Scene at MIT: Donations of personal protective equipment ready for local hospitals
Labs across campus respond to a call; MIT sends thousands of items directly to area hospitals in need.
3 Questions: The risks of using 3D printing to make personal protective equipment
Professor Martin Culpepper provides caution on the use of 3D printing to make masks and other PPE for individuals on the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis.
3Q: Collaborating with users to develop accessible designs
An MIT team discusses the pitfalls of “parachute research” and the importance of “sociotechnical” factors.
Speculative machines produce existential wonder
“Orbiting” will be an aerial archive of symbols that reference the cultural and technological achievements of humanity.
Integrating electronics onto physical prototypes
In place of flat “breadboards,” 3D-printed CurveBoards enable easier testing of circuit design on electronics products.
Printing objects that can incorporate living organisms
A 3D printing system that controls the behavior of live bacteria could someday enable medical devices with therapeutic agents built in.
Transformation by design
Skylar Tibbits makes materials that water, heat, or mechanical forces can alter into new shapes.
How to design and control robots with stretchy, flexible bodies
Optimizing soft robots to perform specific tasks is a huge computational problem, but a new model can help.
Assembler robots make large structures from little pieces
Systems of tiny robots may someday build high-performance structures, from airplanes to space settlements.
Engineers put Leonardo da Vinci’s bridge design to the test
Proposed bridge would have been the world’s longest at the time; new analysis shows it would have worked.
This flat structure morphs into shape of a human face when temperature changes
New structural design could lead to self-deploying tents or adaptive robotic fins.
Objects can now change colors like a chameleon
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory team creates new reprogrammable ink that lets objects change colors using light.
Taking the next giant leaps
Fifty years after the first moon landing with Apollo 11, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics looks to the future of space exploration at MIT.
Ultrathin 3-D-printed films convert energy of one form into another
Low-cost “piezoelectric” films produce voltage, could be used for flexible electronic components and more.
Computer-aided knitting
New research from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory uses machine learning to customize clothing designs.