The robotic cheetah developed by MIT researchers is now capable of jumping over obstacles without human assistance, reports Nidhi Subbaraman for BetaBoston. “As the robot approaches and detects a hurdle, algorithms plan its jumping trajectory unaided by its minders, each adjusting for the speed and position of the robot and the height of the hurdle,” Subbaraman explains.
A team of researchers from MIT, Northeastern, and Harvard has found links between cell phone usage and unemployment, reports Janelle Nanos for BetaBoston. The researchers found that “cellphone use and mobility dropped significantly in areas which eventually reported massive unemployment spikes,” Nanos explains.
Researchers from MIT and the University of California, San Diego have genetically modified bacteria so that it can detect cancer, BBC News reports. The researchers hope that one day, “the general approach could one day be used to develop relatively cheap and easy to use home-testing kits for a range of diseases.”
MIT researchers have developed a non-invasive way to detect liver cancer using probiotics, reports Vijee Venkatraman for BetaBoston. The researchers found that they could “use bacteria as tumor scouts…and engineer them to emit a signal once they reached the mass and multiply.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Zumbrun writes about a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that found that cell-phone records can indicate if a person has been laid off. The researchers found that “people’s social lives and mobility contracted following a layoff.”
According to The Economist, a new algorithm created by EECS graduate student YiChang Shih and his colleagues can remove the reflections that often appear in photos taken through glass. As the team describes in their paper, their software “can indeed separate the desired image from the reflected one.”
Scott Kuindersma, a post-doctoral associate and Planning and Control Lead for the MIT DARPA Robotics Challenge team, spoke with Boston.com about the Atlas robot. “Walking robots are interesting for a lot of reasons,” says Kuindersma. “They have the promise of getting over challenging terrain that would stymie many track systems.”
According to The Boston Herald, “Amsterdam’s Royal Philips N.V and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have signed a five-year, $25 million research alliance to develop healthtech solutions and digital connected lighting systems.” Philips will also move its North American research headquarters to Cambridge.
Stacey Higginbotham of Fortune writes about a new $25 million partnership between Philips and MIT in which the company will move its North American R&D headquarters to Cambridge: “Given that Philips will focus on lighting and healthcare technology for its R&D, Boston makes a considerable amount of sense, especially on the health side.”
Sarah Lewin writes for Wired about research by Professor Pedro Reis and a team of MIT mathematicians on the formation of wrinkles in materials. “What’s beautiful about this work is the collaboration between experimentalists and theorists,” says Reis. “We challenged them with results we didn’t understand, and they went somewhere new.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Brian Potts highlights the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) report on the future of solar energy. Potts writes that solar subsidies should be reconsidered, citing the MITEI report’s findings that “net metering is inefficient and should be redesigned.”
Eleanor Goldberg writes for The Huffington Post that a team of MIT researchers has developed a solar-powered desalination system that could help bring clean drinking water to rural areas. The researchers hope to eventually release a model that could provide clean drinking water for an entire village, Goldberg reports.
TechCrunch's Darrell Etherington writes about WaitChatter, a program developed by researchers at MIT CSAIL that leverages unoccupied time by teaching users a new language. WaitChatter “uses a Google Chat extension to offer up quick vocabulary learning lessons right in your IM chat window.”
Nidhi Subbaraman writes for BetaBoston about WaitChatter, a new application developed by MIT students that could help teach users a foreign language while they chat online. “The application uses the brief window when the ellipses dominate the screen as an opportunity to spring a vocabulary quiz,” Subbaraman explains.
WGBH reporter Cristina Quinn reports on this year’s 2.007 robot competition, during which student-built robots faced off on a course inspired by the movie Back to the Future. “We really try to stress real life skills in this class and one of the biggest as a designer is realizing things don’t work as you thought they would,” says Prof. Amos Winter.