Rainer Weiss wins Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
LIGO inventor shares award for direct detection of gravitational waves.
Rainer Weiss awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy
Physics professor emeritus shares prize with Caltech's Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever for designing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
“Super Mario Brothers” is hard
Analysis shows popular video game is among the hardest problems in the “complexity class” PSPACE.
Scrutinizing radiation’s impact
Nuclear science and engineering PhD student Cody Dennett simulates conditions inside reactors to measure microscopic defects in irradiated materials.
Finding relevant data in a sea of languages
A cross-language search engine enables English monolingual analysts to find foreign language documents relevant to their investigations.
Automating DNA origami opens door to many new uses
Like 3-D printing did for larger objects, method makes it easy to build nanoparticles out of DNA.
From Babylon to Baudelaire and back
In exploring the role of clerics in the Shi’a world, political science PhD student Marsin Alshamary heeds the call of family history.
Finding a new formula for concrete
Researchers look to bones and shells as blueprints for stronger, more durable concrete.
Scientists illuminate a hidden regulator in gene transcription
New super-resolution technique visualizes important role of short-lived enzyme clusters.
New concept turns battery technology upside-down
Pump-free design for flow battery could offer advantages in cost and simplicity.
![“[T]oday, if you want to write a program, you go and bring in these huge frameworks and these huge pieces of functionality that you then glue together, and you write a little code to get them to interact with each other. If you don’t understand what that big framework is doing, you’re not even going to know where your program is going to start executing,” says Armando Solar-Lezama.](/sites/default/files/styles/term_page__news_article/public/images/201605/MIT-Symbolic-Execution.jpg?itok=A5FxILHQ)
Automatic bug finder
System could make complex analysis practical for programs that import huge swaths of code.
Target coal or carbon?
Researchers are analyzing coal and energy caps as carbon policy instruments for China.
Neuroscientists illuminate role of autism-linked gene
Loss of Shank gene prevents neuronal synapses from properly maturing.
Maria Zuber elected as chair of the National Science Board
For the first time, women will hold both of the board’s top leadership positions.