Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: It’s the final day! Thank you for following along this series—and thank you for following us on any of our socials ♡ The last gift is... 1 incredible community – comprising more than 200 talented scientists, engineers, and designers! 👏

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: Gift #2 is... 2 amazing universities: MIT and Harvard! These two universities house eight Yang Tan Collective centers (check Gift #8 to see them all)🌟 🎁 One last gift tomorrow & we think it’s a sweet one ☺️💕

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: Today’s gift is the last research gift and it comes from a Harvard lab! Did you guess it? It's... 3 senses (seeing, hearing, smelling) aren’t enough to satisfy social need in the absence of touch in a study published by Harvard’s Dulac lab 🫂 ⬇️ Link to article

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: Did you guess Day 4’s gift? I won’t leave you hanging, its… 4 distinct neural pathways interact with the brain’s striatum region in order to finely tune dopamine levels to motivate or inhibit action. 📚⬇️ Link to read it below

What if aging didn’t have to mean a weaker immune system? 🧬🛡️ Feng Zhang & researchers in the Yang Brain-Body Center have found a way to reawaken immune strength. 🔗 Read the article about the study: yangtan.mit.edu/new-study-su...

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: Today’s gift comes from the GEAR Center! ☀️💧 5 times per second: the Yang GEAR Center’s solar-powered desalination platform senses and responds to changing sunlight as often as 300 times per minute, maximizing efficiency in real time. ⬇️ article linked below!

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: For Day 6, we have... 6 distinct functions are integrated in a single hair-thin fiber developed by Polina Anikeeva’s group! Read what the functions are in the graphics ⬇️

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: we posted about this one recently! Gift #7 is… 7 tasks, from simple arithmetic to complex grid-transformation problems, required the same amount of thinking by both humans and a computational model to reach a solution! ⬇️ article below

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: what does the Yang Tan Collective boast eight of? Gift #8 is—of course—the EIGHT centers!! 🧑‍🔬🧠 Can you name all eight?

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: Gift #9 🧬🧰 9 tiny units of genetic code make up each part of the TIGR guide RNA. These TIGR systems, discovered by Feng Zhang’s lab, are biological tools that can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, expanding the genome-editing toolbox!

(1/2) Yang ICoN Center's @evfedorenko.bsky.social spoke with @quantamagazine.bsky.social about her research, which shows how our brains parse language with LLM-like efficiency!

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: what will Gift #10 have in store for us today? That’s right! It’s 10 future clinicians who are advancing through the Yang Center for Bionics training program! 🥼🦿 The featured picture shows a few trainees receiving their white coats 👏

Twelve Days of Yang Tan Collective: did you guess Gift #11? It’s… 11 ICoN Center Postdoctoral Fellows who are tomorrow’s leaders in computational neuroscience! 🧠Learn more about these iconic ICoN fellows at yangtan.mit.edu/icon/icon-center-researchers/ 🎁 Any guesses for Gift #10?

Happy December☃️✨! Join us as we celebrate the Collective’s amazing people, centers, & research! (I know the song starts off with 1 gift, but it’s ok if we start off with 12, right?) 🎁#12, we have: 12 @harvardmed.bsky.social faculty members! Can you guess what Gift #11 might be?

Yang ICoN researchers are revealing the shared rules of balance across species. 🧠🚶‍♀️🐭🪰 Humans, mice, and flies all use the same error-correction strategy to stay upright, thanks to new work led by ICoN Center’s @nidhise.bsky.social & ICoN Fellow @antoinecomite.bsky.social.

On International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we honor the many ways people move throughout the world and celebrate human potential in all its forms. View this short video to see the incredible research the Yang Center for Bionics is doing & how they celebrate every body!

(1/3) Check out this short Q & A about the K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate program, especially if you or someone you know is a recent college grad who needs more experience before applying to PhD programs.

(1/3) For the past few months, we've highlighted conversations Yang Tan Collective fellows and faculty have taken part in & we’ve collected all the podcasts and videos in one neat post in case you need something inspirational to listen to during the holidays (or whenever!)

Listen to the discussion between Hugh Herr & Bloomberg Businessweek Daily hosts as they discuss the future of bionic limbs and more on Bloomberg Podcasts! www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5_2...

(1/2) ICoN Fellow Andrea de Varda @andreadevarda.bsky.social and Ev Fedorenko @evfedorenko.bsky.social have revealed that AI reasoning models & humans struggle with the same tough problems—and take longer on them in parallel ways. Article 🔗 news.mit.edu/2025/cost-of...

A new cross-species atlas created by Yang Tan researchers reveals how astrocytes—star-shaped cells and the brain’s most abundant non-neuronal cells—change across space and time. This resource gives scientists an essential lens for probing brain development, function, and disease.

(1/3) Read about Jinyoung Kang and Margaret Schroeder (@meschro.bsky.social)'s collaboration in developing a new imaging technique that can provide scientists across many fields with “clearer pictures of biological machinery”, originally featured in the Summer 2025 Newsletter.

