Massachusetts has long been a hub for education, public health, and civic innovation. This archive tracks progress stories from across the state — from Boston’s research institutions to smaller cities finding local solutions to shared challenges.
“For the first time, it is possible for water, produced by sunlight, to be even cheaper than tap water,” said Lenan Zhang, a research scientist from the team from MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “This opens up the possibility for solar desalination to address real-world problems.”
A new 4% tax on the state’s wealthiest residents will account for $1 billion of the state’s $56 billion fiscal budget for 2024. A portion of those funds will be used to provide all public-school students with free weekday meals.
All public school students grades K-12 will be entitled to free lunches regardless of their financial status. It’s estimated to save families about $1,200 a year per student.
“In our first treated case, we were thrilled to see that the aggressive decline usually seen after birth simply did not appear,” said lead author Professor Darren Orbach of Boston Children’s Hospital.
Starting this fall, any city resident will be eligible to pursue an associate’s degree or certificate at one of six partnering local institutions without paying to attend.
For decades researchers have been trying to develop a vaccine for the deadly respiratory disease. It looks like 2023 will be the landmark year where not only one, but possibly three different vaccines are approved.
Gay will be the only Black president currently in the Ivy League and the second Black woman ever, following Ruth Simmons, who led Brown University from 2001 to 2012.
The Alzheimer’s Association called the robust study from American biotech company Biogen “the most encouraging results in clinical trials treating the underlying causes of Alzheimer’s to date.”
Recyclable wind turbine blades just moved from concept to reality: a French-led consortium has built a 62-meter prototype in Ponferrada, Spain, designed to be fully broken down and reused at the end of its life. The secret is a thermoplastic resin called Elium, which can be chemically separated from its glass fibers so both materials return to the manufacturing stream as good as new. Engineers will now put the blade through structural lifetime testing in Denmark, with the recycling process itself validated soon after. If the approach proves commercially viable, it could close one of renewable energy’s most persistent loops — turning the blades that power our clean-energy future from a looming waste problem into a genuine circular success story.
One University of Cambridge study suggests that there will be 43 million tonnes of blade waste around the world by 2050.
