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If you thought the Mommy Tummy pregnancy simulator was hilarious, try this exoskeleton on for size. This is AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), a suit by MIT's AgeLab that simulates what it's like to be in your mid-seventies. It's not recommended for fisticuffs with xenomorphs. More »
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Computers may be naturally fluent in binary, but how might they fare with learning human languages? Computers were tested by playing the game Civilization. Random chance let them win about half the time...but then they started reading the instruction manual. More »
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This is the PR2 robot. He has come from the future MIT's Distributed Robotics Lab, programmed to bake us delicious pastries. Check out a video of the PR2 making sweet treats while wearing an ominous surgical cowl. More »
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How can we prevent another nuclear disaster from happening here in the United States? One way is to be more systematic in how we handle spent nuclear fuel. Stored nuclear waste was a huge factor in Japan's Fukushima reactor disaster. More »
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On January 22, 1948, Boston mayor Mayor James Curley wrote this letter to MIT President Karl Compton asking for "a competent group of engineers [to] make an immediate study as to ways and means of removing the huge accumulation [...] be it by the use of flame throwers or chemicals or otherwise." Quite the modest request for such a metal means of snow removal. More »
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What the heck is that blue box on top of the Small Dome at MIT? Students starting school this week at the venerable geek institution were wondering that themselves. Let's take a closer look . . . More »
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Many diabetics endure daily finger pricks to test their blood sugar levels. But advances in nanotechnology could soon mean that diabetics need endure the needle only once: to get a glucose-tracking tattoo. More »
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British material-design company Peratech recently inked a deal with MIT to create pressure-sensitive, electronically responsive "skin" for robots. This means, of course, that sooner or later we'll have a terrifying robotic version of Buffalo Bill. More »
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Forget an apple a day; scientists are working on a pill that would be much more successful in the ongoing battle to find a way to keep the doctor away by giving you medicine without your even knowing about it. More »
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Ever wanted to stand on a floor that fine-tunes its own thickness? Or ride an elevator powered by the same peristaltic mechanisms found in the human intestine? Neri Oxman is way ahead of you. More »
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A new research initiative at MIT intends to revisit some decades-old assumptions about artificial intelligence. It's part of a five-year plan to create an AI program that can comprehend a children's book. More »
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MIT researchers are just three years away from developing a retinal implant that can send visual information directly to the brain. Although it won't completely restore an individual's vision, they would be able to navigate rooms and recognize faces. [Wired] More »
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Two MIT students managed to snap this incredible picture of our planet by spending just $150 on a Canon camera, a weather balloon full of helium, and a styrofoam cooler. The camera reached 93,000 feet before crashing to Earth. [CNET] More »
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MIT's latest robotic fish may not look like much on land, but once it gets in the water, it swims just like the real thing. And it could be an ideal tool for underwater exploration. More »
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It may look like the gateway into Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck, but this is a bus stop... or, rather, "an iPhone-like interactive bus stop," according to its creators at MIT's SENSEable City Lab. Click through to find out what it can do, and where it might show up. More »
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Science has come up with a new way to terrify us with the news that a team of researchers from MIT may have created an all-new green battery made up of genetically-engineered viruses. More »
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The tech world has been buzzing for the past week over an MIT Media Lab student project which converts any surface - including the human body - into a touchpad that controls a mobile computer in your pocket. Using just $350 of off-the-shelf technology, Pranav Mistry created the device for the Fluid Interfaces group at the Media Lab. More »
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Turn in your Prius and get ready to rumble, Jetson-style. That's right: There's a new car in town, and it's flying right at you. More »
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Quirky, inventive, Oscar-winning writer/director Michel Gondry is penning a new film about time travel, set at MIT. And the physicists went wild! More »
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Alex McDowell, the amazing production designer for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Minority Report, takes us inside Dr. Manhattan's digs in Watchmen during a lecture at MIT, and talks easter eggs, Bowie and design. More »
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The future of entertainment may not be in Hollywood, but in Massachusetts. The MIT Media Lab announced this week that it is launching the Center for Future Storytelling, a research program that will develop new storytelling technologies. The team envisions a future that includes robotic actors and improved motion capture, but also increased democratization and participation, so that stories are told not just by individuals, but by entire communities. More »
