Search Stories

The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund will support work around the world that advances the development of artificial intelligence in the public interest.

MIT Media Lab to participate in $27 million initiative on AI ethics and governance

Fund establishes a global initiative to advance artificial intelligence research for the public good.

January 10, 2017

Left: An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by the Trojan Eurybates — one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans asteroids to be studied. Right: Psyche, the first mission to a metal asteroid, will map features, structure, composition, and magnetic field, and examine a landscape unlike anything explored before.

Twin wins for planetary exploration

MIT scientists and alumni well represented on newly announced NASA asteroid missions Psyche and Lucy.

January 5, 2017

Decision points for the first player in an “envelope game” are graphed like the branches of a tree. In a game with two players, each has a potential payoff, but the first one’s actions determine the second one’s payoff in each round. Choices whether to gather more information by looking in an envelope that contains either a high or a low temptation and whether to cooperate or defect from t...

Using evolutionary dynamics and game theory to understand personal relations

MIT biophysicists apply mathematics from evolutionary biology to describe a surprising aspect of human behavior.

January 5, 2017

A tweet noting "The Simpsons"' prediction of a Nobel Prize for Professor Bengt Holmström was @MIT's most popular to date.

Top tweets of 2016

Best posts on @MIT touch on LIGO discoveries, Nobel laureate Bengt Holmström, Apollo pioneer Margaret Hamilton, Commencement speaker Matt Damon, and more.

December 30, 2016

Participants in the first Rising Stars in Physics Workshop at MIT

Young women in physics explore faculty careers in inaugural MIT workshop

Rising Stars event features research presentations, panel discussions on academic life.

December 14, 2016

Richard Held, MIT professor emeritus and former head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Richard Held, professor emeritus of brain and cognitive sciences, dies at 94

Longtime professor and former department head spent a lifetime investigating the mechanisms of visual perception.

December 9, 2016

MIT spinout Benchling is bringing life science researchers a cloud-based platform that integrates different types of lab software into one place, with aims of making research and development easier, quicker, and more collaborative.

“Google Docs” for life sciences accelerates discovery

Cloud-based platform assists in managing, sharing data facilitates research.

December 7, 2016

MIT senior Rasheed Auguste’s parents emigrated from Haiti to Boston as teenagers and completed master’s degrees in the U.S. “When I was born, the standard was, ‘we have master’s degrees; a PhD is the next step for this next generation.’ That was always the bar,” says Auguste. “It just so happens I got lucky. I actually do want this PhD that was prescribed from birth.”

Nuclear engineering student advocates for change on campus and Capitol Hill

Senior Rasheed Auguste is fueled by passions for science, policy, and creating a more inclusive MIT.

December 7, 2016

“We make sense of the world through stories, and we remember the world through experience. That’s how it works as human beings. I am telling a story and making people live an experience at the same time,” says MIT Visiting Artist Karim Ben Khelifa.

Face to face with "The Enemy"

Visiting Artist Karim Ben Khelifa creates immersive experiences using virtual and augmented reality to humanize soldiers in global conflicts.

December 2, 2016

Four proposals from six MIT faculty members, pictured here, have been awarded Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants. Left to right: Angela Belcher, Amy Keating, Karl Berggren, Betar Gallant, Domitilla Del Vecchio, and Ron Weiss.

Bold research visions recognized and rewarded

Four proposals from six MIT faculty members to receive Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants.

December 1, 2016

Dennis Frenchman, the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Design and Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning.

3Q: Dennis Frenchman on the rise of innovation districts in Cambridge and beyond

MIT professor explains how “productive neighborhoods” can remake cities.

November 28, 2016

This image shows the fabrication steps from raw circular filament to a fully functional bending artificial muscle. The bottom filament is a raw circular filament. Researchers press the filament using a rolling mill (the second sample from the bottom). Next, they add a mask in the middle of the surface (the third sample from the bottom). Then, they add the conductive ink (the second sample from the...

Nylon fibers made to flex like muscles

MIT engineers find a simple and inexpensive new approach to creating bending artificial muscle fibers.

November 23, 2016

In this illustration, each colored line represents a different state of a “spin chain,” which can be thought of as the magnetic orientations, or spins, of a string of quantum particles. Where the line rises, the spin is up; where it falls, the spin is down; and where it’s flat, the spin is zero. MIT researchers modeled the entanglement of a quantum system as the “superposition” of such s...

Entanglement bonanza

Relatively simple quantum computers could be much more powerful than previously realized.

November 18, 2016

A capacity crowd at the New England Aquarium's Omni Theater enjoyed the 2016 John H. Carlson Lecture, "Big Ice: Antarctica, Greenland, and Boston," presented by Penn State University Professor Richard Alley.

Big ice, big science

Richard Alley delivers 2016 Carlson Lecture on the physics of glaciers and how ice sheets capture a history of the world’s climate.

November 14, 2016

MIT researchers have developed a way to isolate genetic circuits within individual synthetic “cells,” preventing the circuits from disrupting each other.

Researchers create synthetic cells to isolate genetic circuits

Encapsulating molecular components in artificial membranes offers more flexibility in designing circuits.