You already know what all of your friends are eating, so you might as well know how to make it, too. Carlina Teteris/Getty Images hide caption

Mildred Dresselhaus, winner of the Kavli Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, speaks in Bergen, Norway, in 2012. Marit Hommedal/Flickr hide caption

There was a lot of excitement in 2012, when the Hiriko car was unveiled at this event at European Union headquarters in Brussels. At the time, the then-president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, hailed the car as a trans-Atlantic "exchange between the world of science and the world of business." Zhou Lei/Xinhua/Landov hide caption

TMAYD founder Izzy Lloyd (right) gives a friend a hug after asking about her day. Maia Weinstock/MIT hide caption

The man on the screen isn't really there. But the flashlight he's moving around is. Tangible.Media.MIT.edu hide caption

M-Block cube robots rest on a work table in the Distributed Robotics Lab in CSAIL at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. The robots are 50mm cubes that can reconfigure themselves into various arrangements using self-propulsion and magnets. M. Scott Brauer/MIT hide caption

Harvard Square, a large triangular area located in the heart of Cambridge and adjacent to Harvard University and near MIT University — two of the world's top-ranked institutions of higher learning. Darren McCollester/Getty Images hide caption

An MIT analysis of Larry Abramson's Gmail account illustrates his online relationships. immersion.mit.media.edu hide caption

Internet activist Aaron Swartz at a rally in January 2012. Daniel J. Sieradski/Flickr hide caption

People stood in line to vote on Election Day 2012 at the Wake County Firearms Education and Training Center in Apex, N.C. Gerry Broome/AP hide caption

Aaron Swartz co-authored RSS and founded the company that later became the social media website Reddit. Boston Globe via Getty Images hide caption