Jack Carson, a second-year undergraduate at MIT majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, has been named a 2026 Udall Scholar, one of up to 65 undergraduates nationally to receive the prestigious $7,500 award. The Udall Scholarship honors students who have demonstrated a commitment to the environment, Indigenous health care, or tribal public policy. Carson is only the third MIT student to win this award, and the first to win for tribal policy. Carson, a member of the Cherokee Nation and resident of Oklahoma, exemplifies the multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving that the Udall Scholarship seeks to honor. His work spans artificial intelligence, biomedical research, Indigenous community development, and ethics. "Jack is the type of leader the Udall Foundation exists to support," says Kim Benard, associate dean for distinguished fellowships. "He's not only conducting cutting-edge research, but he's actively creating opportunities for Indigenous students to enter tech fields."...

Lidar systems use pulses of infrared light to measure distance and map a 3D scene with high resolution, allowing autonomous vehicles to rapidly react to obstacles that appear in their path. But traditional lidar sensors are expensive, bulky systems with many moving parts that degrade over time, limiting how the sensors can be deployed. A new study from MIT researchers could help to enable next-generation lidar sensors that are compact, durable, and have no moving parts. The key advance is a novel design for a silicon-photonics chip, which is a semiconductor device that manipulates light rather than electricity. Typically, such silicon-photonics chip-based systems have a restricted field of view, so a silicon-photonics-based lidar would not be able to scan angles in the periphery. Existing workarounds to this problem increase noise and hamper precision. To avoid these drawbacks, the MIT researchers designed and demonstrated an array of integrated antennas that minimizes unwanted crosstalk between the antennas. Their innovation allows a lidar chip to scan a wider field of view while maintaining low-noise operation compared to other silicon-photonics-based approaches....

A human had eyes, a browser, a mouse, a password manager, a credit card, an email address, a tolerance for modal dialogs, and a finite amount of patience. The entire SaaS and consumer internet stack grew around this shape of user. Search engines ranked pages for humans. E-commerce sites optimized funnels for humans. CRMs tracked human sales reps selling to human buyers. Identity systems authenticated humans. Analytics systems measured human clicks, human sessions, human conversions....

Hantavirus typically spreads through the air, in particles from rodent urine, droppings or saliva. But some strains can occasionally spread between people who are in close contact. One of these strains, called Andes virus, is responsible for an ongoing outbreak in Argentina, and World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has confirmed that the passengers were infected with this strain, for which there are no specific treatments or vaccines. Scientists suspect that some of the travellers might have been infected in Argentina before boarding the cruise. Although hantavirus infections are rare, some strains have a fatality rate of up to 50%. For more than three decades, Jay Hooper, a virologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland, has been working to develop a vaccine against several strains of hantavirus that can infect people, including the Andes virus. Some people have suggested, and I have said it before, that climate change could alter rodent populations and increase the number of people living in or entering areas where these rodents are present. That might increase case numbers....