The rise of self-driving cars is set to dramatically alter the way we move around cities in the future. In particular, private car ownership is expected to shift toward shared mobility services, with vehicle fleet operators offering on-demand transportation. This should help to reduce traffic in urban areas and cut greenhouse gas emissions. For these services to grow, however, accurate […]
New Metal-Mesh Membrane Could Lead To Inexpensive Power Storage
MIT Scientists Prove Tailgating Doesn’t Get You There Faster
We’ve all experienced “phantom traffic jams” that arise without any apparent cause. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently showed that we’d have fewer if we made one small change to how we drive: no more tailgating. Specifically, the team’s new journal article argues that if we all kept an equal […]
Climate Conditions Affect Solar Cell Performance More Than Expected
Video of the Day: Engineers Create Plants That Glow
Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you could read by the light of a glowing plant on your desk. MIT engineers have taken a critical first step toward making that vision a reality. By embedding specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, they induced the plants to […]
New Nanowires Are Just A Few Atoms Thick
“Two-dimensional materials” — materials deposited in layers that are only a few atoms thick — are promising for both high-performance electronics and flexible, transparent electronics that could be layered onto physical surfaces to make computing ubiquitous. The best-known 2-D material is graphene, which is a form of carbon, but recently researchers have been investigating other […]
IBM and MIT to Pursue Joint Research in Artificial Intelligence, Establish New MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab
IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Techology (MIT) today announced that IBM plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab will carry out fundamental artificial intelligence (AI) research and seek to propel scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI. The collaboration aims to […]
Ingestible Origami Robot
In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery […]
Can Technology Help Teach Literacy in Poor Communities?
For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University have been conducting a study to determine whether tablet computers loaded with literacy applications could improve the reading preparedness of young children living in economically disadvantaged communities. At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference this week, they presented […]
The simplification of superconducting circuits
Computer chips with superconducting circuits — circuits with zero electrical resistance — would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today’s chips, an attractive trait given the increasing power consumption of the massive data centers that power the Internet’s most popular sites. Superconducting chips also promise greater processing power: Superconducting circuits that use so-called […]