For the last decade, engineers have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. When deploying such autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan but new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more "cognitive" capabilities, enabling humans to specify high-level goals, while the robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals. 

Photosynthesis, the process by which plants utilize the sun's energy to create their own, leaves behind a unique calling card in the form of a chemical signature that is spelled out with stable oxygen isotopes.

Photosynthesis by microscopic plants forms the base of the oceanic food chain, but it is difficult to measure how productive these plants are in natural settings. This research will make it easier to do so.

Most oxygen atoms contain eight protons and eight neutrons and are represented by the symbol O-16. More than 99.9 percent of Earth's oxygen is O-16, but two heavier oxygen isotopes exist in trace amounts: O-17, with one extra neutron, and O-18, with two.

Rydberg atoms, atoms whose outermost electrons are highly excited but not ionized, might be just the thing for processing quantum information. These outsized atoms can be sustained for a long time in a quantum superposition condition (a good thing for creating qubits) and they can interact strongly with other such atoms, making them useful for devising the kind of logic gates needed to process information. 

A new study shows that the microbial communities we carry in and on our bodies, the human microbiome, contain the potential to uniquely identify individuals, much like fingerprints.

Researchers and demonstrated that personal microbiomes contain enough distinguishing features to identify an individual over time from among a research study population of hundreds of people. The study, the first to rigorously show that identifying people from microbiome data is feasible, suggests that we have surprisingly unique microbial inhabitants, but could raise potential privacy concerns for subjects enrolled in human microbiome research projects.

The new 9-valent human papillomavirus vaccine, can potentially prevent 80 percent of cervical cancers in the United States if given to all 11- or 12-year-old children before they are exposed to the virus, according to a seven-center study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. 

A survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults has found misperceptions about miscarriage and its causes are widespread. Results of the survey show that feelings of guilt and shame are common after a miscarriage and that most people erroneously believe that miscarriages are rare.

Nearly one million miscarriages occur in the U.S. each year. Miscarriages end one in every four pregnancies and are by far the most common of all pregnancy complications. Yet 55 percent of respondents to the Einstein/Montefiore survey believed that miscarriages are "uncommon" (defined in the survey as less than six percent of all pregnancies).