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Most Innovative Square Mile on The Planet

If your travels take you to Boston, do take the T – the first subway system in the United States, built in 1897 – to get around town. Get down at the Kendall/MIT station on the Red Line – yes, this is the stop for...

Queen of Carbon

Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, of Lincoln Laboratory, who has achieved prominence as a solid-state physicist has been appointed Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read a small news item in the Boston Globe on 8 October, 1967. The appointment was...

The Atlas of Perfumes

The gods created scents; humans make perfumes. Naked and frail, they survive only by artifice (trickery). In the late 1960s, Jean-Claude Ellena, an apprentice perfumer in France, tried to reproduce Eau Sauvage, a cologne from the fashion house of Christian Dior. Ellena made good headway...

Drunk!

A good book can take you to some unexpected places. The whiskey room at a giant tech company furnished with colorful beanbags and foosball tables is one. When coders at Google hit a creative wall, they can apparently, pop into this room on campus for...

A Quantum Life

They called him “The Professor” because by the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test. But, by the time he was in his teens, the...

The New Breed

BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a robot called Marty patrols looking for spills, summoning employees loudly...