From: MIT World on Fri, Sep 11 2009 12:53 PM

As Ann Graybiel puts it, “basal ganglia were dark basement structures” until Okihide Hikosaka began his classic 1980s research demonstrating how these neuronal clusters influenced eye movements. Hikosaka has deepened and broadened his work in this once neglected area of the brain, and brings a M...

From: MIT World on Tue, Sep 08 2009 2:16 PM

As Ann Graybiel puts it, “basal ganglia were dark basement structures” until Okihide Hikosaka began his classic 1980s research demonstrating how these neuronal clusters influenced eye movements. Hikosaka has deepened and broadened his work in this once neglected area of the brain, and brings a M...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 9:00 AM

Susan Hockfield states that science journalism “is now, and in the decades ahead, absolutely indispensable.” As we confront global warming and health pandemics, science reporting must be sustained, Hockfield says, “in its rightful place, at the top of the profession and in the thick of the natio...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 9:00 AM

John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer, “fell in love with archaeology” during college. His senior thesis at Cornell involved a 600-year-old Incan suspension bridge made entirely out of grass. Ochsendorf learned that this apparently primitive structure owed its astonishing longevity to regular r...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 9:00 AM

According to Tonio Buonassisi, we’re “on the cusp” of achieving a competitive technology for capturing the limitless energy of the sun. Buonassisi, in conversation with an MIT Museum audience, describes how, with the work of MIT and other researchers, photovoltaics may finally be coming into its...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 9:00 AM

In their symposium introduction, Susan Hockfield and Mriganka Sur place MIT at the forefront of a revolution in neuroscience. Hockfield, a neuroscientist by training, recaps the evolution of the discipline at MIT, from its 1964 start in the Department of Psychology to the more recent establishme...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 9:00 AM

Linda Mason was originally going to make a case study of Bright Horizons, her $1.3 billion, early childhood care business, but reconsidered in light of the current economic crisis — to the benefit of her audience. Instead, she takes up her own story as a recession-era entrepreneur who buil...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

At the end of the three-day Media in Transition conference, panelists swap impressions and reactions, offering some notional themes for future symposia. Mary Bryson frames her comments as “a mash-up aggregation.” The conference’s “massive disagreements and sometimes awkward silences and gaps” we...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

Researchers are well along in designing a highly efficient, inexpensive solar cell, but the big barrier to the dissemination of solar power in society remains the problem of installation, says Marc Baldo. As an engineer, Baldo expresses confidence that “we’re going to mow down” the problem of pr...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

Cooperation may be making us “a little bit too nice” when it comes to innovation, suggests Fiona Murray. She believes there’s nothing like competition for injecting energy into the process of solving key innovation problems, whether in business or society. Murray is convinced competition make ve...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

Contrary to popular thinking, China owes its astonishing economic expansion not to far-sighted government policy but to hundreds of millions of entrepreneurial peasants. Yasheng Huang’s research reveals not only how small-scale rural businesses created China’s miracle but how that nation’s recov...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

It’s a good thing for a world increasingly beset by mammoth challenges that universities are responding with new engineering systems programs. These initiatives, as Daniel Roos attests, are swiftly proliferating in the U.S. and abroad to equip students to address such complex issues as health ca...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

These panelists use the lens of systems engineering to focus sharply on some signature global challenges in finance, healthcare, energy and IT. The system failure that undid the small but influential financial services industry was a few decades in the making, says John Reed. In the ‘80...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 29 2009 8:59 AM

The field of systems engineering has only recently emerged, and as this symposium demonstrates, defies precise definition. But MIT has taken this evolving area to heart, nurturing a new division and encouraging a raft of ventures that in their execution, may help shape the field for the next cen...

From: MIT World on Mon, Aug 17 2009 5:45 PM

The field of systems engineering has only recently emerged, and as this symposium demonstrates, defies precise definition. But MIT has taken this evolving area to heart, nurturing a new division and encouraging a raft of ventures that in their execution, may help shape the field for the next cen...

From: MIT World on Tue, Aug 11 2009 1:26 PM

These panelists use the lens of systems engineering to focus sharply on some signature global challenges in finance, healthcare, energy and IT. The system failure that undid the small but influential financial services industry was a few decades in the making, says John Reed. In the ‘80...

From: MIT World on Thu, Aug 06 2009 3:47 PM

It’s a good thing for a world increasingly beset by mammoth challenges that universities are responding with new engineering systems programs. These initiatives, as Daniel Roos attests, are swiftly proliferating in the U.S. and abroad to equip students to address such complex issues as health ca...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 01 2009 6:21 PM

Sometime around 100 million years ago, when the continents of Africa and South America were still in touch, a female primate — one of our ancestors -- was born with the capacity to see in vivid color. Jeremy Nathans describes the fortuitous genetic event that gave rise to this evolutionary...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 01 2009 6:21 PM

Just as digital technology has expanded the means of producing media, so has it increased the geographic range new media may travel. Locally generated content can zip around the world in a heartbeat. But, says moderator Henry Jenkins, “as a society we’re in a contradictory state in terms of havi...

From: MIT World on Sat, Aug 01 2009 6:21 PM

Wielding numerous analogies for his audience of MIT students, Anant Agarwal makes the case that the next generation of computers, not to mention much of the technology in everyday life, will be built with smaller, simpler parts “combined in a clever way.” Agarwal starts with Puerto Rico’s enorm...