Featured video: An “MIT story” about an iconic professor
A new short film spotlights the life and career of MIT Institute Professor and School of Engineering Dean Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93.The documentary, “Full Circle: Paula Hammond at MIT,” traces...
View ArticleThen and now: How MIT Lincoln Laboratory has served as a driving force in...
On July 26, 1951, the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy signed a charter establishing Project Lincoln, an R&D program managed by MIT to develop the nation's first continent-wide air defense system,...
View ArticleHow a medical database developed at MIT evolved into a global standard of...
Before the advancement of scientific data storage and collaboration via the cloud, medical investigators seeking health research breakthroughs had to overcome significant obstacles to collaboration and...
View ArticleMIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel...
Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and a Nobel laureate, died July 11 at the age of 86.Tonegawa was a renowned molecular biologist who wielded his keen insight in...
View ArticleScientists find ozone depletion began decades before discovery of ozone hole
The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons...
View ArticleHarriet having it all
In winter 1997, at age 60, when many researchers might be looking forward to retirement, Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 was pursuing a faculty position as the chief of microbiology and...
View ArticleThe long history of vaccine hesitancy
Debates about vaccines are a recurring feature of contemporary politics. It turns out they actually date back more than 200 years, since the development of the first smallpox vaccine. MIT Professor...
View ArticleThe tech revolution that wasn’t
In 1960, engineers at India’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) built what they called an “Automatic Calculator,” the country’s first working computer. It had the same type of ferrite-core...
View Article“We the People” depicts inventors, dreamers, and innovators in all 50 states
Zora Neale Hurston remains one of America’s best-known authors. Charles Henry Turner developed landmark studies about the behavior of bees and spiders. Brian Wilson founded the Beach Boys. George...
View ArticleCelebrating worm science
For decades, scientists with big questions about biology have found answers in a tiny worm. That worm — a millimeter-long creature called Caenorhabditis elegans — has helped researchers uncover...
View ArticleProfessor Ioannis Yannas, pioneer of regenerative medicine who invented...
Professor Ioannis V. Yannas SM ’59, a physical chemist and engineer known for the invention of artificial skin for the treatment of severe burns, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty, died on Oct....
View ArticleA better understanding of debilitating head pain
Everyone gets headaches. But not everyone gets cluster headache attacks, a debilitating malady producing acute pain that lasts an hour or two. Cluster headache attacks come in sets — hence the name —...
View ArticleRemembering David Baltimore, influential biologist and founding director of...
The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research fondly remembers its founding director, David Baltimore, a former MIT Institute Professor and Nobel laureate who died Sept. 6 at age 87.With discovery...
View ArticleProfessor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, influential physicist who forged new paths...
MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work confirmed a longstanding prediction about the nature of the universe,...
View ArticleProfessor John Joannopoulos, photonics pioneer and Institute for Soldier...
John “JJ” Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), passed away on Aug. 17. He was 78. Joannopoulos was a...
View ArticleFamous double-slit experiment holds up when stripped to its quantum essentials
MIT physicists have performed an idealized version of one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics. Their findings demonstrate, with atomic-level precision, the dual yet evasive nature of...
View ArticleProfessor Emeritus Daniel Kleppner, highly influential atomic physicist, dies...
Daniel Kleppner, the Lester Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT whose work in experimental atomic physics made an immense mark on the field, died on June 16 at the age of 92, in Palo Alto,...
View ArticleTiny organisms, huge implications for people
Back in 1676, a Dutch cloth merchant with a keen interest in microscopes, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, discovered microbes and began cataloging them. Two hundred years later, a German doctor in current-day...
View ArticleMIT’s McGovern Institute is shaping brain science and improving human lives...
In 2000, Patrick J. McGovern ’59 and Lore Harp McGovern made an extraordinary gift to establish the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, driven by their deep curiosity about the human mind and...
View ArticleBeneath the biotech boom
It’s considered a scientific landmark: A 1975 meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, shaped a new safety regime for recombinant DNA, ensuring that researchers would...
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