In the Media

Neel V. Patel interviews Professor Srini Devadas for Popular Science about the future of computer chip design. Devadas contends that there is still room for innovation of chips using existing materials.

Ashley Esqueda and Tom Merritt discuss the FingerReader audio reading device developed by researchers at the MIT Media Lab on the CNET show “Tomorrow Daily”. The device could be used by people who are visually impaired or for translating foreign languages. 

Guardian reporter Oliver Wainwright reports on the new remote-controlled contraceptive chip developed by MIT researchers. “Someone across the room cannot reprogramme your implant,” says Dr. Robert Farra. “Communication with the implant has to occur at skin contact-level distance. Then we have secure encryption. That prevents someone from trying to interpret or intervene between the communications.”

In a piece for Fortune, Benjamin Snyder writes about how MIT researchers have developed a new system to help achieve the perfect lighting for photo shoots. Flying robots are programmed to produce rim lighting, which illuminates the edge of the subject in a photograph. 

Lauren Hitchings of New Scientist reports on findings showing that marine microbes exhibit daily patterns of behavior. “The researchers think this might be a result of the low nutrient levels in the open ocean, and the need for organisms to rely on one another for metabolic functions,” writes Hitchings. 

The Associated Press reports on a new soft robotic fish developed by MIT researchers. The video features footage of the fish, which the researchers developed in an effort to make more lifelike robots. 

"You're going to swallow a pill and know English,” said Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab in a TedTalk video reviewed by Sara Gates of The Huffington Post. Negroponte discussed the possibility of being able to learn information by ingesting pills in the future.

Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a system that allows people to choose exactly what information they share online. “The primary benefit of this is that you as an individual would not be able to be identified from an anonymised dataset,” writes Collins.

“They've created an app which recasts mediocre headshots in the styles of famous portrait photographers like Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus- and in the process reveals how subtle shifts in lighting can completely change the way we perceive a face,” writes Boston Globe reporter Kevin Hartnett. 

Nathalia Holt writes for Popular Science about Professor Feng Zhang’s work with gene-editing systems, in particular TALENs and CRISPR, and how these new techniques could be used to help tackle deadly diseases. 

Liat Clark reports for Wired on Changing Environments, an MIT Media Lab spinoff that is developing solar-powered smart benches to be placed around Cambridge and Boston. These benches allow users to charge their mobile devices and download environmental data.

Contessa Gayles writes for CNN Money about Promise Tracker, an app developed at MIT that helps to determine whether politicians keep campaign promises. Promise Tracker is being piloted in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte this fall to monitor the mayors of those cities.

R. Colin Johnson of EE Times reports that MIT researchers are, “aiming for a multicore architecture that can scale to any number of cores, with cache coherency. So far, they've prototyped a 36-core version.”

Liat Clark writes for Wired about the FingerReader, a 3-D printed device developed at the MIT Media Lab that can translate text from printed materials into a robotic voice for the visually impaired. The device has been in development for three years. 

“Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a ring-shaped device that slips around a user’s pointer finger, scans any text above the fingertip, and reads it aloud in a robotic voice,” writes Dan Kedmey for Time.