The Sunrise Movement is organizing late-night protests outside hotels housing ICE agents.

A total of nine firms plan to join the voluntary trial to purchase sustainable aviation fuel through the Singapore Sustainable Aviation Fuel Co. being established.

The plan targets power, steel, cement, refineries and chemicals over the next five years, India’s finance minister said.

The crisis has reignited anger toward President Javier Milei, whose harsh austerity drive has slashed spending on programs and agencies that not only work to combat fires but also protect parks.

Italy’s civil protection agency said two landslides hit the town of Niscemi after torrential rain, impacting the local road network, damaging buildings and disrupting essential services.

More than 100 million people in the United States suffer from metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver. This condition can lead to the development of more severe liver disease that causes inflammation and fibrosis.

In hopes of discovering new treatments for these liver diseases, MIT engineers have designed a new type of tissue model that more accurately mimics the architecture of the liver, including blood vessels and immune cells.

Reporting their findings today in Nature Communications, the researchers showed that this model could accurately replicate the inflammation and metabolic dysfunction that occur in the early stages of liver disease. Such a device could help researchers identify and test new drugs to treat those conditions.

This is the latest study in a larger effort by this team to use these types of tissue models, also known as microphysiological systems, to explore human liver biology, which cannot be easily replicated in mice or other animals.

In another recent paper, the researchers used an earlier version of their liver tissue model to explore how the liver responds to resmetirom. This drug is used to treat an advanced form of liver disease called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), but it is only effective in about 30 percent of patients. The team found that the drug can induce an inflammatory response in liver tissue, which may help to explain why it doesn’t help all patients.

“There are already tissue models that can make good preclinical predictions of liver toxicity for certain drugs, but we really need to better model disease states, because now we want to identify drug targets, we want to validate targets. We want to look at whether a particular drug may be more useful early or later in the disease,” says Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation at MIT, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and the senior author of both studies.

Former MIT postdoc Dominick Hellen is the lead author of the resmetirom paper, which appeared Jan. 14 in Communications Biology. Erin Tevonian PhD ’25 and PhD candidate Ellen Kan, both in the Department of Biological Engineering, are the lead authors of today’s Nature Communications paper on the new microphysiological system.

Modeling drug response

In the Communications Biology paper, Griffith’s lab worked with a microfluidic device that she originally developed in the 1990s, known as the LiverChip. This chip offers a simple scaffold for growing 3D models of liver tissue from hepatocytes, the primary cell type in the liver.

This chip is widely used by pharmaceutical companies to test whether their new drugs have adverse effects on the liver, which is an important step in drug development because most drugs are metabolized by the liver.

For the new study, Griffith and her students modified the chip so that it could be used to study MASLD.

Patients with MASLD, a buildup of fat in the liver, can eventually develop MASH, a more severe disease that occurs when scar tissue called fibrosis forms in the liver. Currently, resmetirom and the GLP-1 drug semaglutide are the only medications that are FDA-approved to treat MASH. Finding new drugs is a priority, Griffith says.

“You’re never declaring victory with liver disease with one drug or one class of drugs, because over the long term there may be patients who can’t use them, or they may not be effective for all patients,” she says.

To create a model of MASLD, the researchers exposed the tissue to high levels of insulin, along with large quantities of glucose and fatty acids. This led to a buildup of fatty tissue and the development of insulin resistance, a trait that is often seen in MASLD patients and can lead to type 2 diabetes.

Once that model was established, the researchers treated the tissue with resmetirom, a drug that works by mimicking the effects of thyroid hormone, which stimulates the breakdown of fat.

To their surprise, the researchers found that this treatment could also lead to an increase in immune signaling and markers of inflammation.

“Because resmetirom is primarily intended to reduce hepatic fibrosis in MASH, we found the result quite paradoxical,” Hellen says. “We suspect this finding may help clinicians and scientists alike understand why only a subset of patients respond positively to the thyromimetic drug. However, additional experiments are needed to further elucidate the underlying mechanism.”

A more realistic liver model

In the Nature Communications paper, the researchers reported a new type of chip that allows them to more accurately reproduce the architecture of the human liver. The key advance was developing a way to induce blood vessels to grow into the tissue. These vessels can deliver nutrients and also allow immune cells to flow through the tissue.

