Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have issued a list of 9 tips for better tweeting based on a study of Twitter usefulness (see "Most tweets are useless, Twitter users say").

Twitter has been celebrated for its ubiquity and impact on world events from natural disaster recovery to political uprisings. But researchers from a group of big time universities have found that useful tweets are few and far between.

MIT has expanded the footprint of its Media Lab with a new US$90 million, 163,000-square-foot modern building.

Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Researchers at Stanford University have used nanotechnology to create lightweight and even bendable batteries out of paper.

October 2009 marked an important milestone in the history of computing. It was exactly 40 years since the first Multics computer system was used for information management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this edition of Blast from the Past we talk to Fernando Corbato on the early days of Multics, why it was so influential, open source and software development practices, and how cloud computing is a modern incarnation of Multics’ time-sharing philosophy.