"Because of the solidity of the earth’s crust on the eastern seaboard - unlike California, where there are networks of active faults - earthquakes tend to be felt over longer distances here, according to Thomas Herring, a geophysics professor at MIT."
"Instead, students sit down at a table, as they otherwise would in a university dining hall, except the person sitting across from them would be across the country."
"In a Massachusetts Institute of Technology cafeteria, down the hall from an early radar dish, is the 'wormhole,’ an oddly-shaped plexiglass dome hovering over a video screen."
"Imagine yourself in a crowded lecture hall, utterly confused by the lesson. Normally, this situation offers two choices: You are baffled for the entire class, or you raise your hand and halt the entire lecture because you didn’t get it."
"The digital future, it seems, will be less a takeover of the physical world than a marriage with it. 'This bits-atoms dichotomy is becoming less and less true,' said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business."
"...the same kind of computer modeling that predicts whether car components can hold their own in a crash could also forecast whether pipes will fracture at offshore drilling sites."
"Jose Gomez-Marquez is like the MacGyver of medical devices, hacking toys and turning them into gadgets that can be used to diagnose conditions such as diabetes and dengue fever."
"When prospective college students begin looking for their future homes, one statistic they may want to evaluate is a school's freshman retention rate."
"App Inventor will live on as part of a new MIT Center for Mobile Learning, which will be housed at the famed MIT Media Lab and run by App Inventor creator Hal Abelson, along with fellow MIT professors Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick (both of whom were also instrumental in the creation of the project)."