Ian Sample of The Guardian reports on how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed a “Transformer” robot that can self-assemble. "This will rapidly extend the manufacturing capabilities that we have today where configuring an assembly line is done manually and requires a lot of time," Prof. Daniela Rus explains.
Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports on the mobile, self-assembling robot developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. "This is a simple, flexible and rapid design process and a step toward the dream of realizing the vision of 24-hour robot manufacturing," explains Prof. Daniela Rus.
WBUR’s Benjamin Swasey reports on Professor Chris Warshaw’s new study examining how reflective governments are of their constituents’ views. “When you put all this stuff together, it turns out that cities are quite responsive to how liberal their publics are,” explains Warshaw.
Heather Kelly of CNN reports on how MIT researchers have developed a new technique to recreate audio from silent video. "We showed that we can determine pretty reliably the gender of a speaker from low-quality sound we managed to recover from a tissue box," says Dr. Michael Rubinstein.
Luke Holland writes for The Guardian about work by the MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms to try to form 3-D structures comprised of light. “By manipulating photons, they've discovered a way of making them react with and deflect each other, essentially forming a new type of matter,” writes Holland.
Krissy Clark of NPR reports on Professor Amy Glasmeier’s work developing the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Clark reports that through examining the cost of living, Glasmeier found that areas with higher poverty rates tended to have higher amounts of minimum wage jobs where the minimum wage, “absolutely was not paying people enough to live on.”
“The MIT Media Lab recently released ScratchJr, a free iPad app that helps children 5-8 learn how to code,” writes Jordan Shapiro for Forbes. The ScratchJr language is a redesign of the original Scratch programming to simplify it for use by younger children.
“Nancy L. Rose PhD ‘85, a professor of applied economics at MIT, has been named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis by the U.S. Department of Justice,” writes Katherine Nazemi for The Tech. Rose will head the DOJ’s anti-trust division.
Mark Peplow writes for Nature about the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing and how work done there could contribute to the design of a device that automatically fabricate organic molecules. “A synthesis machine would be transformational,” says Professor Tim Jamison.
“The MIT Sloan School of Management announced on Tuesday that professor Simon Johnson won a spot at the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research,” writes Natalie Kitroeff of Bloomberg Businessweek. Johnson’s appointment follows the publication of a book that he coauthored: “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”
Dan Kadlec reports for TIME on new research from Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, which shows that grandparents can play an important role in teachning their grandchildren about the importance of saving money.“Life has gotten very busy for dual income households,” Coughlin says. “Grandparents can fill in the gaps. They have the time and the stories to tell.”
“[A]s an educational researcher, I believe that MIT has captured, perhaps uniquely, both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for colleges and universities,” writes Dan Butin for The Huffington Post about a new report released by the MIT Task Force on the Future of MIT Education.
Professor Noam Chomsky reflects in The Huffington Post on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the age of nuclear weapons. Chomsky argues that, considering their tremendous capacity for destruction, it is only by luck that we have survived with nuclear weapons for so long.
NPR’s Melissa Block examines the new MIT algorithm that can translate visual information into sound. Abe Davis explains that by analyzing sound waves traveling through an object, “you can start to filter out some of that noise and you can actually recover the sound that produced that motion.”
Time reporter Nolan Feeney writes about how researchers from MIT have developed a new technique to extract intelligible audio of speech by “videotaping and analyzing the tiny vibrations of objects.”