The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) was founded in 1950 in response to “a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war,” as outlined in the 1949 Lewis Committee Report.  The report’s findings emphasized MIT’s role and responsibility in the new nuclear age, which called for doubling down on genuine “integration” of scientific and technical topics with humanistic scholarship and teaching. Only that way, the committee wrote, could MIT tackle “the most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation.” As SHASS marks its 75th anniversary, Dean Agustín Rayo answers questions about why the need […]

The electricity to an island goes out. To find the break in the underwater power cable, a ship pulls up the entire line or deploys remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to traverse the line. But what if an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) could map the line and pinpoint the location of the fault for a diver to fix? Such underwater human-robot teaming is the focus of an MIT Lincoln Laboratory project funded through an internally administered R&D portfolio on autonomous systems and carried out by the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. The project seeks to leverage the respective strengths of humans […]

Each year we compile our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, featuring our educated predictions for which technologies will have the biggest impact on how we live and work. This year, however, we had a dilemma. While our final picks encompass all our core coverage areas (energy, AI, and biotech, plus a few more), our 2026 list was harder to wrangle than normal. Why? We had so many worthy AI candidates we couldn’t fit them all in! (The ones that made it were AI companions, generative coding, and hyperscale data centers.) Many great ideas fell by the wayside to keep the list […]