Tracking counterfeit seeds + our transcendent brains + QS subject rankings

Alan Lightman’s new book asks how a sense of transcendence can exist in brains made of atoms, molecules, and neurons.

New LiGO technique accelerates training of large machine-learning models, reducing the monetary and environmental cost of developing AI applications.

The Institute also ranks second in five subject areas.

This year’s Turing Award has been awarded to Bob Metcalfe ’69, a CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, for his work inventing Ethernet, a computer networking technology that for decades “has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe.” Marc Weber, curator and director of the internet history program at the Computer History Museum, noted that “almost everything you do online goes through Ethernet at some stage.”