February 11, 2025

AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone

We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, and…

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“I wanted to work on something that didn’t exist”

April 23, 2024
In 2017 Polina Anikeeva, PhD ’09, was invited to a conference in the Netherlands to give a talk about magnetic technologies that she and her team had developed at MIT and how they might be used for deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease. After sitting through a long day of lectures, she was struck…

A walking antidote to political cynicism

April 23, 2024
Burhan Azeem ’19 had never been to a city council meeting before he showed up to give a public comment on an affordable-­housing bill his senior year. Walking around Cambridge, he saw a “young, dynamic, racially diverse city,” but when he stepped inside City Hall, most of the others who had arrived to present comments…

Raman to go

April 23, 2024
For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the…

Taking on climate change, Rad Lab style

April 23, 2024
When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT’s Climate Project. Now that it’s underway, I’d like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise.  In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president’s job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously…

I went to COP28. Now the real work begins.

April 23, 2024
As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I’ve experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation’s struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can’t always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation,…

Tesla profits drop 55%, company says EV sales ‘under pressure’ from hybrids

April 23, 2024

Tesla profits fell 55% to $1.13 billion in the first quarter from the same year-ago period as a protracted EV price-cutting strategy continued to cut into the automaker’s bottom line. The results, posted after markets closed Tuesday, sent shares up 7% immediately following the release. Tesla reported revenue of $21.3 billion in the first quarter, […]

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