“Making more sophisticated models of liver that incorporate features of vascularity and immune cell trafficking that can be maintained over a long time in culture is very valuable,” Griffith says. “The real advance here was showing that we could get an intimate microvascular network through liver tissue and that we could circulate immune cells. This helped us to establish differences between how immune cells interact with the liver cells in a type two diabetes state and a healthy state.”

As the liver tissue matured, the researchers induced insulin resistance by exposing the tissue to increased levels of insulin, glucose, and fatty acids.

As this disease state developed, the researchers observed changes in how hepatocytes clear insulin and metabolize glucose, as well as narrower, leakier blood vessels that reflect microvascular complications often seen in diabetic patients. They also found that insulin resistance leads to an increase in markers of inflammation that attract monocytes into the tissue. Monocytes are the precursors of macrophages, immune cells that help with tissue repair during inflammation and are also observed in the liver of patients with early-stage liver disease.

“This really shows that we can model the immune features of a disease like MASLD, in a way that is all based on human cells,” Griffith says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program, NovoNordisk, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and the Siebel Scholars Foundation.

The plastic bottle you just tossed in the recycling bin could provide structural support for your future house.

MIT engineers are using recycled plastic to 3D print construction-grade beams, trusses, and other structural elements that could one day offer lighter, modular, and more sustainable alternatives to traditional wood-based framing.

In a paper published in the Solid FreeForm Fabrication Symposium Proceedings, the MIT team presents the design for a 3D-printed floor truss system made from recycled plastic.

A traditional floor truss is made from wood beams that connect via metal plates in a pattern resembling a ladder with diagonal rungs. Set on its edge and combined with other parallel trusses, the resulting structure provides support for flooring material such as plywood that lies over the trusses.

The MIT team printed four long trusses out of recycled plastic and configured them into a conventional plywood-topped floor frame, then tested the structure’s load-bearing capacity. The printed flooring held over 4,000 pounds, exceeding key building standards set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The plastic-printed trusses weigh about 13 pounds each, which is lighter than a comparable wood-based truss, and they can be printed on a large-scale industrial printer in under 13 minutes. In addition to floor trusses, the group is working on printing other elements and combining them into a full frame for a modest-sized home.

The researchers envision that as global demand for housing eclipses the supply of wood in the coming years, single-use plastics such as water bottles and food containers could get a second life as recycled framing material to alleviate both a global housing crisis and the overwhelming demand for timber.

“We’ve estimated that the world needs about 1 billion new homes by 2050. If we try to make that many homes using wood, we would need to clear-cut the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest three times over,” says AJ Perez, a lecturer in the MIT School of Engineering and research scientist in the MIT Office of Innovation. “The key here is: We recycle dirty plastic into building products for homes that are lighter, more durable, and sustainable.”

Perez’ co-authors on the study are graduate students Tyler Godfrey, Kenan Sehnawi, Arjun Chandar, and professor of mechanical engineering David Hardt, who are all members of the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity.

Printing dirty

In 2019, Perez and Hardt started MIT HAUS, a group within the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity that aims to produce homes from recycled polymer products, using large-scale additive manufacturing, which encompasses technologies that are capable of producing big structures, layer-by-layer, in relatively short timescales.

Today, some companies are exploring large-scale additive manufacturing to 3D-print modest-sized homes. These efforts mainly focus on printing with concrete or clay — materials that have had a large negative environmental impact associated with their production. The house structures that have been printed so far are largely walls. The MIT HAUS group is among the first to consider printing structural framing elements such as foundation pilings, floor trusses, stair stringers, roof trusses, wall studs, and joists.

What’s more, they are seeking to do so not with cement, but with recycled “dirty” plastic — plastic that doesn’t have to be cleaned and preprocessed before reuse. The researchers envision that one day, used bottles and food containers could be fed directly into a shredder, pelletized, then fed into a large-scale additive manufacturing machine to become structural composite construction components. The plastic composite parts would be light enough to transport via pickup truck rather than a traditional lumber-hauling 18-wheeler. At the construction site, the elements could be quickly fitted into a lightweight yet sturdy home frame.

“We are starting to crack the code on the ability to process and print really dirty plastic,” Perez says. “The questions we’ve been asking are, what is the dirty, unwanted plastic good for, and how do we use the dirty plastic as-is?”

