"Back then, grandmothers didn’t e-mail, and Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones didn’t exist. Teens argued with their parents about watching too much TV, not whether they could text all night long. Politicians lost their jobs for real-life sex scandals, not virtual ones."
"You will learn a lot from 'For the Love of Physics': How to see rainbows in the shower and fogbows in the fog (car headlights; pull over); how to give yourself a halo; how to make a battery with a potato, a penny, a nail and a couple of wires."
"We have all encountered the problem. You visit a site and suddenly a serious and convincing looking pop-up appears on your screen to tell you that your system has a virus on it. Most people just ignore them, but a few users are so scared that they pay."
"As the country attempts to lift its population by a fifth over the next two decades, from 5.08 million to 6 million, it is linking with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to devise ways to manage its expansion — knowledge it plans to export to other cities."
"While computers, phones, and even watches have been transformed at breathtaking speed, improvements to medical devices have arrived slowly and incrementally. Now, a new center at MIT wants to bring the breakneck pace of consumer tech development to such devices, and cement the Boston region’s role in that transformation."
"Basically, in addition to building exoskeletons that allow people to carry 100-pound loads for many miles and jump three stories, Herr is working on a spider suit that uses latex connections at the joints of a jacket to increase your pull-up power."
"The value of a college degree has been taking it on the chin a lot lately, with critics suggesting that it’s not necessarily the slam-dunk investment that we’ve come to take as a national article of faith."
"Researchers at MIT have re-created Italian ballet star Roberto Bolle in digital form to study the capabilities of motion technology. The scientists say that in the future, motion sensors and scanners will be able to find potential health problems before they become apparent to the naked eye."
"Once dubbed 'Nowhere Square,' Kendall Square has become one of the most sought-after high-tech centers on the planet, a global mecca for life science and information technology, research and commerce."