GLOW - Neon Signs in Massachusetts, 1925-70 is an exhibition of historic neon signs drawn from the collection of Dave and Lynn Waller and displayed along the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston. In a landscape dominated by the automobile, highways and corporate architecture, handmade neon signs became distinctive landmarks. Neon may not have been an art form, but it was — and still is — a form of creative expression. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, neon sign-making requires an unusual fusion of craftsmanship, scientific expertise, and graphic design. Viewed together, the signs are part of Massachusetts' graphic and creative history and a legacy of the Massachusetts' history of entrepreneurship.In placing these signs together, the exhibit invites you to consider new ways of interpreting these signs; and contemporary ways of thinking about how neon light can work as a catalyst for engaging with and in public space. By placing these signs in close proximity with each other, a new geography of light was created, inviting you to consider how the presence or absence of light can define a space, how particular kinds of light can encourage us to come together, how light can create open, inclusive spaces for dialogue about technology, creativity, and the shared heritage of our built environment.

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Central Square is a neighborhood in flux. Once a bustling commercial district and now a vibrant culture district, gentrification is putting the neighborhood's own residents at risk. The Central Square mural campaign pays homage to the past, present, and future of the neighborhood, a place where where life science, arts, culture and community connect. The murals — by artists Marka27, Problak, Caleb Neelon, Silvia Lopez-Chavez, Vise & Julz, Imagine, Percy Fortini-Wright, Lena McCarthy, and Kenji Nakayama — celebrate the local creative economy, equity, inclusion, and social and environmental justice, and spread this message throughout the area with features on iconic and easily-spotted buildings, including the Gas and Light building, the Green Street Garage, the old Blockbuster Video Sign, and a wall overlooking Lafayette Square, to name a few.

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Typically someone would have to go to a gallery or museum to get their hands on a limited-edition piece of artwork. Art belongs in the hands of the people, so why not turn newspaper dispensers into mini art galleries? In October 2018, Isenberg Projects installed four repurposed newspaper bins along Western Avenue in Allston and launched Volume 1 of a newsprint program called Art in Print, as part of the Zone 3 initiative. Art in Print reimagines how public art is presented, and makes buying art more accessible to the general public. Ten local artists were commissioned to create newsprint posters, available for purchase for 25 cents each.

Each artist ran with the concept and created a unique artwork. The flexibility of newsprint allowed organizers to work with many different mediums, including painting, photography, digital art, and collage. Only fifty five copies of each print were created, so once they're gone, they're gone. The first batch flew off the shelves, and, in January 2019, Volume 2 was released with works from a new cohort of local artists.

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Spider's Canvas/Arachnodrone is a convergence of conversations, disciplines, practices, and species both biological and academic. A team of artists and MIT researchers created an interactive, immersive performance piece based on a 3D-scan of the web of a South American Cyrtophora citricola spider. The model became a game, which is played, much like a 2300-string Aeolian Harp, with string lengths determining pitch, and with proximity and sympathetic vibration determining resonance. The web was then sonified, and a visual representation of the performance was created, overlaying projections of the web model with photos of local, Bostonian spiders' webs. The piece was premiered at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, performed at MIT's W97, and is currently being installed as the first art installation in MIT's new Nano building.

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Over the past year, photographer Erik Jacobs projected giant images of Bostonians around the city; the faces of athletes, musicians, researchers, politicians, and more have adorned the side of Longfellow Bridge, trees in the Boston Common, and the facade of City Hall during HUBweek 2018. What do all of these people have in common? They’re all immigrants. With this project, Jacobs aimed to show how important immigrants are to the Boston community, and to spread messages of tolerance and inclusivity throughout the city — all while creating a one-of-a-kind art experience.

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Jagged Little Pill is an exhilarating new musical inspired by the themes and raw emotions laid bare in Alanis Morissette's seminal album of the same name. Followed by a record-breaking, sold-out world premiere at the American Repertory Theater, the production will debut on Broadway this fall. Called "Urgent, wildly entertaining, and wickedly funny in all the right places" by The Boston Globe, this original story is ignited by Morissette's groundbreaking music – including such hits as "You Oughta Know," "Head Over Feet," "Hand In My Pocket," and "Ironic" – as well as songs newly written for the stage. Hailed by The New York Times as "a big-hearted musical that breaks the mold," Jagged Little Pill inspires audiences to look within, speak out, and connect.

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Local Fabric is a digital artwork that weaves crowd-sourced photography of Boston's twenty-two neighborhoods into a vibrant tapestry of image and color. Custom software weaves the images of local photographers into an ever-changing pattern of life in Boston. The project was commissioned by Boston Properties as an iconic centerpiece for their lobby at 100 Federal Street. The artwork breathes new life and color into the familiar sites of Boston, and invites people to explore corners of the city they've never seen before. It adds a vibrant moment of color and life to the daily commute of thousands of Boston residents.

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Long-term implantation of biomedical electronics into the human body enables advanced diagnostic and therapeutic functionalities. However, most long-term resident electronics devices require invasive procedures for implantation as well as a specialized receiver for communication. With this project, a team from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and MIT present a gastric resident electronic (GRE) system that leverages the gastric environment to enable residence of an orally delivered platform of such devices within the human body. The GRE is capable of directly interfacing with portable consumer personal electronics through Bluetooth, a widely adopted wireless protocol. In contrast to the passive day-long gastric residence achieved with prior ingestible electronics, advancement in multi-material prototyping enables the GRE to reside in the hostile gastric environment for a maximum of 36 days and maintain about 15 days of wireless electronics communications as evidenced by our studies in a porcine model. Indeed, the synergistic integration of reconfigurable gastric-residence structure, drug release modules and wireless electronics could ultimately enable the next-generation remote diagnostic and automated therapeutic strategies.