Weight class

The team’s new study is one step toward that overall goal of sustainable, recycled construction. In this work, they developed a design for a printed floor truss made from recycled plastic. They designed the truss with a high stiffness-to-weight ratio, meaning that it should be able to support a given amount of weight with minimal deflection, or bending. (Think of being able to walk across a floor without it sagging between the joists.)

The researchers first explored a handful of possible truss designs in simulation, and put each design through a simulated load-bearing test. Their modeling showed that one design in particular exhibited the highest stiffness-to-weight ratio and was therefore the most promising pattern to print and physically test. The design is close to the traditional wood-based floor truss pattern resembling a ladder with diagonal, triangular rungs. The team made a slight adjustment to this design, adding small reinforcing elements to each node where a “rung” met the main truss frame.

To print the design, Perez and his colleagues went to MIT’s Bates Research and Engineering Center, which houses the group’s industrial-scale 3D printer — a room-sized industrial machine that is capable of printing large structures at a fast rate of up to 80 pounds of material per hour. For their preliminary study, the researchers used pellets made of a combination of recycled PET polymers and glass fibers — a mixture that improves the material’s printability and durability. They obtained the material from an aerospace materials company, and then fed the pellets into the printer as composite “ink.”   

The team printed four trusses, each measuring 8 feet long, 1 foot high, and about 1 inch wide. Each truss took about 13 minutes to print. Perez and Godfrey spaced the trusses apart in a parallel configuration similar to traditional wood-based trusses, and screwed them into a sheet of plywood to mimic a 4-x-8-foot floor frame. They placed bags of sand and concrete of increasing weight in the center of the flooring system and measured the amount of deflection that the trusses experienced underneath.

The trusses easily withstood loads of 300 pounds, well above the deflection standards set by the U.S. by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They didn’t stop there, continuing to add weight. Only when the loads reached over 4,000 pounds did the trusses finally buckle and crack.

In terms of stiffness, the printed trusses meet existing building codes in the U.S. To make them ready for wide adoption, Perez says the cost of producing the structures will have to be brought down to compete with the price of wood. The trusses in the new study were printed using recycled plastic, but from a source that he describes as the “crème de la crème of recycled feedstocks.” The plastic is factory-discarded material, but is not quite the “dirty” plastic that he aims ultimately to shred, print, and build.

The current study demonstrates that it is possible to print structural building elements from recycled plastic. Perez is in the process of working with dirtier plastic such as used soda bottles — that still hold a bit of liquid residue — to see how such contaminants affect the quality of the printed product.

If dirty plastics can be made into durable housing structures, Perez says “the idea is to bring shipping containers close to where you know you’ll have a lot of plastic, like next to a football stadium. Then you could use off-the-shelf shredding technology and feed that dirty shredded plastic into a large-scale additive manufacturing system, which could exist in micro-factories, just like bottling centers, around the world. You could print the parts for entire buildings that would be light enough to transport on a moped or pickup truck to where homes are most needed.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Gerstner Foundation, the Chandler Health of the Planet grant, and Cincinnati Incorporated.

James Baldwin was a prodigy. That is not the first thing most people associate with a writer who once declared that he “had no childhood” and whose work often elides the details of his early life in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, by the time Baldwin was 14, he was a successful church preacher, excelling in a role otherwise occupied by adults.

Throw in the fact that Baldwin was reading Dostoyevsky by the fifth grade, wrote “like an angel” according to his elementary school principal, edited his middle school periodical, and wrote for his high school magazine, and it’s clear he was a precocious wordsmith.

These matters are complicated, of course. To MIT scholar Joshua Bennett, Baldwin’s writings reveal enough for us to conclude that his childhood was marked by a “relentless introspection” as he sought to come to terms with the world. Beyond that, Bennett thinks, some of Baldwin’s work, and even the one children’s book he wrote, yields “messages of persistence,” recognizing the need for any child to receive encouragement and education.

And if someone as precocious as Baldwin still needed cultivation, then virtually everyone does. If we act is if talent blossoms on its own, we are ignoring the vital role communities, teachers, and families play in helping artists — or anyone — develop their skills.

