from Government Technology Biobot Analytics, a startup spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is collecting data from sewage to monitor opioid use, has raised its first round of seed funding. The company pulled in $2.5 million, with the Chicago venture firm Ekistic Ventures acting as the leader. Also participating ...

from Xconomy by Jeff Engel The Thai chicken bowl from Spyce Food’s new restaurant in downtown Boston wasn’t life-changing, but it’s one of the better meals I’ve had from a “fast casual” restaurant—and certainly the best I’ve had that was prepared mostly by robots. OK, it’s the first meal I’ve ...

from MIT Sloan News by Betsy Verecky In finance or consulting, finding the right expert to weigh in on a problem is sometimes as tough as the problem itself. Just ask Yishi Zuo. While working as a hedge fund analyst, Zuo would ring up subject matter experts to help guide ...

from TechCrunch by Devin Coldewey What if there’s a drug that already exists that could treat a disease with no known therapies, but we just haven’t made the connection? Finding that connection by exhaustively analyzing complex biomechanics within the body — with the help of machine learning, naturally — is the ...

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 ...