from The New Yorker by Jay Cheshes Last month, four recent M.I.T. graduates, engineers with a shared passion for robotics, gathered in a lab at a startup incubator near Boston, to show off their pet project. They stood around a hulking console that looked like an old mainframe computer but ...

from The Boston Globe by Kathleen Conti For many millennials, barn weddings are as ubiquitous as avocado toast. The quest to find off-the-beaten-path locations that can be personalized — and won’t break the bank — often brings couples to the doors of rural independent farm owners like Jim and June Wolfe, who ...

from BostInno by Lucia Maffei This weekend, Infinite Cooling, an alum of the MIT “delta v” startup accelerator program, wonnearly $500,000 in cash and prizes at the Houston-based Rice Business Plan Competition, one of the largest student startup competitions in the country. Infinite Cooling was ranked first among the the 42 total competitors. ...

from MIT News by Rob Matheson With novel optoelectronic chips and a new partnership with a top silicon-chip manufacturer, MIT spinout Ayar Labs aims to increase speed and reduce energy consumption in computing, starting with data centers. Backed by years of research at MIT and elsewhere, Ayar has developed chips ...

from Xconomy by Jeff Engel Walmart is reportedly talking with PillPack about acquiring the online pharmacy and medication management company, a deal that would strengthen the retail giant’s healthcare offerings and potentially help it fend off Amazon if the Seattle e-commerce company starts selling prescription drugs. The PillPack acquisition talks ...

from MIT News by Anne Trafton One of the major side effects of chemotherapy is a sharp drop in white blood cells, which leaves patients vulnerable to dangerous infections. MIT researchers have now developed a portable device that could be used to monitor patients’ white blood cell levels at home, without taking ...

from Forbes by Frederick Daso Unfortunately, traffic is a necessary part of modern life in a big city. The transportation-consulting firm INRIX found that worldwide traffic congestion cost $305 billion in 2017 in the U.S. An adtech startup is working on a solution to share traffic data with city officials to help ...

from MIT Sloan News by Edward Mason The pharmaceutical industry’s traditional plodding path for discovering drugs can cost billions of dollars, require more than a dozen years from concept to consumer, and in the end result in a product with a jaw-dropping price tag. Enter twoXAR, a Palo Alto, California, startup ...

from Poets & Quants by Nathan Allen Yishi Zuo has a philosophy about entrepreneurship. “As an investor, the best returns are found in the most inefficient markets,” he says. “And the most inefficient markets of all are in markets where no companies exist yet — where there are opportunities to create ...