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....

When the curtain of New York's Metropolitan Opera House rose for the closing matinee of Porgy and Bess in January, the boos that typically accompany the entrance of the show's villains were a mere murmur. The nearly 4,000 people who packed the space to capacity'175 of them standing-room ticket holders who remained on their feet for the opera's three-and-a-half-hour run time'had come to cheer. Thirty-one years before, Denyce Graves had made her Met debut in the title role of Georges Bizet's Carmen. The mezzo-soprano had been a revelation, her full, rich voice and lusty physicality defining the role for a generation. Graves was a diva in the original, operatic sense: a world-renowned performer who made journalists wilt, and whose name alone was enough to draw crowds. But here she was, playing a supporting character in Porgy and Bess. Graves was singing the part of Maria, the matriarch of the 1920s working-class Black community of Catfish Row, the Lowcountry settlement where the show takes place. It was set to be her final performance ever, a return to the opera that had launched her professional career in 1985....