Millions of times during their four-month lifespan, human red blood cells must squeeze through tiny capillaries to deliver their payload of oxygen and pick up waste carbon dioxide-functions essential to life.

Researchers from MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology and Ohio State University have developed a new computer modeling approach to study how materials behave under stress at the atomic level, offering insights that could help engineers design materials with an ideal balance between strength and resistance to failure.

In a launch Oct. 12 worthy of its sparkling acronym, the Global Enterprise for Micro-Mechanics and Molecular Medicine, or GEM4, brought to MIT people from 12 time zones away, many university presidents, leaders of government, and royalty: Professor Dr. Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand.

CAMBRIDGE – Leaders of 10 research universities from around the world will gather at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today to launch an international collaboration to use nanotechnology tools for global health and medical research.

A panel of international judges has selected Subra Suresh, the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, as the 2006 recipient of one of the most prestigious and multinationally coordinated prizes in materials science and engineering: the Acta Materialia Gold Medal.

MUMBAI, DECEMBER 25 On the world map of medicine’s war against malaria, an engineer with roots in IIT Chennai is cutting new headway from a lab at MIT, Massachusetts.His first love is not biology, but non-living materials and structures at the nano scale: 1/80,000th the breadth of a human hair.

Work led by MIT nanotechnology expert Subra Suresh