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In the wake of the completion of the human genome project, technological advances in medical genome sequencing have revolutionized the diagnosis of rare genetic disorders, which affect over 20 million individuals in the U.S. alone. Rare genetic diseases disproportionately affect children, and because we don't have treatments for the vast majority of them, three in ten afflicted kids won't live to see their fifth birthday. Our team at Boston Children's Hospital is developing a pathway for offering tailor-made treatments — individualized medicines -— to help these most vulnerable patients.

Our first case, Mila, is an eight-year old girl diagnosed with Batten disease — an ultra-rare childhood disorder that causes brain degeneration, is rapidly progressive, and ultimately fatal. Using a promising type of "programmable medicine" called antisense oligonucleotides, our team designed and manufactured a brand-new drug, customized to her unique genetic mutation, tested it in her own cells, and begin treating her, all within one year. A world's first for truly personalized medicine, we are now working to extend this pathway to offer hope to many other children who, like Mila, suffer from rare, orphan diseases.

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Ginkgo Bioworks launched Motif Ingredients in February 2019 with a $90M Series A. Motif makes ingredients for the next generation of plant-based and healthy foods. We use fermentation to brew vital proteins and nutrients that power your body and please your palate. We collaborate with chefs, health experts, and food visionaries to create new building blocks for tomorrow's food revolution. Motif combines tradition, innovation, and biotechnology to help build a more sustainable future, for everyone.

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TESS is an MIT-led NASA mission, an all-sky survey for transiting exoplanets. Transiting planets are those that go in front of the star as seen from the telescope and, to date, is the most successful discovery technique for finding small exoplanets. Launched in April 2018, TESS will survey the entire sky for the next two years, and promises to discover thousands of new exoplanets orbiting around nearby stars — it's already found three. The refrigerator-sized spacecraft is equipped with four cameras designed and built at MIT, which will give researchers important information about the many other planets in our galaxy, some of which might be Earth-like.

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More efficient, more electric, and 100% clean! Carbon Free Boston, a path-breaking new report from the GRC and Boston University finds that Boston can achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 using existing technologies, but the city must move quickly and boldly to make changes, especially in the buildings and transportation sectors.  Undertaken at the request of Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Carbon Free Boston provides the analytics behind the actions available to City leaders, in concert with Commonwealth and regional policy-makers, to sharply deepen energy efficiency while reducing demand, electrify as much possible, and purchase 100 percent clean energy.

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We all know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess and Boston Children's Hospitals recently found that the organelle may be able to play another role — helping to repair dying organs that were previously thought to be beyond repair. In order to revive an infant's damaged heart, the physicians injected the muscle with a billion healthy mitochondria, and watched in amazement as the fresh cells swiftly came to the aid of their ailing counterparts. Since then, the method has been initially successful in preserving organs for transplant and even minimizing brain damage after a stroke.

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In November 2017, astronomers detected an interstellar object in solar system, and it was acting strange. Instead of obeying the gravitational pull of the sun, it exhibited "excess acceleration" that led two Harvard astronomers to hypothesize that the object could have been "a lightsail of artificial origin" sent from an extraterrestrial civilization. A year after Oumuamua's initial discovery, the scientists, Avi Loeb and Shmuel Baird, published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters outlining their theories, which has both ignited debate and inspired curiosity across the world.

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The Dearborn STEM Academy, which opened its doors last fall, is Boston’s first school designed specifically for STEM learning, and is also the district’s first new school facility in 15 years. Located in Dudley Square, the school gives its 488 students access to cutting-edge lab equipment and a variety of technologies, including 3D printers, laser die cutters, computer labs, and more. The building itself is also powered with green energy, and features a rooftop garden.

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Empatica's recently announced smart watch, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Government's BARDA Division of Research, Innovation, and Ventures (DRIVe), can alert users when they are developing a serious respiratory infection, before any symptoms appear. The new smart watch will be based on the technology of Empatica's FDA-cleared Embrace2, a device widely worn by people living with epilepsy. Embrace2 uses advanced machine learning to monitor physiological signals, detect any unusual patterns and immediately notify caregivers in the case of possible convulsive seizures. The partnership with DRIVe will utilize this technology to evaluate health signatures that can predict pathogen exposures prior to the manifestation of any symptoms, and alert the user and any caregivers.

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AlterEgo seeks to combine humans and computers—such that computing, the Internet, and AI would weave into human personality as an internal "second self" and augment human cognition and abilities. AlterEgo is a non-invasive, wearable, peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistants, services, and other people — without opening their mouth. Simply by articulating words internally, the system allows for a human-computer interaction that is subjectively experienced as completely internal to the human user — like speaking to oneself. The feedback to the user is given through audio, via bone conduction, without disrupting the user's usual auditory perception, and making the interface closed-loop. The wearable system captures peripheral neural signals when internal speech articulators are volitionally and neurologically activated, during a user's internal articulation of words. This enables a user to transmit and receive streams of information to and from a computing device or any other person without any observable action, in discretion, without unplugging the user from her environment, without invading the user's privacy.

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