December 2025

Today, out of an estimated 1 trillion species on Earth, 99.999 percent are considered microbial — bacteria, archaea, viruses, and single-celled eukaryotes. For much of our planet’s history, microbes ruled the Earth, able to live and thrive in the most extreme of environments. Researchers have only just begun in the last few decades to contend with the diversity of microbes — it’s estimated that less than 1 percent of known genes have laboratory-validated functions. Computational approaches offer researchers […]

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What if there were a way to solve one of the most significant obstacles to the use of nuclear energy — the disposal of high-level nuclear waste (HLW)? Dauren Sarsenbayev, a third-year doctoral student at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is addressing the challenge as part of his research. Sarsenbayev focuses on one of the primary problems related to HLW: decay heat released by radioactive waste. The basic premise of his solution is to extract […]

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During early development, tissues and organs begin to bloom through the shifting, splitting, and growing of many thousands of cells. A team of MIT engineers has now developed a way to predict, minute by minute, how individual cells will fold, divide, and rearrange during a fruit fly’s earliest stage of growth. The new method may one day be applied to predict the development of more complex tissues, organs, and organisms. It could also help scientists identify cell patterns […]

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A big reason I started this blog (almost twenty years ago!) was to have a safe space to rant about things I’m obsessed with. One of those obsessions is TV, but growing up in the UK and living in the US most of my adult life has left me with tastes that don’t seem to match up with anyone’s demographic. That means I spend a lot of time trying to find shows that I enjoy, and while I […]

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Announcing: 𝗪𝗪-𝗣𝗚𝗗 — 𝗪𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁 I just released WW-PGD, a small PyTorch add-on that wraps standard optimizers (SGD, Adam, AdamW, etc.) and applies an epoch-boundary spectral projection using WeightWatcher diagnostics. Elevator pitch: WW-PGD explicitly nudges each layer toward the Exact Renormalization Group (ERG) critical manifold during training. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁 • HTSR critical condition: α ≈ 2 • SETOL ERG condition: trace-log(λ) over the spectral tail = 0 WW-PGD makes these explicit optimization targets, rather than […]

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As language models (LMs) improve at tasks like image generation, trivia questions, and simple math, you might think that human-like reasoning is around the corner. In reality, they still trail us by a wide margin on complex tasks. Try playing Sudoku with one, for instance, where you fill in numbers one through nine in such a way that each appears only once across the columns, rows, and sections of a nine-by-nine grid. Your AI opponent will either fail […]

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Artificial intelligence can enhance decision-making and enable action with reduced risk and greater precision, making it a critical tool for national security. A new program offered jointly by the MIT departments of Mechanical Engineering (Course 2, MechE) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6, EECS) will provide breadth and depth in technical studies for naval officers, as well as a path for non-naval officers studying at MIT, to grow in their understanding of applied AI for naval […]

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The expression converges to the golden ratio φ. Another way to say this is that the sequence defined by x0 = 1 and for n > 0 converges to φ. This post will be about how it converges. I wrote a little script to look at the error in approximating φ by xn and noticed that the error is about three times smaller at each step. Here’s why that observation was correct. The ratio of the error at […]

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