Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series about emerging neurotechnologies. Join a pilot class of 12 PhD students at MIT as we explore how neuroscience is revolutionizing our understanding of the brain. Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a series about emerging neurotechnologies. Join a pilot class of 12 PhD students at MIT as we explore how neuroscience is revolutionizing our understanding of the brain. Each post coincides with a lecture and lab tour at MIT created by the Center for Neurobiological Engineering. This experiment is supported by MITx and created by EyeWire. A beautiful scene stirs a sense of wonder. Reminiscing with a friend brings back warm memories. A conflict instantly spawns alertness — even if it’s only in a movie. Your capacity to feel joy or fight anger or savor a laugh is made possible by an exquisite organ: the brain. It enables universal human tendencies while rendering you one of over 7 billion unique individuals. We’ve learned more about the brain in the past 5 years than the previous 5,000. A convergence of technologies allows us to see synapses at nanoscale resolution and map highways of millions of cells. Researchers can measure activity spanning milliseconds, minutes and decades. Techniques from MRI to microscopy allow us to engineer views of the cells that make us human....

Winners, chosen from a pool of candidates from 77 colleges and universities, took home awards for inventions in medicine, transportation, food, and consumer devices and tools ($15,000 for graduate students, $10,000 for undergraduates). Healthcare Catalin Voss, Stanford University (graduate winner)Voss developed a Google Glass app to help people with autism recognize and respond to emotional cues. The app uses an artificial intelligence system to analyze people’s emotions and suggest appropriate social cues via the heads-up display or audio. Jason Kang, Katherine Jin and Kevin Tyan, Columbia University (undergraduate team winner)The team invented a brightly colored powder called Highlight, which mixes with disinfectant solutions to make them more visible and effective at eliminating potential contamination. Healthcare workers can use it to ensure contaminated surfaces are fully cleaned, lowering the chance for human error. Transportation Dan Dorsch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (graduate winner)Dorsch designed the world’s first light, high-efficiency clutch-less transmission for hybrid vehicles. He’s working with automotive manufacturers to bring the technology to mass market vehicles. It could offer energy savings while matching the performance of today’s sportscars....

From time to time, a new picture of outer space changes our understanding of the universe and our place in it. One hundred years ago, astronomers captured the light of stars behind the sun during a total solar eclipse, proving that the sun had bent the starlight and validating Albert Einstein’s new theories of gravity. In 1923, Edwin Hubble captured a pulsing star within the Andromeda Galaxy on a glass photographic plate, revealing for the first time that galaxies exist beyond our own Milky Way. By the 1960s, astronomers in New Jersey had detected radiation from the Big Bang, now called the Cosmic Microwave Background, marking the edge of the observable universe—though they didn’t know what they were seeing at first. This past April, a picture of a black hole, captured by a global network of telescopes, again transformed our perception of the cosmos. That image appeared in major newspapers around the world: a ring of superheated gas 55 million light-years away, about the width of our solar system, spiraling into an abyss with the mass of 6.5 billion suns at the center of the giant galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The picture again validated the physics of Einstein, but also provided a glimpse of what may lie beyond the universe we know. Stitched together from several of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, the blurry image of darkness silhouetted by light is the result of decades of work by more than 200 scientists around the globe and coordinated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....

By the age of three, wealthy children hear 30 million more words than their poor counterparts, according to a landmark 1995 study (pdf) by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley. The “30 million word gap” has since become shorthand for the gaping inequalities between high and low-income children. Hart and Risley also showed that the number of words kids heard by their third birthday strongly predicted kids’ academic success when they were nine. Clearly, it was important to talk to children—a lot. But a new study from researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania shows that it may not be the sheer accumulation of words that builds children’s brains and their verbal and non-verbal skills. Rather, “conversational turns,” or back-and-forth banter, proved to be much more predictive of a child’s language development than the number of words spoken to them. By using brain scanners, natural language processing systems, and a raft of standardized tests on four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the researchers found that conversational turns strongly correlated with both more brain activation and stronger scores on tests. Their findings applied to children regardless of parental income or education....