Protected: News

As I write in late July, we’re contending with a major tax increase on the annual returns from MIT’s endowment as well as other investments and assets. This new tax burden will strain the resources we use to support research, innovation, and student scholarships and financial aid—the heart and soul of the Institute. 

Textiles account for 5% of landfill space—and clothing made with polyester can take up to 200 years to decompose. Massachusetts tackled the problem by banning disposal of clothing and fabrics in 2022. And Infinite Threads, a spinoff of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee, is addressing it by collecting lightly used clothing from the MIT community and selling it for $2 to $6 per item at popup sales held several times each semester. 

“Our goal is simple: We want to keep clothing out of landfills,” says Cameron Dougal ’25, who led the effort with Erin Hovendon ’26 in 2024–’25. That year, the group sold over 1,000 items and gave about 750 pounds of unsold goods to Helpsy, an organization that collects used clothing for resale and recycling. Infinite Threads uses proceeds from its sales to pay student workers and to rent a U-Haul to bring clothing to the popups. 

SARAH FOOTE

In addition to helping the planet, offering affordable clothing options generates a lot of positive feedback on campus. “I love hearing from students that they got clothing items they now wear frequently from one of our sales,” says Hovendon. 

Infinite Threads also gives away leftover T-shirts from residence hall events and career fairs, which Dougal says demonstrates the importance of a hyperlocal reuse ecosystem. “As soon as these types of items leave campus,” he says, “there is a much lower chance that they will find a new home.”

Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have identified areas needing repair and then mixed the exact shades needed to fill in one area at a time. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade. Now an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering has used artificial intelligence to speed up the process by orders of magnitude.

Digital restoration tools are not new; computer vision, image recognition, and color matching have all helped generate repaired versions of damaged paintings in recent years. But until now, there has been no way to apply the results directly onto an original canvas. Instead, they are usually displayed virtually or printed as stand-alone works.

In his study, Alex Kachkine, SM ’23, presents a new method he’s developed that involves printing the restoration on a very thin polymer film that can be carefully aligned with a painting and adhered to it or easily removed. As a demonstration, he used the method to repair a highly damaged 15th-century oil painting he owned. First he used traditional techniques to clean the painting and remove any past restoration efforts. Then he scanned the painting, including the many regions where paint had faded or cracked, and used existing algorithms to create a virtual version of what it may have looked like originally.

Next, Kachkine used software he developed to create a map of regions on the original painting that require infilling, along with the exact colors needed. The method automatically identified 5,612 regions in need of repair and filled them in using 57,314 different shades. This map was then translated into a physical, two-layer mask printed onto polymer-based films. The first layer was printed in color, while the second layer was printed in the exact same pattern but in white.

“In order to fully reproduce color, you need both white and color ink to get the full spectrum,” Kachkine explains. He used high-fidelity commercial inkjets to print the mask’s two layers, which he carefully aligned with the help of computational tools he developed. Then he overlaid them by hand onto the original painting and adhered them with a thin spray of conventional varnish. The films are made from materials that can be easily dissolved in case conservators need to reveal the original, damaged work. The entire process took 3.5 hours, which he estimates is about 66 times faster than traditional restoration methods.

If this method is adopted widely, Kachkine emphasizes, conservators should be involved at every step, to ensure that the final work is in keeping with an artist’s style and intent. The digital file of the mask can also be saved to document exactly what was restored. “Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine says. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”

The result, he hopes, will be a new lease on life for many works that have not had a chance to be repaired by hand. “There is a lot of damaged art in storage that might never be seen,” he says. “Hopefully with this new method, there’s a chance we’ll see more art.”