Oliver Smoot, the man who became a unit of measurement, was back in town today to serve as grand marshal of the 100th anniversary of MIT's moving day - the celebration of the school's moving from the Back Bay to Cambridge.
RoadTrip New England snapped him as he rode past the markers bearing his name on the bridge.
Curt Nickish caught him being measured to make sure he still had an ear (the bridge being, of course, 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus an ear): Read more.
WBUR talks with Oliver Smoot, who gave us the measurement, back in town for the centennial celebration of MIT's move across the river.
— Paula Tennyson (@PaulaTennyson) May 7, 2016
Paula Tennyson captured some of the lights beamed upward by MIT tonight, part of its Moving Day festivities.
How else to explain the size of the lawn chair in front of the fraternity's house on Beacon Street in the Back Bay?
The Guardian reports some AI researchers at MIT have developed a Twitterbot that spits out things Donald Trump might one day say, using a "recurrent neural network" fed transcripts of his speeches and debate statements.
The New York Times reports a team of scientists, including Rainer Weiss of MIT have confirmed the presence of gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted in 1915, but which have never before been detected.
Two detectors, each 2.5 miles long and 1,900 miles apart, detected waves from the collision of two black holes about 1.2 billion years ago, almost as soon as they were turned on for testing, the Times reports.
MIT says Toshiba owes it at least that much in royalties for the right to make digital TVs, video players and home-theater systems based on patents it holds.
In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, MIT says that Toshiba stopped making agreed upon royalty payments in 2011 for patented work by MIT researchers on several key digital-TV standards, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. Read more.
The Tech reports on efforts to rename the title of people who oversee student residences at MIT:
After speaking with students, Essigmann found that "Head of House" was a popular choice, often due to “affection for Harry Potter and Hogwarts." ...
The survey included "House Parent" (which some students considered infantilizing) and "House Maven" (which some students considered silly and subtly feminine). "Dumbledore" stood out as a popular write-in among responses ..."
The Harvard Gazette reports researchers at Harvard, MIT and the Joslin Diabetes Center have successfully tested an implantable bundle containing human pancreas cells in mice and primates with type 1 diabetes.
Key to the research is alginate, a substance derived from seaweed that blocks the immune system from attacking the container for the new cells as "foreign" without the need for expensive and risky immune suppressing drugs. Read more.
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory reports Minsky, 88, died Sunday
Minsky viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated in a computer - which would teach us, in turn, to better understand the human brain and higher-level mental functions: How might we endow machines with common sense - the knowledge humans acquire every day through experience? How, for example, do we teach a sophisticated computer that to drag an object on a string, you need to pull, not push - a concept easily mastered by a two-year-old child?
OK, to be accurate: 900,000 photos of the Boston skyline, and another 150,000 of the Cambridge skyline, all taken from the same spot in Cambridge over a five-year period.
Adrian Dalca took all those photos from a window in an MIT (of course!) residential building. Naturally, he's now trying to figure out what to do with them all: Read more.
The Globe reports how an MIT student (of course) built a glowing MBTA map for his wall that shows the location of subway trains in real time.
Among the many scientists and inventors honored along the Infinite Corridor at MIT is Kodak founder and MIT benefactor George Eastman. Is rubbing his nose supposed to bring good luck?
Scene in Back Bay. Photo by Paula Tennyson.
Cambridge Police report somebody was shot as the Caribbean parade wound down in Kendall Square this afternoon.
The victim, a 25-year-old woman from Roxbury, was shot in the leg but is expected to survive, police say. Read more.
A bit late with this, but ... Cambridge Day reports MIT is kicking out everybody who stores stuff at Metropolitan Moving & Storage so it can turn the building into some sort of studenty thing.
The Boston Business Journal reports on the sensor, intended to be implanted during a biopsy. A key issue: How to get power to the thing. Magnets to the rescue.
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