The world is awash in data visualizations, from charts accompanying news stories on the economy to graphs tracking the weekly temperature to scatterplots showing relationships between baseball statistics.

Most people recognize Alzheimer’s from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now a sweeping new study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes..  The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.

Every year, global health experts are faced with a high-stakes decision: which flu strains should go into the next seasonal vaccine? The choice must be made months in advance, long before flu season even begins, and it can often feel like a race against the clock. If the selected strains match those that circulate, the vaccine will likely be highly effective. But if the prediction is off, protection can drop significantly, leading to (potentially preventable) illness and strain on healthcare systems.

When the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) first convened 40 years ago, the robotics community shared a clear vision: robots would one day combine elegant mathematical models with advanced computation to handle complex tasks. Four decades later, the community is divided over how to reach that goal. That divide was on full display this May in Atlanta, where ICRA marked its anniversary with a unique closing keynote: a live Oxford-style debate on whether “data will solve robotics and automation.”

If you rotate an image of a molecular structure, a human can tell the rotated image is still the same molecule, but a machine-learning model might think it is a new data point. In computer science parlance, the molecule is “symmetric,” meaning the fundamental structure of that molecule remains the same if it undergoes certain transformations, like rotation.

Let’s say you’re reading a story, or playing a game of chess. You may not have noticed, but each step of the way, your mind kept track of how the situation (or “state of the world”) was changing. You can imagine this as a sort of sequence of events list, which we use to update our prediction of what will happen next.

Imagine a future where artificial intelligence quietly shoulders the drudgery of software development: refactoring tangled code, migrating legacy systems, and hunting down race conditions, so that human engineers can devote themselves to architecture, design, and the genuinely novel problems still beyond a machine’s reach. Recent advances appear to have nudged that future tantalizingly close, but a new paper by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and several collaborating institutions argues that this potential future reality demands a hard look at present-day challenges.