Disembodied performance
Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers, which features robots as performers, premieres this month. Is this the future of opera?
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Can you find me now?
By demonstrating fundamental limits on their accuracy, MIT researchers show how to improve wireless location-detection systems.
Supercomputing on a cell phone
For complex problems whose form can be anticipated but whose particulars can’t, new software can offer approximate solutions in seconds.
The MIT roots of Google’s new software
Google’s App Inventor, which lets people with no previous programming experience build applications for mobile phones, draws on decades of MIT research.
A hop, skip and a jump on the moon — and beyond
Team envisions robotic spacecraft that can explore hard-to-reach areas on the moon and other planetary bodies by hopping.
Shape-shifting robots
Self-folding sheets of a plastic-like material point the way to robots that can assume any conceivable 3-D structure.
3 Questions: Nicholas Roy on deploying drones in U.S. skies
MIT robotics expert discusses the logistical hurdles of regulating unmanned aircraft for civilian use.
A plane that lands like a bird
An innovative control system allows a foam glider to touch down on a perch or a wire like a pet parakeet.
3 Questions: Richard Binzel on astronomers’ powerful new tool
Pan-STARRS, a telescope designed to reveal the ‘unexpected surprises’ in our solar system, including possible threats to Earth, just became fully operational.
Bill Mitchell, former dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, dies at age 65
He was an outspoken advocate for radically transforming infrastructure to create responsive sustainable cities, and played an instrumental role in transforming MIT's physical campus.
Operating in orbit
Astronaut and alumnus Bobby Satcher recounts his experience as the first orthopedic surgeon in space
Building organs block by block
Tissue engineers create a new way to assemble artificial tissues, using ‘biological Legos’ — cells transformed into bricks.