“We talk as if these people emerged ex nihilo,” Bennett says. “When all along the way, there were people who cultivated them, and our children deserve the same — all of the children of the world. We have a dominant model of genius that is fundamentally flawed, in that it often elides the role of communities and cultural institutions.”

Bennett explores these issues in a new book, “The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time,” published this week by Hachette. A literary scholar and poet himself, Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and a professor of literature.

“The People Can Fly” accomplishes many kinds of work at once: Bennett offers a series of profiles, carefully wrought to see how some prominent figures were able to flourish from childhood forward. And he closely reads their works for indications about how they understood the shape of their own lives. In so doing, Bennett underscores the significance of the social settings that prodigious talents grow up in. For good measure, he also offers reflections on his own career trajectory and encounters with these artists, driving home their influence and meaning.

Reading about these many prodigies, one by one, helps readers build a picture of the realities, and complications, of trying to sustain early promise.

“It’s part of what I tell my students — the individual is how you get to the universal,” Bennett says. “It doesn’t mean I need to share certain autobiographical impulses with, say, Hemingway. It’s just that I think those touchpoints exist in all great works of art.”

Space odyssey

For Bennett, the idea of writing about prodigies grew naturally from his research and teaching, which ranges broadly in American and global literature. Bennett began contemplating “the idea of promise as this strange, idiosyncratic quality, this thing we see through various acts, perhaps something as simple as a little riff you hear a child sing, an element of their drawings, or poems.” At the same time, he notes, people struggle with “the weight of promise. There is a peril that can come along with promise. Promise can be taken away.”

Ultimately, Bennett adds, “I started thinking a little more about what promise has meant in African American communities,” in particular. Ranging widely in the book, Bennett consistently loops back to a core focus on the ideals, communities, and obstacles many Black artists grew up with. These artists and intellectuals include Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stevie Wonder, and the late poet and scholar Nikki Giovanni.

Bennett’s chapter on Giovanni shows his own interest in placing an artist’s life in historical context, and picks up on motifs relating back to childhood and personal promise.

Giovanni attended Fisk University early, enrolling at 17. Later she enrolled in Columbia University’s Masters of Fine Arts program, where poetry students were supposed to produce publishable work in a two-year program. In her first year, Giovanni’s poetry collection, “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” not only got published but became a hit, selling 10,000 copies. She left the program early — without a degree, since it required two years of residency. In short, she was always going places.

Giovanni went on to become one of the most celebrated poets of her time, and spent decades on the faculty at Virginia Tech. One idea that kept recurring in her work: dreams of space exploration. Giovanni’s work transmitted a clear enthusiasm for exploring the stars.

“Looking through her work, you see space travel everywhere,” Bennett says. “Even in her most prominent poem, ‘Ego trippin (there may be a reason why),’ there is this sense of someone who’s soaring over the landscape — ‘I’m so hip even my errors are correct.’ There is this idea of an almost divine being.”

That enthusiasm was accompanied by the recognition that astronauts, at least at one time, emerged from a particular slice of society. Indeed, Giovanni at many times publicly called for more opportunities for more Americans to become astronauts. A pressing issue, for her, was making dreams achievable for more people.

“Nikki Giovanni is very invested in these sorts of questions, as a writer, as an educator, and as a big thinker,” Bennett says. “This kind of thinking about the cosmos is everywhere in her work. But inside of that is a critique, that everyone should have a chance to expand the orbit of their dreaming. And dream of whatever they need to.”

And as Bennett draws out in “The People Can Fly,” stories and visions of flying have run deep in Black culture, offering a potent symbolism and a mode of “holding on to a deeper sense that the constraints of this present world are not all-powerful or everlasting. The miraculous is yet available. The people could fly, and still can.”

Children with promise, families with dreams

Other artists have praised “The People Can Fly.” The actor, producer, and screenwriter Lena Waithe has said that “Bennett’s poetic nature shines through on every page. … This book is a masterclass in literature and a necessary reminder to cherish the child in all of us.”

Certainly Bennett brings a vast sense of scope to “The People Can Fly,” ranging across centuries of history. Phillis Wheatley, a former enslaved woman whose 1773 poetry collection was later praised by George Washington, was an early American prodigy, studying the classics as a teenager and releasing her work at age 20. Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut, enrolled in Stanford University at age 16, spurred by family members who taught her about the stars. All told, Bennett weaves together a scholarly tapestry about hope, ambition, and, at times, opportunity.

