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Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research, welcomes GE to MIT as a new Sustaining Member of the MIT Energy Initiative. Zuber discussed MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change and the importance of industry engagement in solving global climate and energy challenges.

MIT Energy Initiative welcomes GE as new member and participant in Low-Carbon Energy Centers

GE’s membership marks continued progress on goals of MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change to engage industry in solving global challenges.

August 30, 2016

In this series, a 3-D printed multimaterial shape-memory minigripper, consisting of shape-memory hinges and adaptive touching tips, grasps a cap screw.

3-D printed structures “remember” their shapes

Heat-responsive materials may aid in controlled drug delivery and solar panel tracking.

August 26, 2016

Ginkgo Bioworks staff members Ramya Prathuri (left) and Nate Tedford work at the mass spectrometer in the Ginkgo foundry.

Hacking microbes

Startup’s engineered yeast helps clients produce fragrances and flavors more efficiently.

August 25, 2016

PhD Ezzeldin Hamed, professor Dina Katabi, and visiting researcher Hariharan Rahul developed MegaMIMO to address spectrum crunch.

Solving network congestion

MegaMIMO system from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab speeds data transfer by coordinating multiple routers at the same time.

August 23, 2016

New MIT heads of house for fall 2016: (clockwise from top left) Nuria Jane and Alberto Rodriguez; Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (who will co-lead with Empar Rollano-Hijarrubia, not pictured); Laurie Lynn and Jared Berezin (with Shakedown); and Kristen Covino.

New heads of house join undergraduate and graduate communities to start the fall semester

Areas of expertise include robotics, writing, physics, jewelry-making, and breakfast cereal.

August 18, 2016

Simulations written in Simit, a new programming language, were dozens or even hundreds of times as fast as those written in existing simulation languages. But they required only one-tenth as much code as meticulously hand-optimized simulations that could achieve similar execution speeds.

User-friendly language for programming efficient simulations

New language can speed up computer simulations 200-fold or reduce the code they require by 90 percent.

August 10, 2016

MIT Women's Technology Program tutor Katherine Ward '16 works on a programming exercise with a student.

$1 million gift to support diversity in STEM education

Gift from Hopper-Dean Foundation will enhance computer science and engineering programs for high school and middle school students.

August 1, 2016

Seymour Papert was a world-renowned visionary in education and a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab.

Professor Emeritus Seymour Papert, pioneer of constructionist learning, dies at 88

World-renowned mathematician, learning theorist, and educational-technology visionary was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab.

August 1, 2016

Pison Technology team members (left to right) Bobby Forster, Dexter Ang, David Cipoletta, and Wenxin Feng are developing assistive technology for people with ALS.

Fighting ALS with mind, hand, and heart

With support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, an MIT spinoff is creating assistive technology for people with ALS.

July 29, 2016

Nicholas Okafor, head online facilitator for the MIT Online Science, Technology, and Engineering Community (MOSTEC) program, records a video in advance of students' arrival at MIT this month.

Scene at MIT: Encouraging future scientists and engineers

July 27, 2016

Top row: (l-r) Karole Armitage, Perry Chen, Sheila Hayman. Middle row: (l-r) Keisuke Honda, Masataka Hosoo, Arielle Johnson. Bottom row: (l-r) Alaa Murabit, Madeline Sayet, Céline Semaan Vernon.

2016 MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellows announced

Program blurs the lines between academia and the world.

July 22, 2016

A five-day MIT Professional Education course — Agriculture, Innovation, and the Environment — showcased new technologies and strategies for making the agriculture industry more productive.

Growing season

New professional education program on agriculture, innovation, and the environment attracts global agricultural leaders to MIT.

July 19, 2016

Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy, left), a gung-ho scientist with expertise in the paranormal, and Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon, right), an eccentric engineer, tinker in a nearly perfect replication of an MIT lab.

How MIT gave "Ghostbusters" its "geek cred"

From proton packs to hidden props, the 2016 blockbuster draws upon MIT personalities and scientific panache.

July 15, 2016

A new system that can anticipate room assignments and suggest which nurses to assign to patients for C-sections and other procedures provided satisfactory recommendations to nurses 90 percent of the time.

Robot helps nurses schedule tasks on labor floor

System from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab suggests where to move patients and who should do C-sections.

July 13, 2016

“It’s intuitive that if a bunch of people are randomly walking around an area, the number of times they bump into each other will be a surrogate of the population density,” says Cameron Musco, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. “What we’re doing is giving a rigorous analysis behind that intuition, and also saying that the estimate is a very good estim...

Exploring networks efficiently

Analysis of ant colony behavior could yield better algorithms for network communication.