Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 and Gary Ruvkun share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The pair, who worked together as postdocs at MIT, were honored for their discovery of microRNA, a class of molecules critical for gene regulation.

Julian Shun leverages parallel computing to build algorithms for analyzing networks with billions or even trillions of data points. “The goal of parallel computing is to speed things up in real life, so if your algorithms aren’t fast in practice, then they aren’t that useful,” he says.

Via @mitalumni on Instagram: “More scenes from the MIT Alumni Leadership Conference.”

Built by MIT researchers, the Plasma Science Experiment aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft took measurements for the last 47 years and 15 billion miles, before shutting down on Sept. 26. “It is very sad to lose this instrument and data,” John Richardson says.

CSAIL researchers compiled and labeled a huge collection of “pareidolic” images, in which objects appear to have faces. The team trained AI models to see faces in these pictures, shedding light on how humans learned to recognize faces within their surroundings.

Via @MITMuseum on Facebook: “Thank you to everyone who came out today to celebrate at the Cambridge Science Festival Science Carnival with us! We had the best time celebrating all week long, and we're already counting down the days until next year.”