MIT researchers have developed a robot called Hermes that is controlled by the motions of an exoskeleton-wearing human, reports Nidhi Subbaraman for BetaBoston. “What’s unique about Hermes is that Ramos is able to sense the robot’s balance through the harness,” writes Subbaraman.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston reports on how MIT researchers have developed a fleet of self-driving golf carts. “The group road-tested a fleet of self-driving golf carts at a park in Singapore over six days,” writes Subbaraman.
“A team of researchers from MIT has created sensitive metallic polymers that change color in response to chemical or physical variations in their surroundings,” writes Alexandra Ossola for Popular Science. “The gel could be used as a litmus test to detect if particular pollutants are present in an environment.”
Graduate student Sydney Do speaks with Huffington Post Live about the technological shortfalls that currently make the Mars One plan for colonizing the Red Planet unrealistic. “Our finding is the Mars One plan is inherently unsustainable and is hence infeasible,” explains Do. “The technology that’s required is just not there yet.”
An article in The Economist highlights how a number of researchers at MIT are developing new devices to regulate the delivery of drugs within the body. Prof Michael Cima is working on a drug-delivery technology that could be used to treat ovarian cancer.
Don Willmott writes for The Huffington Post about a theoretical design for a compact fusion reactor created by MIT researchers. “The MIT reactor should ultimately be able to produce five to six times the energy it consumes, MIT's scientists say, about 190 megawatts,” explains Willmott.
Kelsey Atherton reports for Popular Science that MIT researcher have developed and tested a self-driving golf cart in a public garden in Singapore. Atherton writes that one potential use for the self-driving golf carts is a shared vehicle system where the carts would “drive people to their destination, and then either return or seek new riders.”
David Unger of The Christian Science Monitor speaks with Prof. Donald Sadoway about the future of batteries. Sadoway says he views the battery enterprise "as very socially conscious. It would represent a major step in bringing electricity to those who don’t have reliable access to electricity.”
A group of MIT researchers has designed a computer file system that will not lose track of data when a computer crashes, reports Matt Chiappetta for Forbes. The system “is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes,” writes Chiappetta.
Huffington Post reporter Nitya Rajan writes about a new 3-D printer designed by researchers at MIT CSAIL that can print up to 10 different materials at once. Rajan writes that, “this machine has just bought us one step closer to printing just about anything we fancy, on demand.”
In this video, PBS explores a new technique MIT researchers developed to enlarge brain samples, making them easier to image at high resolutions. Prof. Ed Boyden explains that he hopes the technique could be used to “hunt down very rare things in a tissue.”
Prof. Michael Stonebraker speaks with Randy Bean of The Wall Street Journal about big data and how companies handle data integration. “We are in the midst of an explosion of new ideas that will change the data landscape,” says Stonebraker.
In a study examining online learning, MIT researchers have uncovered a new type of cheating in online courses and identified ways to prevent such behavior, reports Laura Krantz for The Boston Globe. Krantz explains that while the researchers “want to stop the cheating, they are equally interested in the benefits of this new type of online education.”
Inside Higher Ed reporter Carl Straumsheim writes about a study conducted by researchers from MIT and Harvard that identifies a new type of cheating in massive open online courses (MOOCs). The researchers found that “the prevalence of cheating varied by discipline,” Straumsheim explains, with just 0.1 percent of learners appearing to have employed the technique in computer science courses.
Boston Magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme writes that MIT researchers have developed a new digitized pen that could be used to improve a test that screens for Alzheimer’s and other cognitive impairments. “What the pen does is capture the writing with considerable temporal and spatial accuracy,” Prof. Randall Davis explains.