Janissa Delzo writes for CNN that MIT researchers have developed a platform to 3-D print thousands of hair-like structures in minutes. "The purpose of this project is looking beyond the aesthetic perspective," explains graduate student Jifei Ou. "What kind of new functionality can we bring to the material?"
Prof. Hugh Herr has been named the recipient of Spain’s 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, according to the AP. Herr’s achievements “have had a major impact on people with disabilities, through adaptive knee prostheses for femoral amputees, and ankle-and-foot orthopedic prostheses for those with clubfoot or disabilities caused by cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.”
In a BBC News article about the Venice Architecture Biennale, Will Gompertz highlights a "drone-port" developed in collaboration with MIT researchers. “With the aid of cutting edge computer science and buried steel tension ropes, the largely self-supporting structure uses a fraction of the materials such a building would normally need.”
Researchers in MIT’s Tangible Media Group have developed visual cues to help people learn how to play the piano, reports G. Clay Whittaker for Popular Science. “Animated figures walk, dance, and lumber across the keyboard in telling motions that help you learn not just which keys to strike, but how hard and for what duration to strike them.”
Popular Science reporter G. Clay Whittaker writes that MIT researchers have developed a new interface that mimics the properties of other materials. Whittaker writes that the project “goes a step past responsive design. Your interactions with the surface changes based on what you've programmed it to replicate: water, rubber, a mattress.”
Wired reporter Liz Stinson writes about the MIT Tangible Media Group’s new shapeshifting interface that can mimic the characteristics of a wide variety of materials. The interface “hints at how materiality could be used to build a tangible bridge between our digital and physical interfaces,” writes Stinson.
Tim Logan writes for The Boston Globe that MIT has received approval to develop new buildings, open spaces, restaurants, research and commercial spaces in Kendall Square. “We want to create a greater sense of place,” says Provost Martin Schmidt. “A greater place to live and learn, not only for our community, but also for our neighbors.”
Professors Edward Boyden and Max Tegmark are honored as “Game Changers” in a Boston Globe special section dedicated to highlighting people and organizations for their work. The Globe features Boyden’s work developing tools to better understand the brain, and Tegmark’s involvement in the Future of Life Institute.
Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, speaks with Vanessa Quirk of Metropolis about MIT’s widespread presence at the 2016 Venice Biennale, the Institute’s approach to architectural challenges and its interdisciplinary ethos. “MIT thrives on what it calls complex societal problems,” says Sarkis. “And what better complex societal problems are there today than cities and architecture and the environment.”
The PBS NewsHour highlights how one organization used tracking technology developed by Prof. Carlo Ratti to learn what happens to recycled electronic waste. “Tracking is really the first step in order to design a better system,” Ratti said. “One of the surprising things we discovered is how far waste travels.”
MIT has launched a campaign aimed at advancing the Institute’s work on some of the world’s biggest challenges, reports Laura Krantz for The Boston Globe. Krantz writes that President L. Rafael Reif’s vision for the campaign is centered around the idea that the “university of the 21st century should do more than educate students and advance knowledge — it should solve real problems.”
In an article for Scientific American, Prof. César Hidalgo examines how to improve the design of and make open data websites more usable. “To make open data really open, we need to make it searchable, and for that we need to bring data to the surface of the web,” writes Hidalgo.
ELLE reporter Chloe Schama speaks with the organizers of the MIT breast pump hackathon about the need for a better breast pump. "There are a lot of women who are internalizing failures," says Alexis Hope, one of the organizers of the MIT hackathon, "when these are really problems with public policy or with pumps."
Prof. Carlo Ratti and graduate student Matthew Claudel write for Harvard Business Review about how technology is changing office environments. “Throughout history, buildings have been rigid and uncompromising, more like a corset than a T-shirt,” they write. “With better data on occupancy, we could design a built environment that adapts to humans, rather than the inverse.”
In an article for the BBC News, Jane Wakefield highlights a gesture-controlled transforming unit designed for small homes by MIT researchers. "We need to think of technology-enabled furniture as a platform for integrating other technology because in a small apartment it is not practical to put in conventional systems," explains Principal Research Scientist Kent Larson.