Massachusetts Institute Of Technology

Quaker Oats Co. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have agreed to pay $1.85 million to settle a lawsuit over an experiment in which radioactive oatmeal was fed to more than a 100 students in the 1940s and '50s. Boys at the Fernald School in Waltham were given the cereal containing radioactive iron and calcium as part of an experiment to prove that nutrients in Quaker oatmeal travel throughout the body.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology fraternity house where a freshman pledge drank himself into a coma and died earlier this year has lost its housing permit. The Boston Licensing Board suspended the dormitory license of Phi Gamma Delta for seven months starting Jan. 15. All 37 students will have to move out of the house for the rest of the school year. The board criticized the fraternity for serving alcohol to minors and cited the case of 18-year-old Scott Krueger of Orchard Park, N.Y.

Fashion and technology met on a runway here yesterday in an unprecedented collaboration of international designers and computer researchers. The result was an amazing display of wearable computers, from a Levi's denim jacket equipped with a full stereo system--the world's smallest synthesizer and speakers--to pscyho-sunglasses that could virtually read the wearer's mind to a funky barrett with e-mail capabilities.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will guarantee financial aid packages to its ROTC students whose military funding is cut because of their sexual orientation, the school stated. "There are two principles at MIT that we hold dear," said Sarah Gallop, an assistant to MIT President Charles Vest. "One is our long-standing and deep commitment to national service . . . an equally important principle for us is to promote an environment of nondiscrimination."

Ventura County is flush with businesses, but its entrepreneurs, like their counterparts across the country, generally have difficulty creating marketing plans and projecting cash flow, said Steve Matthews, who organizes a monthly business forum based in Ventura. "I think the problems beginning businesses have here are not unlike those you would have in Minnesota, Massachusetts, anywhere," said Matthews, who helps plan local meetings for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum.

"Wastoid! Wastoid! Wastoid!" That strange cheer rose from a standing-room-only audience inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Auditorium 26100 as two small robots made of multicolored plastic Legos tangled on a table at the front of the room. It seems almost comical that some of the nation's brightest engineering students could become so intensely involved in a game using a common toy. But MIT's annual 6.270 Lego competition is anything but child's play.

Two former students at a Massachusetts school for the mentally retarded told federal lawmakers Thursday that their excitement over taking part in a 1950s school Science Club had turned to fear since they learned that club members were fed cereal laced with radioactivity. The testimony of two subjects of radiation experiments marked a dramatic opening to what is expected to be a season of stormy congressional hearings on some three decades of human experimentation involving radiation.

Two days after threatening further court action against Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Justice Department announced Wednesday that the school has agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit. The suit, filed by the government, charged that the school and eight Ivy League institutions violated antitrust laws when they joined together to set salaries and establish common levels of financial aid for needy students.