Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids. Colloids, which insoluble particles or molecules anywhere from a billionth to a millionth of a meter acros...

MIT researchers have developed the first molecular clock on a chip, which uses the constant, measurable rotation of molecules — when exposed to a certain frequency of electromagnetic radiation — to keep time. The chip could one day significantly improve the accuracy and performance of navigation on smartphones and other consumer devices. Today’s most accurate time-keepers are atomic clocks.

While exoskeletons may still feel like a product of science fiction, they are increasingly becoming a technological reality, and advancements are being made in bringing functioning exoskeletons into the world. 

A new study in Nature Communications, a team from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory provides evidence that one crucial brain region called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays an important role in converting vision into action. “Vision in the service of action begins with the eyes, but then that information has to be transformed into motor commands,” said senior author Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. and L...

Fabrics that resist water are essential for everything from rainwear to military tents, but conventional water-repellent coatings have been shown to persist in the environment and accumulate in our bodies, and so are likely to be phased out for safety reasons. That leaves a big gap to be filled if researchers can find safe substitutes. Now, a team at MIT has come up with a promising solution: a coating that not only adds water-repellency to ...

Children with autism spectrum conditions often have trouble recognising the emotional states of people around them — distinguishing a happy face from a fearful face, for instance. To remedy this, some therapists use a kid-friendly robot to demonstrate those emotions and to engage the children in imitating the emotions and responding to them in appropriate ways.

Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: Usually, scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language. But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct...

MIT engineers have created soft, 3D-printed structures whose movements can be controlled with a wave of a magnet, much like marionettes without the strings. The menagerie of structures that can be magnetically manipulated includes a smooth ring that wrinkles up, a long tube that squeezes shut, a sheet that folds itself, and a spider-like 'grabber' that can crawl, roll, jump, and snap together fast enough to catch a passing ball. It can even ...

Have you ever plugged in a vacuum cleaner, only to have it turn off without warning before the job is done? Or perhaps your desk lamp works fine, until you turn on the air conditioner that’s plugged into the same power strip. These interruptions are likely 'nuisance trips,' in which a detector installed behind the wall trips an outlet’s electrical circuit when it senses something that could be an arc-fault — a potentially d...

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 postures and movement, even from the other side of a wall.

After a patient has a heart attack, a cascade of events leading to heart failure begins. Damage to the area in the heart where a blood vessel was blocked leads to scar tissue. In response to scarring, the heart will remodel to compensate. This process often ends in ventricular or valve failure. A team of researchers is hoping to halt the progression from heart attack to heart failure with a small device called 'Therepi.' The device contains ...

A technique developed by MIT physicists could someday provide a way to custom-design multilayered nanoparticles with desired properties, potentially for use in displays, cloaking systems, or biomedical devices. It may also help physicists tackle a variety of thorny research problems, in ways that could in some cases be orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

For many people, household chores are a dreaded, inescapable part of life that we often put off or do with little care. But what if a robot assistant could help lighten the load? Recently, computer scientists have been working on teaching machines to do a wider range of tasks around the house.

Compression therapy is a standard form of treatment for patients who suffer from venous ulcers and other conditions in which veins struggle to return blood from the lower extremities. Compression stockings and bandages, wrapped tightly around the affected limb, can help to stimulate blood flow. But there is currently no clear way to gauge whether a bandage is applying an optimal pressure for a given condition.

MIT engineers have designed a robotic glider that can skim along the water’s surface, riding the wind like an albatross while also surfing the waves like a sailboat. In regions of high wind, the robot is designed to stay aloft, much like its avian counterpart. Where there are calmer winds, the robot can dip a keel into the water to ride like a highly efficient sailboat instead.

MIT researchers have built an ingestible sensor equipped with genetically engineered bacteria that can diagnose bleeding in the stomach or other gastrointestinal problems. This 'bacteria-on-a-chip' approach combines sensors made from living cells with ultra-low-power electronics that convert the bacterial response into a wireless signal that can be read by a smartphone.

In the field of self-driving cars, algorithms for controlling lane changes are an important topic of study. But most existing lane-change algorithms have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyse on the fly; or they’re so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as never changing lanes at all.

Since the 1960s, researchers have been interested in the possibility of treating type 1 diabetes by transplanting islet cells — the pancreatic cells that are responsible for producing insulin when blood glucose concentration increases. Implementing this approach has proven challenging, however. One obstacle is that once the islets are transplanted, they will die if they don’t receive an adequate supply of oxygen.

There are potentially thousands of planets that lie just outside our solar system — galactic neighbours that could be rocky worlds or more tenuous collections of gas and dust. Where are these closest exoplanets located? And which of them might we be able to probe for clues to their composition and even habitability? The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be the first to seek out these nearby worlds.

During the past several years, many strains of bacteria have become resistant to existing antibiotics, and very few new drugs have been added to the antibiotic arsenal. To help combat this growing public health problem, some scientists are exploring antimicrobial peptides — naturally occurring peptides found in most organisms. Most of these are not powerful enough to fight off infections in humans, so researchers are trying to come up ...