SHASS News

On a sunny, warm Sunday MIT students, staff, and faculty spread out across the fields of Hannan Healthy Foods in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Some of these volunteers pluck tomatoes from their vines in a patch a few hundred feet from the cars whizzing by on Route 117. Others squat in the shade cast by the greenhouse to […]

The gathering featured presentations from MIT faculty and researchers on a variety of projects.

Humans know they exist, but how does “knowing” work? Despite all that’s been learned about brain function and the bodily processes it governs, we still don’t understand where the subjective experiences associated with brain functions originate.  A new interdisciplinary project seeks to find answers to these kinds of big questions around consciousness, a fundamental yet elusive […]

MIT and GE Vernova launched the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance on Sept. 15, a collaboration to advance research and education focused on accelerating the global energy transition. Through the alliance — an industry-academia initiative conceived by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik — GE Vernova has committed $50 million […]

Around 5,000 years ago, people living in what is now Iran began extracting copper from rock by processing ore, an activity known as smelting. This monumental shift gave them a powerful new technology and may have marked the birth of metallurgy. Soon after, people in different parts of the world were using copper and bronzes (alloys […]