Charles Pulliam-Moore of the PBS NewsHour reports on new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab showing that humans are happier and more productive when robots are in control. The research, “could lead to situations in which human employees could be empowered by machines, rather than replaced by them,” Pulliam-Moore writes.
Erika Fry writes for Fortune about the spread of infectious diseases, highlighting a study by researchers from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering that examines how infectious diseases could spread worldwide through air transportation. The researchers developed a metric to rank and predict which U.S. airports would be the most influential spreaders of a disease.
Katie Collins writes for Wired that MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that will allow delivery drones to monitor their own health. “Drones will be able to keep an eye on their ability to do the job by predicting fuel levels and checking on the condition of propellers, cameras and other sensors,” writes Collins.
Melissa Malamut of Boston Magazine writes that MIT chemical engineers have developed a new treatment for bone injuries. The researchers developed an implantable tissue scaffold coated with bone growth factors that helps the body quickly form new bone.
BetaBoston reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes that MIT researchers are developing new techniques to make future delivery drones more functional and efficient. “We have broken the large problem into lots of small problems,” says Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi.
MIT scientists have shown recycled lead can be used in solar cells, reports Popular Science’s Emily Gertz. “The group's work demonstrates that the perovskite created from the lead in just one old car battery could provide materials for 30 households-worth of solar energy cells,” writes Gertz.
Martin LaMonica writes for IEEE Spectrum about how MIT researchers have developed a system that uses car batteries to produce solar cells. “The beauty is that this new process is pretty interchangeable with the current production method,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
Washington Post reporter Rachel Feltman writes that MIT engineers have developed a system that recycles batteries into solar cells. “We think it could be a competitor that’s easy to process, has rapidly increasing efficiency, and can be made in an environmentally friendly way,” says Prof. Angela Belcher.
Drake Bennett of Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard have created a robot that can self-assemble from a flat sheet of paper in four minutes. The robot is made of paper, and layered with a circuit board and prestretched polystyrene, the same material used to create Shrinky Dinks, Bennett explains.
Bloomberg Businessweek spotlights the new self-folding, mobile robot developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. The design for the robot was inspired by origami and the team used inexpensive and easily accessible materials to build the robot, Bloomberg reports.
Joseph Flaherty of Wired takes a close look at the design of MIT’s self-assembling robots. “[T]hese researchers are promoting a new kind of manufacturing where engineers can elegantly specify a design and watch it spring to life like a seed emerging from the ground,” writes Flaherty.
“Researchers at MIT and Harvard said that they achieved a landmark feat of engineering by creating a sophisticated machine—and doing so inexpensively and quickly—that has the ability to autonomously interact with its environment,” Kevin Conlon and Leigh Remizowski of CNN report.
Wired reporter Katie Collins writes about the new self-assembling, mobile robot developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. “It takes only four minutes for the robot to fold itself up, after which it can walk away with no human intervention,” writes Collins.
Writing for BetaBoston, Nidhi Subbaraman reports on the self-assembling robot, made of inexpensive materials, developed by researchers from MIT and Harvard. This research demonstrates the potential to make robots easily accessible and affordable for the general population, Prof. Daniela Rus explains.
Megan Turchi of Boston.com writes about the new autonomous, self-assembling robots designed by researchers from MIT and Harvard. The robots can fold themselves into mobile structures that are then able to move independently.