The MIT women’s swimming and diving team won the program’s first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center […]
Bar graphs and other charts provide a simple way to communicate data, but are, by definition, difficult to translate for readers who are blind or low-vision. Designers have developed methods for converting these visuals into “tactile charts,” but guidelines for doing so are extensive (for example, the Braille Authority of North America’s 2022 guidebook is […]
The MIT campus came alive with artistic energy on March 13 as Artfinity — the Institute’s new festival celebrating creativity and community — took over multiple venues with interactive experiences, exhibitions, and performances. Artfinity participants created their own paths through interconnected artistic encounters across campus, exploring everything from augmented reality (AR) experiences in the Infinite Corridor […]
David Schmittlein, an MIT professor of marketing and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s longest-serving dean and a visionary and transformational leader, died March 13, following a long illness. He was 69. Schmittlein, the John C Head III Dean from 2007 to 2024, guided MIT Sloan through a financial crisis, a global pandemic, and numerous […]
Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson […]
It’s difficult to build devices that replicate the fluid, precise motion of humans, but that might change if we could pull a few (literal) strings. At least, that’s the idea behind “cable-driven” mechanisms in which running a string through an object generates streamlined movement across an object’s different parts. Take a robotic finger, for example: […]
Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process. One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics […]
Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus, has been named a winner of the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations,” as described in the BBVA Foundation’s award […]
In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for […]
Professors Emery Brown and Hamsa Balakrishnan work in vastly different fields, but are united by their deep commitment to mentoring students. While each has contributed to major advancements in their respective areas — statistical neuroscience for Brown, and large-scale transportation systems for Balakrishnan — their students might argue that their greatest impact comes from the […]