(1/3) Kyla Nichols, in her Yang Tan Collective Summer 2025 Newsletter feature, gives us an overview of her research on the gut-brain connection and what she wants to uncover about “why there might be strong sex-based differences in mental health disorders,”

Congratulations to Collective alumni and gene engineering superstars Omar Abudayyeh & Jonathan Gootenberg on their continued success beyond MIT! Your innovative spirit is truly shaping the future. Listen now to their conversation on the podcast Frameshifts with Benjamin Arya:

Hugh Herr speaks with Tilly Lockey on her Open Bionics podcast “Tilly Talks Tech” about his lived experiences and personal journey, his research and vision for the future of human augmentation, and about the beauty of human diversity.

(1/4) A new Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders from researchers identifies the top ways workplaces can be made more inclusive for autistic employees. Nonprofit org Neurodiversity in the Workplace also supported the study.

(1/2) Congratulations to the Yang Tan Collective faculty for winning inaugural MIT Health and Life Sciences (HEALS) Seed Grants!

Applying new tools to entire brains, starting with C. elegans, offers the opportunity to uncover how molecules work together to generate neural physiology, and how neurons generate behavior, write @kordinglab.bsky.social and @eboyden3.bsky.social. #neuroskyence bit.ly/48EzEO8

ICoN Center alumna @nogazs.bsky.social offers a fresh take on how the brain compresses visual information to guide intelligent behavior in @thetransmitter.bsky.social article: “The visual system’s lingering mystery: Connecting neural activity and perception”. www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

In this talk at International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, ICoN Center director Ila Fiete dives into how the brain builds modular, high-capacity memory systems using structured neural scaffolds. Listen now on YouTube: 💻 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX1a...

From worms to mice, Ed Boyden's expansion microscopy method is now scaling to whole organisms—revealing nanoscale detail across entire bodies. Read more here: analyticalscience.wiley.com/content/arti...

(1/2) @sarthakc.bsky.social, from the lab of Ila Fiete, studies grid cells – “the GPS of the brain”. Explore his research & findings with this snapshot of the work and papers he and his team worked on:

CRISPR-Cas12b, pioneered by Yang Tan Collective’s Feng Zhang, just hit a milestone: edited cells made insulin for months in a diabetes patient—no immunosuppressants needed. Read here: www.wired.com/story/no-more-injections-crispr-offers-new-hope-for-treating-diabetes/ @broadinstitute.org

Hugh Herr discusses the AMI (agonist-antagonist myoneural interface) surgery & the Yang Bionics Center’s latest advances in this recent Be-YOU-tiful Adaptive Warrior podcast episode “Dr. Hugh Herr: Bionics and Beyond”. Listen now: www.bawarrior360.com/2025/07/15/dr-hugh-herr-bionics-and-beyond/

Congrats to our friends at @harvardmed.bsky.social on the launch of the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center–studying how sleep, immunity, pain & gut health intersect. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/17/m...

Full house at @harvardmed.bsky.social for today’s Brain Body Dialogues symposium — exploring connections between brain and body in health & disease.

Can a self-guided meditation app be just as helpful in managing stress and anxiety as in-person mindfulness-based interventions in autistic adults? Researchers in the Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT sought to answer this question in new research published in the journal “Mindfulness.”

Even the smallest choice lights up the brain like Times Square (in mice, according to the @intlbrainlab.bsky.social papers recently published in @nature.com). Congrats to Ila Fiete, Yang ICoN Center director, on her role in this landmark map of decision-making!

Congratulations to Chris Shallal, PhD student at Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology & Yang Center for Bionics, for being named an inaugural MIT Health and Life Sciences (HEALS) Graduate Fellow! Image Credit: MIT Media Lab

Congratulations to Nidhi Seethapathi, a faculty member in the Yang ICoN Center, who is featured in MIT Technology Review 2025 class of “Innovators Under 35”! We can’t wait to see how her research will impact the world.

Meet Emily Robinson, our newest Yang Brain-Body Fellow. An MIT Biology PhD student, she’s decoding how the vagus nerve senses inflammation. In this image from her research, vagus neurons (blue) light up the carotid sinus—your body’s hypoxia alarm system.

As cells age, their nuclei get wonky. @eboyden3.bsky.social & colleagues have developed a tool that “blows up” nuclei to reveal how warped shapes scramble gene control. Read more here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Big congrats to Yang GEAR Center grad student Jon Bessette—just named a 2025 @activatefellows.bsky.social 🌍🔧 Turning bold ideas into real-world impact. 🔗 www.activate.org/news/introdu...

Join K. Lisa Yang Brain Body Center, @harvardmed.bsky.social, and @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social at “The Brain Body Dialogues in Health and Disease Symposium” at Harvard on September 17 for an exciting program with discussions by nine leading experts! More info: brain.harvard.edu/hbi_events/t...

Breakthrough from the Yang Center for Bionics at MIT: a new bionic knee that’s transforming life for lower-leg amputees. 🚀🦿 #YangTanCollective #Bionics #MIT Read it here: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

The K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics' bionic knee is integrated into tissue and allows for natural movement #bionics #mit #yangtancollective #bionicknee #neuroscience #science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...