Computational biology is enhancing our understanding of intrinsically disordered proteins, leading to exciting new medical treatments. From videogames to protein discovery, high performance computing impacts how we understand and engage with each other and the world around us. …

A helicopter rescue mission gone awry fuels this man’s mission to bring heroes home safely with drones built for aircraft load stabilization. As a Black Hawk helicopter’s rotors whop-whop-whopped overhead in their fight for command of the winds amid a stormy — and ultimately failed — rescue mission, a teenage…

Bearing a smile, Mazdak “Maz” Taghioskoui says he immigrated to the United States from Iran for a good education and same-day shipping, two key features that have supported his focus on building — from scratch — a sophisticated next-generation analytical tool: the Trace Matters mass spectrometer. Maz is the Founder and CEO/CTO of Trace Matters, and we sat down with him for show-and-tell to discuss how he and his company is reinventing the mass spectrometer to save lives here on Earth and to advance our scientific understanding of the cosmos beyond our planet.

While aboard a plane nosediving into Baghdad, one may be forgiven for pondering how one’s life path could lead from vacuum cleaners to minesweeping robots. …

What happens to the ideas generated across the United States federal government’s research initiatives? Will Dickson and Trinity Torres walk us through the pathways of taxpayer-funded technological advancements and opportunities for a diverse pool of private citizens-entrepreneurs to find commercial success licensing patents owned by the U.S. government. The United…

Dual-use ventures — tough tech startups pursuing commercial relationships with the private sector and federal government, are a unique class of companies with whom Kathryn “Katy” Person, of the MIT Innovation Initiative, works daily. “[Working with the United States government, such as the Department of Defense,] is not for everyone…

No longer the domain of strictly nation-states, ‘new space’ is undergoing a wave of commercialization and growth. Two key engineering challenges, observed Louis Perna, are in-space communications and propulsion. He and his co-founder, Natalya Bailey, launched Accion Systems to provide cost-effective electrospray propulsion for satellites. While the complexities of space travel are something that many members of society may recognize, less obvious may be the terrestrial challenges spacefaring tech developers face: designing and manufacturing hardware, cultivating an interdisciplinary team, and working through unit economics of complicated systems. Louis details his insider’s view of the privatization of space, one electrospray ion thruster at a time.

The building blocks of life, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), can be used for computational advantage, posits Dr. James Banal, postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Biological Engineering, in the Bathe Lab. “I work on the wackiest things in computing and storage right now, which is quantum computing and DNA data storage,” says James. From ultra-dense, ultra-long storage of digital data (think: storing exabytes for fifty years) to building a ‘frozen zoo’ or ‘species time capsule’ to preserve living components of our planet in case of catastrophe, DNA storage and computing leverages the life within all of us to improve not only our lives, but those who will inherit our future Earth.

What is ‘tough tech’? To quote from Who’s Your Ally?, a piece @jmill published by the MIT Innovation Initiative: Whether spinning out of a pristine laboratory or an unkempt dormitory, tough tech ventures and the entrepreneurs building them may be loosely defined by their work in an emerging area where science meets engineering, and may sometimes be referred to as working in “deep tech” or “frontier tech”. The markets which such companies could serve may not yet exist, and the companies’ development milestones may be measured in years rather than months.