Often, that hope and ambition belong to whole families, not just one gifted child. As Nikki Giovanni herself quipped, while giving the main address at MIT’s annual Martin Luther King convocation in 1990, “the reason you go to college is that it makes your mother happy.”

Bennett can relate, having come from a family where his mother was the only prior relative to have attended college. As a kid in the 1990s, growing up in Yonkers, New York, he had a Princeton University sweatshirt, inspired by his love of the television program “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” The program featured a character named Phillip Banks — popularly known as “Uncle Phil” — who was, within the world of the show, a Princeton alumnus.

“I would ask my Mom, ‘How do I get into Princeton?’” Bennett recalls. “She would just say, ‘Study hard, honey.’ No one but her had even been to college in my family. No one had been to Princeton. No one had set foot on Princeton University’s campus. But the idea that was possible in the country we lived in, for a woman who was the daughter of two sharecroppers, and herself grew up in a tenement with her brothers and sister, and nonetheless went on to play at Carnegie Hall and get a college degree and buy her mother a color TV — it’s fascinating to me.”

The postscript to that anecdote is that Bennett did go on to earn his PhD from Princeton. Behind many children with promise are families and communities with dreams for those kids.

“There’s something to it I refuse to relinquish,” Bennett says. “My mother’s vision was a powerful and persistent one — she believed that the future also belonged to her children.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02553-1

Ocean salinity could change as the climate warms. Here the authors show that the South Indian Ocean has freshened most of the Southern Hemisphere oceans and highlight the mechanisms behind this freshening, as well as the implications for Indian Ocean stratification and structure.

The way the brain develops can shape us throughout our lives, so neuroscientists are intensely curious about how it happens. A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT that focused on visual cortex development in mice reveals that an important class of neurons follows a set of rules that, while surprising, might just create the right conditions for circuit optimization.

During early brain development, multiple types of neurons emerge in the visual cortex (where the brain processes vision). Many are “excitatory,” driving the activity of brain circuits, and others are “inhibitory,” meaning they control that activity. Just like a car needs not only an engine and a gas pedal, but also a steering wheel and brakes, a healthy balance between excitation and inhibition is required for proper brain function. During a “critical period” of development in the visual cortex, soon after the eyes first open, excitatory and inhibitory neurons forge and edit millions of connections, or synapses, to adapt nascent circuits to the incoming flood of visual experience. Over many days, in other words, the brain optimizes its attunement to the world.

In the new study in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team led by MIT research scientist Josiah Boivin and Professor Elly Nedivi visually tracked somatostatin (SST)-expressing inhibitory neurons forging synapses with excitatory cells along their sprawling dendrite branches, illustrating the action before, during, and after the critical period with unprecedented resolution. Several of the rules the SST cells appeared to follow were unexpected — for instance, unlike other cell types, their activity did not depend on visual input — but now that the scientists know these neurons’ unique trajectory, they have a new idea about how it may enable sensory activity to influence development: SST cells might help usher in the critical period by establishing the baseline level of inhibition needed to ensure that only certain types of sensory input will trigger circuit refinement.

“Why would you need part of the circuit that’s not really sensitive to experience? It could be that it’s setting things up for the experience-dependent components to do their thing,” says Nedivi, the William R. and Linda R. Young Professor in the Picower Institute and MIT’s departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Boivin adds: “We don’t yet know whether SST neurons play a causal role in the opening of the critical period, but they are certainly in the right place at the right time to sculpt cortical circuitry at a crucial developmental stage.”

A unique trajectory

To visualize SST-to-excitatory synapse development, Nedivi and Boivin’s team used a genetic technique that pairs expression of synaptic proteins with fluorescent molecules to resolve the appearance of the “boutons” SST cells use to reach out to excitatory neurons. They then performed a technique called eMAP, developed by Kwanghun Chung’s lab in the Picower Institute, that expands and clears brain tissue to increase magnification, allowing super-resolution visualization of the actual synapses those boutons ultimately formed with excitatory cells along their dendrites. Co-author and postdoc Bettina Schmerl helped lead the eMAP work.

