One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists are still stuck with perhaps the biggest incompatibility problem in the universe. The smoothly warped space-time landscape that Einstein described is like a painting by Salvador Dali — seamless, unbroken, geometric. But the quantum particles that occupy this space are more like something from Georges Seurat: pointillist, discrete, described by probabilities. At their core, the two descriptions contradict each other. Yet a bold new strain of thinking suggests that quantum correlations between specks of impressionist paint actually create not just Dali’s landscape, but the canvases that both sit on, as well as the three-dimensional space around them. And Einstein, as he so often does, sits right in the center of it all, still turning things upside-down from beyond the grave. Like initials carved in a tree, ER = EPR, as the new idea is known, is a shorthand that joins two ideas proposed by Einstein in 1935. One involved the paradox implied by what he called “spooky action at a distance” between quantum particles (the EPR paradox, named for its authors, Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen). The other showed how two black holes could be connected through far reaches of space through “wormholes” (ER, for Einstein-Rosen bridges). At the time that Einstein put forth these ideas — and for most of the eight decades since — they were thought to be entirely unrelated....

“When I was little, I would stretch rubber bands across cabinet and drawer handles,” says Zhang. “A rubber band produces a different pitch when you pluck it, depending on the material and depending on the tension. So I wondered if I could make an entire scale.” When he succeeded, Zhang says he wanted to know how it worked. Zhang has since pondered the science behind many more observations — and played scales of a more traditional variety. At MIT, he is double-majoring in physics and mathematics with computer science, and minoring in music. Zhang says his double major allowed him to pursue all three of his academic interests, forming what he calls a “math and friends umbrella.” “What draws me to these academic fields is that I tend to be pretty analytical,” he says. “Computers are cool and math is fun, but I really like this particular way of thinking — being able to understand something from first principles.” Trying to understand the science underlying an observation is something Zhang thinks about often in everyday life. Once, while playing a board game with some friends on the 30th or so floor of an apartment building, Zhang says the group noticed that the sun seemed to be setting later than would be expected. Someone suggested it was because they were up so high....

NEW YORK – While PCR-, antigen-, and antibody-based technologies have been the backbone technologies in the development of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics tests, other methods not usually used in the life sciences are also being explored as strategies to improve the detection of the coronavirus. ...

A completely passive solar-powered desalination system developed by researchers at MIT and in China could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Such systems could potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide an efficient, low-cost water source. The system uses multiple layers of flat solar evaporators and condensers, lined up in a vertical array and topped with transparent aerogel insulation. It is described in a paper appearing today in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, authored by MIT doctoral students Lenan Zhang and Lin Zhao, postdoc Zhenyuan Xu, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and eight others at MIT and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. The key to the system’s efficiency lies in the way it uses each of the multiple stages to desalinate the water. At each stage, heat released by the previous stage is harnessed instead of wasted. In this way, the team’s demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation....