December 18, 2024

The Download: AI tracking birds, and a pig kidney transplant

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their…

From the editor

August 28, 2024
Welcome to our 125th anniversary issue! With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next…

A hundred years of curiosity

August 27, 2024
Any facet of Josef Eisinger’s remarkably wide-ranging century of life would be enough to shape the entire identity of another person. If you were to ask how his experience has intersected with history, for example, he might tell you about escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror in his native Austria by fleeing to Britain by…

This is MIT and yes, we have bananas

August 27, 2024
Attending lectures and movies in 26-100 has been an integral part of the MIT experience for generations of students, but since 2018 they have also embraced what’s become another quintessential Institute experience just across the hall: picking up a banana in 26-110, officially the Karl Taylor Compton Room but now better known as the MIT…

In molecules, one chemist sees art

August 27, 2024
One Tuesday morning this past January, So Young Lee walked into a lab on the fourth floor of Building 18 and discovered that her equipment had exploded. It was a minor explosion—thankfully, no one was hurt—but the chemical she had painstakingly made had splattered all over the walls, the ceiling, and the broken shards of…

Transformative spaces

August 27, 2024
MIT people often find their greatest moments of inspiration in each other’s company. And two big, beautiful additions to West Campus now underway will open up new spaces for connection, collaboration, rigorous exploration, and joyful play.  Stretching along Mass. Ave. and Vassar Street, the familiar brick face of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse may evoke…

Not just another band from Boston

August 27, 2024
In 1976, Tom Scholz ’69, SM ’70, was a 29-year-old product design engineer working at Polaroid on audio electronics and tape-recording technology, with 11 patents under his belt. But few colleagues knew what Scholz did after hours, why he often came in late, or why he was, in his own words, “a horrible employee.”  For…