Prepping a robot for its journey to Mars

“In my lab, we bridge a gap,” says Hadley Sikes. “We try to figure out how to take established science and implement it in clinical practice in a reliable, easy and cost-effective way.”.

On an afternoon in early April, Tommi Jaakkola is pacing at the front of the vast auditorium that is 26-100. The chalkboards behind him are covered with equations. Jaakkola looks relaxed in a short-sleeved black shirt and jeans, and gestures to the board. “What is the answer here?” he asks the 500 MIT students before him. “If you answer, you get a chocolate. If nobody answers, I get one — because I knew the answer and you didn’t.” The room erupts in laugher.

When Jeffrey Grossman teaches solid-state chemistry, he keeps it moving. His shoes click across the front of the lecture hall floor with the cadence and energy of a tap dance. He spins toward the chalkboard and rapidly jots down equations. He pauses to hold up a large 3-D model of the atoms in a crystal structure, passes it into the sea of 400 students in the room, then resumes his lecture — without once breaking his rhythm.

On a foggy night in San Francisco, a Bat-Signal appears in the sky. It flickers above a house on the highest hilltop in the city, where five MIT students live in what other people call a “hacker house.” It’s a label the students avoid. Inside, the lights are on at all hours. It has been that way since the group arrived in June, set down their things, claimed spots on the furniture, and opened their laptops. They've barely looked up since, except to blow off steam, when they send up Bat-Signals, invent gadgets, or take their waterproof air mattresses for a row.