For the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), 2025 marks a decade of translating groundbreaking research into tangible solutions for global challenges. Few examples illustrate that mission better than NONA Technologies. With support from a J-WAFS Solutions grant, MIT electrical engineering and biological engineering Professor Jongyoon Han and his team developed a portable desalination device that transforms seawater into clean drinking water without filters or high-pressure pumps. The device stands apart from traditional systems because conventional desalination technologies, like reverse osmosis, are energy-intensive, prone to fouling, and typically deployed at large, centralized plants. In contrast, the device developed in Han's lab employs ion concentration polarization technology to remove salts and particles from seawater, producing potable water that exceeds World Health Organization standards. It is compact, solar-powered, and operable at the push of a button ' making it an ideal solution for off-grid and disaster-stricken areas....

Many diseases are caused by a missing or defective copy of a single gene. For decades, scientists have been working on gene therapy treatments that could cure such diseases by delivering a new copy of the missing genes to the affected cells. Despite those efforts, very few gene therapy treatments have been approved by the FDA. One of the challenges to developing these treatments has been achieving control over how much the new gene is expressed in cells ' too little and it won't succeed, too much and it could cause serious side effects. To help achieve more precise control of gene therapy, MIT engineers have tuned and applied a control circuit that can keep expression levels within a target range. In human cells, they showed that they could use this method to deliver genes that could help treat diseases including fragile X syndrome, a disorder that leads to intellectual disability and other developmental problems. 'In theory, gene supplementation can solve monogenic disorders that are very diverse but have a relatively straightforward gene therapy fix if you could control the therapy well enough,' says Katie Galloway, the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the new study....

Nearly 150 years ago, scientists began to imagine how information might flow through the brain based on the shapes of neurons they had seen under the microscopes of the time. With today's imaging technologies, scientists can zoom in much further, seeing the tiny synapses through which neurons communicate with one another, and even the molecules the cells use to relay their messages. These inside views can spark new ideas about how healthy brains work and reveal important changes that contribute to disease. This sharper view of biology is not just about the advances that have made microscopes more powerful than ever before. Using methodology developed in the lab of MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator Edward Boyden, researchers around the world are imaging samples that have been swollen to as much as 20 times their original size so their finest features can be seen more clearly. 'It's a very different way to do microscopy,' says Boyden, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering, and a member of the Yang Tan Collective at MIT. 'In contrast to the last 300 years of bioimaging, where you use a lens to magnify an image of light from an object, we physically magnify objects themselves.' Once a tissue is expanded, Boyden says, researchers can see more even with widely available, conventional microscopy hardware....

This information allows chemists to try to produce the right conditions that will allow the desired reaction to occur. However, current methods for predicting the transition state and the path that a chemical reaction will take are complicated and require a huge amount of computational power. MIT researchers have now developed a machine-learning model that can make these predictions in less than a second, with high accuracy. Their model could make it easier for chemists to design chemical reactions that could generate a variety of useful compounds, such as pharmaceuticals or fuels. 'We'd like to be able to ultimately design processes to take abundant natural resources and turn them into molecules that we need, such as materials and therapeutic drugs. Computational chemistry is really important for figuring out how to design more sustainable processes to get us from reactants to products,' says Heather Kulik, the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, a professor of chemistry, and the senior author of the new study....