mit

Though we're not yet at the point where robots can take fully take over warehouse jobs, technology is rapidly developing toward that end goal. One big issue surrounding robots in these jobs is their ability to sort items. Unlike boxes, which are neatly stacked and easy to grasp, small unpackaged items introduce randomness into the mix, requiring a robot to do a bunch of thinking about how it will grasp the items. This takes a fair bit of time...or at least it used to.

Continue Reading

A new sensor designed by MIT is meant to help doctors and caregivers in hospitals to more quickly diagnose a condition that kills 250,000 people annually. The condition is sepsis, and the quicker treatment can start, the more likely those affected by sepsis can begin to get better. Sepsis is when the immune response to infection triggers an inflammation chain throughout the body leading to high heart rate, high fever, shortness of breath, and other issues.

Continue Reading

Amsterdam is a city that is crisscrossed with canals and garbage in those waterways is a big problem. The canals are also underutilized for relieving congestion from nearby roadways. To combat the issue, Amsterdam has a vision of a fleet of autonomous boats that can cruise its canals to not only pick up trash but to transport goods and people. MIT researchers are working to make Amsterdam's vision come true.

Continue Reading

People instinctively know how to work together when it comes time to lift something that takes two people. People coordinate their motions and work to be sure that each side of whatever is being carried is at the same height. While tasks like that are natural for a human, for robots, it's not natural at all.

Continue Reading

MIT has teamed up with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to create a new deep learning model that can predict from a patients mammogram if they are likely to develop breast cancer in the future. The model was trained using mammograms with known outcomes from over 60,000 patients that were treated at MGH. Using that dataset, the model learned subtle patterns in breast tissue that are precursors to malignancy.

Continue Reading

MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory has published a new video showing off its Mini Cheetah robot and a trick has learned: backflips. The robot features a four-legged design and weighs just under 20lbs; despite its mechanical nature, it is able to perform a backflip without any outside assistance. The robot is also shown on video running, rotating, and more.

Continue Reading

It's called Implosion Fabrication. They can't quite shrink humans yet, but they can print a very tiny version of most any shape you choose. The MIT responsible for this project invented a way to capture the shape of an object and replicate it, further shrinking it down to nanoscale upon drying. It's sort of like Ant Man and the Wasp (2018), but just a little bit different.

Continue Reading

MIT has announced an engineering breakthrough that has resulted in the smallest 3D transistors ever created. These new MIT transistors are half the width of the slimmest commercial models available today. MIT worked with the University of Colorado on this new transistor.

Continue Reading

MIT and Facebook have teamed up on a new potential way to give addresses to people who currently don't have one. Approximately four billion people around the globe lack a physical address, a problem that impacts everything from registering to vote to something as seemingly basic as receiving mail. Machine learning may be the solution to this problem, the two entities revealed in a recent study.

Continue Reading

Scientists all around the globe are working hard at new methods that might be used to detect alien life. MIT has a different idea, and its concept is to use existing laser tech to create a beacon that could attract any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that are actively searching for life in the universe themselves. MIT researchers say that current laser tech could be fashioned into a beacon.

Continue Reading

Those who don’t hike or live in an area where hikers flock don’t understand how easy it can be to get lost in unfamiliar terrain, even when using maps. While it's not hard to get lost, it's very hard for rescuers to search for lost or injured hikers. The major challenge comes when hikers are lost inside a dense forest where helicopters and drones aiding in the search are unable to see what's under the trees.

Continue Reading

Some of the smallest parts of all living things are the individual cells that compose tissues, organs, and bone. Cells are so tiny they can only be observed directly under a microscope. Researchers at MIT have announced a discovery that could allow mass production of self-powered robots that are the size of cells.

Continue Reading