to make a 180-degree turn.” 

From climate-warming pollutant to useful material

Although it is less abundant than carbon dioxide, methane gas contributes disproportionately to global warming. Its molecular structure of single carbon atoms bound to four hydrogen atoms makes it a potentially useful building block for products that could keep this carbon out of the atmosphere, but it’s hard to get it to react with other molecules under ordinary conditions.

Now a catalyst designed by MIT chemical engineer Michael Strano and colleagues could help solve that problem.

The catalyst has two components. The first, a mineral called a zeolite, converts methane to methanol. The second, a natural enzyme called alcohol oxidase, converts the methanol to formaldehyde. With the addition of urea, a nitrogen-containing molecule found in urine, the formaldehyde can be turned into a polymer used in particleboard, textiles, and other products.

The researchers say this catalyst could act to seal cracks in pipes transporting natural gas, a common source of methane leakage. It could also be used to coat surfaces that are exposed to methane gas, producing polymers that could be collected for use in manufacturing.

“Other systems operate at high temperature and high pressure,” says MIT postdoc Jimin Kim, lead author with Daniel Lundberg, PhD ’24, of a paper on the work. That takes money and energy. But, she says, “I think our system could be very cost-effective and scalable.” 

This is your brain on movies

The cerebral cortex contains regions devoted to processing different types of sensory information, including visual and auditory input. Now researchers led by Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and colleagues have developed the most comprehensive picture yet of what all these regions do. They achieved this by analyzing data collected as people performed a surprisingly complex task: watching a movie.

Over the past few decades, scientists have identified many networks that are involved in this kind of processing, often using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity as subjects perform a single task (such as looking at faces) or do nothing. The problem is that while people are resting, many parts of the cortex may not be active at all.

“By using a rich stimulus like a movie, we can drive many regions of the cortex very efficiently. For example, sensory regions will be active to process different features of the movie, and high-level areas will be active to extract semantic and contextual information,” says Reza Rajimehr, a research scientist in the McGovern Institute and the lead author of a paper on the work. “By activating the brain in this way, now we can distinguish different areas or different networks based on their activation patterns.”

Using high-resolution fMRI data collected by an NIH-funded consortium, the researchers analyzed brain activity from 176 people as they watched a variety of movie clips. Then they used a machine-learning algorithm to analyze the activity patterns of each brain region. What they found was 24 networks with different activity patterns and functions. Some are located in sensory areas such as the visual or auditory cortex, while others respond to features such as actions, language, or social interactions. The researchers also identified networks that hadn’t been seen before, including one in the prefrontal cortex that appears highly responsive to visual scenes. This network was most active in response to pictures of scenes within the movie frames.

Three of the networks they found are involved in “executive control” and were most active during transitions between clips. The researchers also observed that when networks specific to a particular feature were very active, the executive control networks were mostly quiet, and vice versa.

“Whenever the activations in domain-specific areas are high, it looks like there is no need for the engagement of these high-level networks,” Rajimehr says. “But in situations where perhaps there is some ambiguity and complexity in the stimulus, and there is a need for the involvement of the executive control networks, then we see that these networks become highly active.”

The researchers hope that their new map will serve as a starting point for more precise study of what each of these networks is doing. For example, within the social processing network, they have found regions that are specific to processing social information about faces and bodies.

“This is a new approach that reveals something different from conventional approaches in neuroimaging,” says Desimone. “It’s not going to give us all the answers, but it generates a lot of interesting ideas.” 

Laser imaging peers deeper into living tissue

Metabolic imaging is a valuable noninvasive method for studying living cells with laser light, but it’s been constrained by the way light scatters when it shines into tissue, limiting the resolution and depth of penetration. MIT researchers have developed a new technique that more than doubles the usual depth limit while boosting imaging speeds, yielding richer and more detailed images.

This technique does not require samples to be sliced and stained with contrast dyes. Instead, when a specialized laser shines light deep into tissues, certain molecules within them emit light of different colors, revealing molecular contents and cellular structures. By using a recently developed fiber shaper—a device controlled by bending it—the researchers can tune the color and pulses of light to minimize scattering and maximize the signal. This allows them to see much further and capture clearer images. In tests, the light was able to penetrate more than 700 micrometers into a sample, whereas the best previous techniques reached about 200 micrometers.

This method is particularly well suited for applications like cancer research, tissue engineering, drug discovery, and the study of immune responses. “It opens new avenues for studying and exploring metabolic dynamics deep in living biosystems,” says Sixian You, an assistant professor of EECS and senior author of a paper on the technique.

Recent books from the MIT community

Differential Privacy
By Simson L. Garfinkel ’87, PhD ’05 
MIT PRESSS, 2025, $18.95

Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the US into a Manufacturing Powerhouse
By Colleen A. Dunlavy, PhD ’88  
POLITY BOOKS, 2024, $29.95

The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature 
By Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of the humanities 
PANTHEON, 2024, $36

The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity
By J. Craig Wheeler ’65, with a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson 
PROMETHEUS BOOKS, 2024, $32.95

Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior
By Olga Touloumi, SM ’06
UNIV. OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2024, $35

The Finite Element Method: Its Basis and Fundamentals 
By O.C. Zienkiewicz, R.L. Taylor, and Sanjay Govindjee ’86 
BUTTERWORTH-HEINNEMANN, 2024, $286.99

Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA 
By Shoumita Dasgupta ’97 
UNIV. OF CALIF. PRESS, 2025, $29.95

A Moving Meditation: Life on a Cape Cod Kettle Pond 
By Stephen G. Waller ’73 
BRIGHT LEAF, 2023, $24.95

Send book news to MITAlumniNews@technologyreview.com or 196 Broadway, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02139