Myron Freeman captured the sunset from Vassar Street at MIT this evening.

MIT News reports two MIT economists and a University of Chicago colleague have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in economics.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson and James Robinson in Chicago shared the award for showing that "democracies, which hold to the rule of law and provide individual rights, have spurred greater economic activity over the last 500 years."

Mayor Wu today announced she's appointed Kairos Shen, current real-estate development professor at MIT and a former top planner at the one-time Boston Redevelopment Authority, to lead the new Boston Planning Department with current planning head Arthur Jemison heading back to Detroit. Read more.

MIT might have handled anti-Zionist protests on campus differently, but nothing the school did was designed to torment its Jewish students and professors - and in fact, the school took steps, if possibly not enough, to minimize hateful acts and rants against them - a federal judge ruled last week in dismissing a lawsuit by students and a pro-Israel group from California alleging MIT had helped turn itself into an antisemitic cauldron. Read more.

The Tech reports on the aftermath of an exploding manhole around 1 this morning.

MIT News reports on experiments that showed that amino acids, a key building block of life on earth, might be able to survive in the sulfuric-acid clouds that make up the atmosphere on Venus. Read more.

Cambridge Day reports MIT is fighting Eversource over underground power cables the utility wants to install beneath MIT as part of its plans for a new Binney Street substation. In filings with the state, MIT goes so far as to say the work could kill the school, because it could disrupt the arteries that radiate out from the school's "heart" - a central utility plant that feeds vital electricity, steam and water across the campus.

The Boston Licensing Board on Thursday decides whether Royale, 279 Tremont St., could have done anything to prevent rising tensions over the impending World Cup final from boiling over into a fight between two students at MIT's Sloan School to Management students that, unlike the soccer match, ended with the French victorious. Read more.

MIT News details some of the work required to move decades worth of artifacts from the old MIT Museum to its new digs last fall - and some of the surprising things curators found:

Among the surprises was something that the collection database described simply as a brick. “I noticed it because I tried to move it and it was a lot heavier than I thought it would be,” says Pierri. She discovered that the “brick” was part of a graphite rod created for the world's first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction ...

A high-pressure gas main ruptured in the area of 300 Main St. around 2 p.m., forcing the evacuation of MIT buildings E19, E28, and E38 and the shutdown of the Kendall Square Red Line station - which led the T to swap in shuttle buses between Harvard and Park. Read more.