These new techniques revealed that SST bouton appearance and then synapse formation surged dramatically when the eyes opened, and then as the critical period got underway. But while excitatory neurons during this time frame are still maturing, first in the deepest layers of the cortex and later in its more superficial layers, the SST boutons blanketed all layers simultaneously, meaning that, perhaps counterintuitively, they sought to establish their inhibitory influence regardless of the maturation stage of their intended partners.

Many studies have shown that eye opening and the onset of visual experience sets in motion the development and elaboration of excitatory cells and another major inhibitory neuron type (parvalbumin-expressing cells). Raising mice in the dark for different lengths of time, for instance, can distinctly alter what happens with these cells. Not so for the SST neurons. The new study showed that varying lengths of darkness had no effect on the trajectory of SST bouton and synapse appearance; it remained invariant, suggesting it is preordained by a genetic program or an age-related molecular signal, rather than experience.

Moreover, after the initial frenzy of synapse formation during development, many synapses are then edited, or pruned away, so that only the ones needed for appropriate sensory responses endure. Again, the SST boutons and synapses proved to be exempt from these redactions. Although the pace of new SST synapse formation slowed at the peak of the critical period, the net number of synapses never declined, and even continued increasing into adulthood.

“While a lot of people think that the only difference between inhibition and excitation is their valence, this demonstrates that inhibition works by a totally different set of rules,” Nedivi says.

In all, while other cell types were tailoring their synaptic populations to incoming experience, the SST neurons appeared to provide an early but steady inhibitory influence across all layers of the cortex. After excitatory synapses have been pruned back by the time of adulthood, the continued upward trickle of SST inhibition may contribute to the increase in the inhibition to excitation ratio that still allows the adult brain to learn, but not as dramatically or as flexibly as during early childhood.

A platform for future studies

In addition to shedding light on typical brain development, Nedivi says, the study’s techniques can enable side-by-side comparisons in mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism or epilepsy, where aberrations of excitation and inhibition balance are implicated.

Future studies using the techniques can also look at how different cell types connect with each other in brain regions other than the visual cortex, she adds.

Boivin, who will soon open his own lab as a faculty member at Amherst College, says he is eager to apply the work in new ways.

“I’m excited to continue investigating inhibitory synapse formation on genetically defined cell types in my future lab,” Boivin says. “I plan to focus on the development of limbic brain regions that regulate behaviors relevant to adolescent mental health.”

In addition to Nedivi, Boivin and Schmerl, the paper’s other authors are Kendyll Martin and Chia-Fang Lee.

Funding for the study came from the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the Freedom Together Foundation.

There’s a new report about two AI coding assistants, used by 1.5 million developers, that are surreptitiously sending a copy of everything they ingest to China.

Maybe avoid using them.

Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five climate contrarians to write about global warming. Department experts pushed back on the findings.

The state is the first to display damage history and future risk. An ad blitz aims to increase awareness and promote flood insurance.

The state's largest utility opposes the Republican proposal, which echoes bills passed in other states.

Critics warn it could spur automakers to build bigger and more dangerous vehicles.

There’s clear interest from Democrats to take some steps to address potential demand for data centers in New York but no clear consensus.

The government will present plans by the end of March “to remedy all the shortcomings of the old climate-protection program,” an official said.

The scientific work is critical to understanding climate change, not just in the polar region but on a global scale.

Global rules that compel companies to disclose their emissions footprint or climate-related risks were weakened or delayed in the past year.

Generative artificial intelligence models have been used to create enormous libraries of theoretical materials that could help solve all kinds of problems. Now, scientists just have to figure out how to make them.

In many cases, materials synthesis is not as simple as following a recipe in the kitchen. Factors like the temperature and length of processing can yield huge changes in a material’s properties that make or break its performance. That has limited researchers’ ability to test millions of promising model-generated materials.

Now, MIT researchers have created an AI model that guides scientists through the process of making materials by suggesting promising synthesis routes. In a new paper, they showed the model delivers state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting effective synthesis pathways for a class of materials called zeolites, which could be used to improve catalysis, absorption, and ion exchange processes. Following its suggestions, the team synthesized a new zeolite material that showed improved thermal stability.

The researchers believe their new model could break the biggest bottleneck in the materials discovery process.

