Professor Xuanhe Zhao has developed a material that mimics the ability of cephalopods such as cuttlefish, squids, and octopuses, to rapidly change color, reports Rachel Feltman for The Washington Post. "It's a fantastic quality, and one unprecedented in human engineering," says Zhao.
Dominique Mosbergen reports for The Huffington Post on MIT’s robotic cheetah: “[T]he researchers behind its development have devised an algorithm that allows their creation not just to run at speeds of up to 10 mph but also to jump over obstacles—all without being tethered to anything.”
Thomas Tamblyn of The Huffington Post reports on a soft, tentacle-shaped robot developed by doctoral candidate Andrew Marchese and PhD student Robert Katzschmann: “The arm is made using purely silicone which is then inflated and deflated forcing the arm to move in the desired direction.”
MIT researchers found that students who spent significant time doing coursework in massive open online courses (MOOCs) showed evidence of learning regardless of educational background, writes Steve Kolowich for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “This certainly should allay concerns that less-well-prepared students cannot learn in MOOCs,” the researchers wrote.
Brian Mastroianni reports for Fox News on the new algorithm developed by Professor Sangbae Kim’s team that gives its robotic cheetah the ability to run and jump over obstacles untethered. “Our goal is to use this kind of robot to save lives in a disaster situation,” said Kim.
For the second year in a row, the QS World University Rankings rated MIT number one on its list of best schools across the globe. “The rankings judge colleges by research, teaching, employability and internationalization,” reports Kate Barnato for CNBC.
Professor Sangbae Kim and his team in MechE have developed an algorithm that allows a four-legged cheetah robot to run up to 10 mph and jump over obstacles untethered. “The Cheetah's new algorithm improvements make it more agile and able to handle real-life terrain,” writes Francie Diep.
MIT researchers have developed a robotic cheetah that can run at 10 miles per hour and jump more than a foot in the air, reports Lily Hay Newman for Slate. “Breakthroughs in the cheetah’s development could be applicable to other autonomous robots or things like prosthetics,” she writes.
Sharon Begley of Reuters writes about Professor Ann Graybiel’s research on the effect of the human FOXP2 gene on mice. “By isolating the effects of one gene, the work sheds light on its function and hints at the evolutionary changes that led to the unique capabilities of the human brain,” writes Begley.
Francie Diep writes for Popular Science about a soft robot designed by MIT’s Distributed Systems Lab, that is able to navigate a maze unaided: “Researchers that build soft robots like this one hope that in the future, soft machines will be safer for humans to work with than hard metal ones.”
“[B]y current robotics standards this MIT creation is a pretty sleek approximation of a cheetah,” writes Rachel Feltman for The Washington Post about Professor Sangbae Kim’s robotic cheetah. A new algorithm could eventually allow the robot to reach speeds of 30 miles per hour.
Research by Professor Ann Graybiel demonstrated that providing mice with the human version of the FOXP2 gene allowed them to learn repetitive patterns more quickly, reports Clare Wilson of The New Scientist. This may demonstrate that the gene plays an important role in how humans learn to speak, says Graybiel.
“Leave it to researchers from MIT to come up with a complex algorithm that’s specific to predatory motions like running, leaping, and bounding that can be programmed into a robot,” writes Steve Annear for Boston Magazine about the robotic cheetah developed by Professor Sangbae Kim’s team.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about a soft, tentacle-shaped robot created by the Distributed Systems Lab at MIT that is able to navigate autonomously. “[T]he robot can make its way from one side of a pipe maze to another without humans getting involved,” writes Subbaraman.
Time features this video of the robot cheetah developed by Professor Sangbae Kim’s team. The researchers developed an algorithm that allows the four-legged robot to run untethered up to 10 miles per hour and jump over obstacles.