Prof. Richard Binzel discusses Apophis, an asteroid roughly 340-meters in diameter, set to pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth on April 13, 2029 with Scientific American’s Andrew Jones. Apophis’s close approach in 2029 will offer “a once-per-millennium natural experiment,” says Binzel.
MIT researchers have designed a recyclable elastic yarn, made from polyethylene, that mimics the stretchiness of spandex-polyester and spandex-nylon blends, the Anthropocene team writes. “[T]he researchers spun a spool of yarn, melted it, and re-spun it into new yarn several times. Even after 10 cycles, the yarn was as strong and flexible as conventional blended fibers,” explains Anthropocene.
Mel Robbins visits the MIT AgeLab and tries out the lab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES) suit, which is designed to help wearers experience the challenges associated with aging. “When we think about aging, most people don’t really have a definition of it. They think about it as a number of birthdays—that's older,” says Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab director. “Actually, aging is about diminishing capacity over time. So weightlifting is increasing your capacity—you're pushing out the clock. Learning something new keeps you cognitively well.”
Principal Research Scientist John Liu speaks to Manufacturing Dive’s Nathan Owens about MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long certificate program designed to "bring experienced technicians into leadership roles with a focus on advanced manufacturing needs.” Says Liu: "We’re looking at developing this elite workforce who bridges the gap. What we’re trying to do is upskill the technician.”
Bloomberg’s Gautam Mukunda highlights Prof. Scott Stern’s finding that 0.07% of business registrations in the 2010s reached meaningful acquisition within six years, and Prof. Danielle Li and Prof. Lindsey Raymond’s finding that AI technologies increased customer support agent productivity by 15%, to predict AI’s role in the influx of business applications filed in June.
MIT researchers have developed a new, breathable hydrogel material that is “packed with microscopic air tunnels inspired by the way human lungs move oxygen” and allows heat and sweat to escape, reports Luis Prada for VICE. “The material proved to be about 10 times more breathable than conventional hydrogels and retained about 95 percent of its airflow even after being stretched 10,000 times,” explains Prada.
MIT researchers have developed a low temperature process to extract battery-grade lithium from spodumene, the most common type of mineral containing lithium, using a reusable liquid reagent, writes Electronic Design’s Lee Goldberg. “The new process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts — not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica,” writes Goldberg. “After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so that waste levels approach zero.”
In an article for The Hill, contributor Juan Williams celebrates the homecoming of his nephew, MIT alumnus and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams PhD ‘12, who travelled 102 miles over the course of eight months on the International Space Station. “Inside the space station he [Christopher] and fellow astronauts measured how eyes change in zero gravity,” writes Juan. “They checked on how the human brain orients its sense of direction in space. They also tracked bone density and DNA changes to gauge the impact a long space journey has on the human body.”
Smithsonian Magazine reporter Margherita Bassi highlights a new robot developed by Prof. Raphael Zufferey that mimics aquatic birds’ ability to fly and swim underwater. “Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility or over a pod of whales,” Zufferey says. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.”
Researchers from MIT and Toyota Research Institute developed SceneSmith, a system that allows robots to practice everyday tasks and action plans in over 1,300 AI generated environments before entering a real home or workplace, writes Fox News’ Kurt Knutsson. “SceneSmith's ability to combine realistic design with usable physics gives the project its strongest advantage,” notes Knutsson.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss the lab’s work utilizing AI to enhance robots’ ability to move, reason, and act like humans. “The objective is to bring AI’s ability to understand text, images, and other online information to make physical machines intelligent, and if we achieve this then AI will not just reside in our computers—it will drive, it will walk it will fly, it will interact with us in the physical world.”
Graduate student Peter Zhi Xuan Li speaks to Tech Briefs’ Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing a new chip that allows small, autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments using a fraction of the power required by other systems. “Today, a robot uses separate, incompatible internal representations for different jobs: one for mapping, another for tracking its own motion, another for rendering what it sees, and every conversion adds memory footprint and energy,” says Li. “Our goal is a single shared representation.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss her group’s work developing liquid neural networks, AI that runs locally on a given device rather than a data center to increase privacy and improve energy efficiency. By using liquid AI, "you avoid privacy concerns and you avoid the security concerns associated with accessing the cloud,” says Rus. “Furthermore, the cost of running your models on a device is much, much lower than running a huge model in the cloud.”
Prof. Raphael Zufferey joins Ania Lichtarowicz, host of Somewhere on Earth: The Global Tech Podcast, to discuss his new winged robot, inspired by aquatic birds, that can fly and dive underwater. “The first thing we looked at is the flapping frequency [of aquatic birds] – the amount of strokes per second that wings use when in flight and when swimming,” says Zufferey. “This was a very good starting point to know how to design these systems in robotics.”
Alumnus Vikas Enti ‘20, founder of Reframe Systems, speaks to Boston 25 about his company’s work aimed at lowering the time and costs of home building with their new system that they used to robotically fabricate a residential building in Somerville. “We went from starting foundation work to handing keys over to our customer in about 180 days,” says Enti. “It would typically take about 18 months to build a structure like this in cities like Somerville—it's almost three times faster. Our units also cost 20% lower than traditional construction costs.”