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This adorable little ant can be trusted to carry quite a lot on its back in the interest of the common good. In that way, it's surprisingly similar to the cells of your immune system, as researchers from MIT and Harvard revealed earlier this month. They've found a way to hook synthetic patches to the surface of B and T cells — and to control the movements of those cells with magnetic fields. Armed with these so-called "backpacks," lymphocytes can now identify growing tumors and infections, as well as personally (or cellularly?) deliver treatments to ailing cells. This could be the first crest of a wave of revolutionary new school supplies in the world of tissue engineering. More »
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Looks like Baba Yaga and Wizard Howl were onto something. According to Danish artists Ion Sørvin and Øivind Alexander Slaatto and MIT student Samuel Kronick, walking houses are the ultimate living spaces of the future. The team of three designed a solar-powered, six-legged abode with a living room, bed, toilet, kitchen, and wood stove — and this week, the ambulant invention took its first tour around Cambridgeshire, England. More »
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When raising a building, construction workers first create a scaffold, a rough framework that mimics the structure of the completed project. As it turns out, biological engineers do the same thing when they develop technology that will enable people to repair their own damaged hearts. This week in Nature Materials, Lisa E. Freed and George C. Engelmayr, Jr. of Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology describe the "accordion-like honeycombs" they've designed that can fight the effects of heart attacks or congenital heart defects — and they present an eerie video of the pulsing, beating tissues in action. More »
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Biologist and chemical engineer Robert Langer won the $1.2 million Millennium Technology Prize earlier this year for his work fighting cancer and heart disease with advanced drug delivery systems. Now, he's setting his sights on sinister weather, and he hopes to win. Langer revealed at a recent talk that he has been working for almost a decade to raise money for research in "hurricane mitigation," ways to tame severe weather using familiar chemistry. His classroom lectures at MIT are memorable for his fearless and often hilarious opinions, and he offered one here, saying, "It's hard for me to understand why more people don't work in this area." More »
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Particle physics professor Brian Cox of the University of Manchester has pretty much the final word on Large Hadron Collider fear-mongering with the above quote. What prompted such an outburst? Death threats against scientists working on the LHC. Perhaps an even better question - what does "t***" stand for? More »
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Oxygen and hydrogen are both excellent energy sources, and we've got tons of both on Earth. Unfortunately, that energy is mostly tied up in water molecules that require still more energy to split apart. But what if you could split water molecules with a modest electric current, under conditions you can duplicate on your kitchen counter? Researchers at MIT have discovered a process, using the simple apparatus above, that could put a solar water refinery in every home. More »
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If you have a pet dog or cat, chances are your furry pal has an embedded microchip that allows animal shelters to find out who the owner is in the event of an escape or pet-napping. Imagine if that same chip could tell a dog to go home or relay instructions directly from the owner, even if the dog was miles away. That's the sort of technology being pursued by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, which can remotely direct cows and even calm them down. More »
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This is a next-generation "emotional robot" named Nexi, who can move its body, hands, and face in a way that suggest human emotion. Created by world-famous roboticist Cynthia Breazeal's group at the MIT Media Lab, Nexi manages to be both weirdly cute and disturbingly emotive. Sure, she "emotes" in a cartoonish way, and yet you won't have any trouble recognizing the feelings she's trying to convey. [Suicide Bots] More »
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MIT's teaming up with Google to design the first satellite that can really, truly search the sky for planets similar to Earth in size and terrain, taking us a giant step closer to making contact with extraterrestrials. Google is funding the development of a six high-res, wide-field digital cameras with a 192-megapixel resolution for TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. That's enough resolution to gauge the brightness of two million stars. MIT scientists are currently hard at work with the design of TESS' observatory. More »
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You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up. More »
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Those Godzilla movies and Mork and Mindy reruns you grew up watching have altered the way you think on a biological level. At least, that's the implication of a controversial new study MIT researchers announced today, which showed that culture changes the way your brain is wired, and how you think about visual problems. In the study, a group of people born in the US were asked to do a visual puzzle in an MRI brain scanner — the results were compared with a group of recent immigrants from East Asia doing the same task. The two groups used very different parts of their brains to do the same thing. More »
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Seth Lloyd, an MIT engineering professor, has published a bracingly sniffy review of David Levy's new book on sex and love between humans and robots. Bottom line: No robot love anytime soon, but get ready for lots of robot sex. [L.A. Times Book Review] More »
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