Post-its are great to jot down quick notes and messages; and important phone numbers; and meeting locations; and the zillions of passwords. Great that is, until they lose their stick and end up buried in piles of work or behind the desk. Now, researchers at MIT have solved that pressing problem with the demoed “Quickies,” a new application to digitize handwritten sticky notes and allow you not only to browse through an archive of notes, but set up to-do lists, send reminders, and even find that sticky note you lost in the middle of a textbook.

MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel got a ton of attention in 2005 when he published a paper in Nature demonstrating a link between global warming and hurricanes—especially since Katrina hit New Orleans just three weeks later.

For years scientists have been touting a disease-fighting technique called RNA interference. The idea behind it is pretty simple: By piggybacking on the body's own system for silencing genes, researchers think they could stop troublesome proteins from being produced, and, as a result, halt the damage those proteins cause. The trick, though, is that scientists have had a hard time figuring out how to make RNAi, as it's known, work on specific tissues.

The Super MoneyMaker Pump—yes, that's the real name—sucks up water from sources as many as 30 feet below the ground, can spray it up to 40 feet high, and can even push it through 1,000 feet of hose to cover a larger section of land. In all, the pump can irrigate two acres of land, and costs only around $100.

MIT professor Martin Fisher and his team at KickStart, a nonprofit, invented the pump for small-scale farmers. Since it's human-powered and easy to use, it allows them to irrigate crops all year round, instead of just waiting for the rainy season.

MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

Metastasis is the process through which cancer cells detach from a tumor and travel the circulatory system until they reach an uninfected site on which to grow anew. It is one of the least understood mechanisms in medicine though it is the cause of nine out of every 10 deaths from cancer. Traditional research has so far yielded little headway, which is why M.I.T. is building a new institute which will pair cancer scientists with engineers to conduct research under the rubric of systems biology.

Cost: $5,000
Time: 1 Week
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The Future of Diagnosis
2015: Get Fit Without Moving a Muscle
Joan Vernikos, Pharmacologist and NASA Consultant

A new study shows that overweight people lose about as much muscle mass in 10 years—10 percent—as astronauts do on extended space missions. Now physicians are fighting fat with the NASA-inspired human centrifuge, a spinning platform that doubles the gravitational load on the body, stimulating metabolism and forcing muscles to contract.