Edward S. Boyden, a professor of media arts and sciences, biological engineering, and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine for his role in the development of optogenetics, a technique for controlling brain activity with light. Gero Miesenböck of the Oxford University and Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University were also honored with the prize for their role in developing and refining the technique. The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are given annually for "outstanding contributions and radical advances in a broad range of scientific, technological, and artistic areas." The 400,000-Euro prize in the category of biomedicine will be shared among the three neuroscientists. "If we imagine the brain as a computer, optogenetics is a keyboard that allows us to send extremely precise commands," says Boyden, a faculty member at the MIT Media Lab with a joint appointment at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

A new study from MIT reveals that a brain region dedicated to reading has connections for that skill even before children learn to read. By scanning the brains of children before and after they learned to read, the researchers found that they could predict the precise location where each child's visual word form area (VWFA) would develop, based on the connections of that region to other parts of the brain. Neuroscientists have long wondered why the brain has a region exclusively dedicated to reading -- a skill that is unique to humans and only developed about 5,400 years ago, which is not enough time for evolution to have reshaped the brain for that specific task. The new study suggests that the VWFA, located in an area that receives visual input, has pre-existing connections to brain regions associated with language processing, making it ideally suited to become devoted to reading. "Long-range connections that allow this region to talk to other areas of the brain seem to drive function," says Zeynep Saygin, a postdoc at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

In 2008, Krishna Gupta '09 launched Romulus Capital, a venture capital seed firm, out of his MIT dorm room, scraping together $850,000 to invest in tech startups launched by his classmates. Today, Romulus controls $150 million in funds and other assets, having just raised a new fund of $75 million in June. Now Romulus plans to fund 20 new startups, adding to its existing portfolio of 30 startups, many of which are MIT spinouts. That's not bad for someone completely unfamiliar with the venture capital industry when he launched Romulus as an MIT junior studying materials science and management. "I knew nothing about venture capital, nothing of investing," Gupta says.

The School of Science announced that six of its faculty members have been appointed to named professorships this fall semester. Gloria Choi studies how the brain learns to recognize olfactory stimuli and associate them with appropriate behavioral responses. Using mouse models, Choi works to anatomically and functionally map the circuitry that connects sensory representations to specific behavioral outcomes, and also investigates how learning transforms this circuitry and how the brain maintains behavioral plasticity so that responses to stimuli are context-dependent. Choi joined the MIT faculty in 2013 as an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a McGovern Investigator. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and her PhD from Caltech, where she studied with David Anderson.

Buildings are the largest energy consumers worldwide, so it seems the sector is ripe for energy investment and savings potential. In order to reduce buildings' energy impact, strategies have been developed to help owners and tenants use technology more efficiently. Yet these strategies vary from residential or commercial buildings -- which combined make up more than 30 percent of final energy consumption across European Union member states. This is the scope for Henrique Pombeiro's PhD thesis for the MIT Portugal Sustainable Energy Systems program. For this research, Pombeiro has been awarded a Fulbright Research Grant that will allow him to continue his studies at MIT on how to improve energy efficiency in buildings.

When the eyes are open, visual information flows from the retina through the optic nerve and into the brain, which assembles this raw information into objects and scenes. Scientists have previously hypothesized that objects are distinguished in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex, which is near the end of this flow of information, also called the ventral stream. A new study from MIT neuroscientists offers evidence that this is indeed the case. Using data from both humans and nonhuman primates, the researchers found that neuron firing patterns in the IT cortex correlate strongly with success in object-recognition tasks. "While we knew from prior work that neuronal population activity in inferior temporal cortex was likely to underlie visual object recognition, we did not have a predictive map that could accurately link that neural activity to object perception and behavior. The results from this study demonstrate that a particular map from particular aspects of IT population activity to behavior is highly accurate over all types of objects that were tested," says James DiCarlo, head of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and senior author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.

D. Fox Harrell, associate professor of digital media with appointments in the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing program and in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has recently been awarded several grants to advance his research at the intersection of the social sciences and digital technology. These grants, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the MIT CSAIL Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) Alliance, and the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST), together amount to $1.35 million in support for Harrell's groundbreaking interdisciplinary research. Harrell's new set of complementary initiatives builds upon his NSF CAREER Grant research project, "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation," to delve more deeply into the dynamic relationship between virtual avatars and personal identities. He was able to push this work in innovative new directions while spending the 2014-15 year as a fellow at Stanford University in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (with the support of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication). "For five years I have been researching this intersection between human experiences and our identities as implemented across digital technologies such as video games and social media," Harrell says.

Rarely does a day go by without mention of a new kind of robot popping up in the science headlines. But if the robot revolution really does come to pass, the machines aren't likely to swoop down on us in some sudden and terrifying Instead, they'll rise up calmly from the weird places they've been secretly infiltrating. Here we take a look at some of the unexpected places where robots have already staked out positions. The Cooki prototype displayed at this year's Consumer Electronics Show is able to prepare an entire meal from ingredients loaded into side-mounted trays. Most public and university libraries now have self-checkout kiosks and other automated systems for checking out books.

Rarely does a day go by without mention of a new kind of robot popping up in the science headlines. But if the robot revolution really does come to pass, the machines aren't likely to swoop down on us in some sudden and terrifying Instead, they'll rise up calmly from the weird places they've been secretly infiltrating. Here we take a look at some of the unexpected places where robots have already staked out positions. The Cooki prototype displayed at this year's Consumer Electronics Show is able to prepare an entire meal from ingredients loaded into side-mounted trays. Most public and university libraries now have self-checkout kiosks and other automated systems for checking out books.

Read about the world's tallest building, the longest bicycle, the most modern tractor and a discovered time capsule that cannot be opened until the year 2957. Shoe manufacturer New Balance is stepping onto the 3-D printing platform with a new running shoe that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole that can be customized to each runner. New Balance is making the shoe available for the first time in Boston in April, 2016 -- timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. It's difficult to believe that with all of the unrest in Iraq, a company such as AMBS Architects would propose building a skyscraper to rival Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 830-meters high. But here it is: the 1,152-meter-tall Bride's tower. The building is being suggested for Basra, located in the south of Iraq -- a rapidly growing center for business.