Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering in Computer Science, has long been dedicated to democratizing access to technology for children. In the 1970s, he directed the first implementation of the educational programming language Logo for the Apple II computer. During a sabbatical at Google in 2007, he launched…
Fabrics Poised to Become the New Software
In the summer of 2018, a team led by MIT researchers reported in the journal Nature that they had successfully embedded electronic devices into fibers that could be used in fabrics or composite products like clothing, airplane wings, or even wound dressings. The advance could allow fabrics or composites to sense their environment, communicate, store and convert…
Generating High-Quality Single Photons for Quantum Computing
MIT researchers have designed a way to generate, at room temperature, more single photons for carrying quantum information. The design, they say, holds promise for the development of practical quantum computers. Quantum emitters generate photons that can be detected one at a time. Consumer quantum computers and devices could potentially leverage certain properties of those…
Engineers Program Marine Robots to Take Calculated Risks
We know far less about the Earth’s oceans than we do about the surface of the moon or Mars. The sea floor is carved with expansive canyons, towering seamounts, deep trenches, and sheer cliffs, most of which are considered too dangerous or inaccessible for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to navigate. But what if the reward…
Putting Food-Safety Detection in the Hands of Consumers
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a wireless system that leverages the cheap RFID tags already on hundreds of billions of products to sense potential food contamination — with no hardware modifications needed. With the simple, scalable system, the researchers hope to bring food-safety detection to the general public. Food safety incidents have made headlines…
AI Senses People’s Pose Through Walls
X-ray vision has long seemed like a far-fetched sci-fi fantasy, but over the last decade a team led by Professor Dina Katabi from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has continually gotten us closer to seeing through walls. Their latest project, “RF-Pose,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people’s…
Physicists Design $100 Handheld Cosmic Ray Muon Detector
At any given moment, Earth’s atmosphere is showered with high-energy cosmic rays that have been blasted from supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena far beyond the Solar System. When cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they decay into muons — charged particles that are slightly heavier than an electron. Muons last only fractions of a second,…
A New Contrast Agent For MRI
A new, specially coated iron oxide nanoparticle developed by a team at MIT and elsewhere could provide an alternative to conventional gadolinium-based contrast agents used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedures. In rare cases, the currently used gadolinium agents have been found to produce adverse effects in patients with impaired kidney function. The advent of…
Chip Could Bring Deep Learning to Mobile Devices
In recent years, some of the most exciting advances in artificial intelligence have come courtesy of convolutional neural networks, large virtual networks of simple information-processing units, which are loosely modeled on the anatomy of the human brain. Neural networks are typically implemented using graphics processing units (GPUs), special-purpose graphics chips found in all computing devices…
Spinning A New Version of Silk
After years of research decoding the complex structure and production of spider silk, researchers have now succeeded in producing samples of this exceptionally strong and resilient material in the laboratory. The new development could lead to a variety of biomedical materials — from sutures to scaffolding for organ replacements — made from synthesized silk with…