Author: Ms. R.

The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.) While manipulating play dough is fun and easy for 2-year-olds, the shapeless sludge is hard for robots to handle. Machines have become increasingly reliable with rigid objects, but manipulating soft, deformable objects comes with a laundry……

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The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.) While manipulating play dough is fun and easy for 2-year-olds, the shapeless sludge is hard for robots to handle. Machines have become increasingly reliable with rigid objects, but manipulating soft, deformable objects comes with a laundry……

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MIT Professor Donald Sadoway has won the 2022 European Inventor Award, in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries, for his work on liquid metal batteries that could enable the long-term storage of renewable energy. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and a longtime supporter and friend of the Materials Research Laboratory. “By enabling the large-scale storage of renewable energy, Donald Sadoway’s invention is a huge step towards the……

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In the final 2022 Division III LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup standings, MIT finished in fourth place overall as the Engineers ended the 2021-22 academic year with 936.75 points. This marks the second-highest finish in MIT history as the Engineers climbed two spots following a tremendous performance in the spring season. Fall highlights Men’s cross country finished as the NCAA National Runner-Up as the Engineers registered a program-best five All-Americans at the NCAA Championship. Women’s cross country captured the NEWMAC title……

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It would seem that engineering is in Ritu Raman’s blood. Her mother is a chemical engineer, her father is a mechanical engineer, and her grandfather is a civil engineer. A common thread among her childhood experiences was witnessing firsthand the beneficial impact that engineering careers could have on communities. One of her earliest memories is watching her parents build communication towers to connect the rural villages of Kenya to the global infrastructure. She recalls the excitement she felt watching……

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Bruce Willis’s recent announcement that he was retiring from acting brought widespread public attention to the neurological condition aphasia. While everyone struggles occasionally with finding the right word or tripping over their sentences, aphasia patients can lose the ability to comprehend language entirely. Though Willis hasn’t confirmed it, some doctors suspect that he may have a particularly brutal and degenerative form called primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Scientists have long understood that there are several subtypes of PPA — some……

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Hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs), since they’ve proven fruitful test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios. Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, since testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t the most easy or desirable to recreate.  To that end, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created “VISTA 2.0,” a……

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