“To use an analogy, we know what kind of cake we want to make, but right now we don’t know how to bake the cake,” says lead author Elton Pan, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “Materials synthesis is currently done through domain expertise and trial and error.”

The paper describing the work appears today in Nature Computational Science. Joining Pan on the paper are Soonhyoung Kwon ’20, PhD ’24; DMSE postdoc Sulin Liu; chemical engineering PhD student Mingrou Xie; DMSE postdoc Alexander J. Hoffman; Research Assistant Yifei Duan SM ’25; DMSE visiting student Thorben Prein; DMSE PhD candidate Killian Sheriff; MIT Robert T. Haslam Professor in Chemical Engineering Yuriy Roman-Leshkov; Valencia Polytechnic University Professor Manuel Moliner; MIT Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli; and MIT Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering Elsa Olivetti.

Learning to bake

Massive investments in generative AI have led companies like Google and Meta to create huge databases filled with material recipes that, at least theoretically, have properties like high thermal stability and selective absorption of gases. But making those materials can require weeks or months of careful experiments that test specific reaction temperatures, times, precursor ratios, and other factors.

“People rely on their chemical intuition to guide the process,” Pan says. “Humans are linear. If there are five parameters, we might keep four of them constant and vary one of them linearly. But machines are much better at reasoning in a high-dimensional space.”

The synthesis process of materials discovery now often takes the most time in a material’s journey from hypothesis to use.

To help scientists navigate that process, the MIT researchers trained a generative AI model on over 23,000 material synthesis recipes described over 50 years of scientific papers. The researchers iteratively added random “noise” to the recipes during training, and the model learned to de-noise and sample from the random noise to find promising synthesis routes.

The result is DiffSyn, which uses an approach in AI known as diffusion.

“Diffusion models are basically a generative AI model like ChatGPT, but more like the DALL-E image generation model,” Pan says. “During inference, it converts noise into meaningful structure by subtracting a little bit of noise at each step. In this case, the ‘structure’ is the synthesis route for a desired material.”

When a scientist using DiffSyn enters a desired material structure, the model offers some promising combinations of reaction temperatures, reaction times, precursor ratios, and more.

“It basically tells you how to bake your cake,” Pan says. “You have a cake in mind, you feed it into the model, the model spits out the synthesis recipes. The scientist can pick whichever synthesis path they want, and there are simple ways to quantify the most promising synthesis path from what we provide, which we show in our paper.”

To test their system, the researchers used DiffSyn to suggest novel synthesis paths for a zeolite, a material class that is complex and takes time to form into a testable material.

“Zeolites have a very high-dimensional synthesis space,” Pan says. “Zeolites also tend to take days or weeks to crystallize, so the impact [of finding the best synthesis pathway faster] is much higher than other materials that crystallize in hours.”

The researchers were able to make the new zeolite material using synthesis pathways suggested by DiffSyn. Subsequent testing revealed the material had a promising morphology for catalytic applications.

“Scientists have been trying out different synthesis recipes one by one,” Pan says. “That makes them very time-consuming. This model can sample 1,000 of them in under a minute. It gives you a very good initial guess on synthesis recipes for completely new materials.”

Accounting for complexity

Previously, researchers have built machine-learning models that mapped a material to a single recipe. Those approaches do not take into account that there are different ways to make the same material.

DiffSyn is trained to map material structures to many different possible synthesis paths. Pan says that is better aligned with experimental reality.

“This is a paradigm shift away from one-to-one mapping between structure and synthesis to one-to-many mapping,” Pan says. “That’s a big reason why we achieved strong gains on the benchmarks.”

Moving forward, the researchers believe the approach should work to train other models that guide the synthesis of materials outside of zeolites, including metal-organic frameworks, inorganic solids, and other materials that have more than one possible synthesis pathway.

“This approach could be extended to other materials,” Pan says. “Now, the bottleneck is finding high-quality data for different material classes. But zeolites are complicated, so I can imagine they are close to the upper-bound of difficulty. Eventually, the goal would be interfacing these intelligent systems with autonomous real-world experiments, and agentic reasoning on experimental feedback to dramatically accelerate the process of materials design.”

The work was supported by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), the National Science Foundation, Generalitat Vaslenciana, the Office of Naval Research, ExxonMobil, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.