Technology News

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently announced that MIT Associate Professor Evelina Fedorenko will receive a 2025 Troland Research Award for her groundbreaking contributions toward understanding the language network in the human brain. The Troland Research Award is given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology….

The MIT Press has announced that Direct to Open (D2O) will open access to over 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons, after reaching its full funding goal for 2025. “It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that…

Steven Strang, a writer and literary scholar who founded MIT’s Writing and Communication Center in 1981 and directed it for 40 years, died with family at his side on Dec. 29, 2024. He was 77. His vision for the center was ambitious. After an MIT working group identified gaps between the students’ technical knowledge and their…

Materials like car tires, human tissues, and spider webs are diverse in composition, but all contain networks of interconnected strands. A long-standing question about the durability of these materials asks: What is the energy required to fracture these diverse networks? A recently published paper by MIT researchers offers new insights. “Our findings reveal a simple,…

Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), and the founder and co-leader of the Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium and the Human Factors Evaluator for Automotive Demand Consortium in the MIT AgeLab, has been appointed to the Task Force on Human Factors in Aviation Safety Aviation Rulemaking Committee (HF Task Force ARC). The…

Three MIT students — Yutao Gong, Brandon Man, and Andrii Zahorodnii — have been awarded 2025 Schwarzman Scholarships and will join the program’s 10th cohort to pursue a master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The MIT students were selected from a pool of over 5,000 applicants. This year’s class of…

Michael “Mike” Walter, MIT Health applications support generalist, passed away on Nov. 2 at age 46 after a battle with cancer.  At home, Walter was a husband and devoted father to his two adolescent sons. But for 22 years, he was everyone’s friend and the smiling face at MIT Health who never failed to solve…

Michael “Mike” Walter, MIT Health applications support generalist, passed away on Nov. 2 at age 46 after a battle with cancer.  At home, Walter was a husband and devoted father to his two adolescent sons. But for 22 years, he was everyone’s friend and the smiling face at MIT Health who never failed to solve…

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem. The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a…

Dry river channels and lake beds on Mars point to the long-ago presence of a liquid on the planet’s surface, and the minerals observed from orbit and from landers seem to many to prove that the liquid was ordinary water.  Not so fast, the authors of a new Perspectives article in Nature Geoscience suggest. Water is…