To assess a community’s risk of extreme weather, policymakers rely first on global climate models that can be run decades, and even centuries, forward in time, but only at a coarse resolution. These models might be used to gauge, for instance, future climate conditions for the northeastern U.S., but not specifically for Boston. To estimate […]
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Engineering household robots to have a little common sense
From wiping up spills to serving up food, robots are being taught to carry out increasingly complicated household tasks. Many such home-bot trainees are learning through imitation; they are programmed to copy the motions that a human physically guides them through. It turns out that robots are excellent mimics. But unless engineers also program them […]
Read MoreFor MIT students, there is much to learn from crafting a chair
Design spans disciplines and schools at MIT as a versatile mode of inquiry. Whether software, furniture, robots, or consumer products, design classes at MIT guide students through the iterative process of ideation, planning, and prototyping. “Design is 80 percent problem-setting and 20 percent problem-solving,” says MIT Professor Larry Sass SM ’94, PhD ’00, designer and […]
Read MoreOptimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors
In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering. Because […]
Read MoreExploring the cellular neighborhood
Cells rely on complex molecular machines composed of protein assemblies to perform essential functions such as energy production, gene expression, and protein synthesis. To better understand how these machines work, scientists capture snapshots of them by isolating proteins from cells and using various methods to determine their structures. However, isolating proteins from cells also removes […]
Read MoreMoving past the Iron Age
MIT graduate student Sydney Rose Johnson has never seen the steel mills in central India. She’s never toured the American Midwest’s hulking steel plants or the mini mills dotting the Mississippi River. But in the past year, she’s become more familiar with steel production than she ever imagined. A fourth-year dual degree MBA and PhD […]
Read MoreGenerative AI for smart grid modeling
MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) has been awarded $1,365,000 in funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to support its involvement with an innovative project, “Forming the Smart Grid Deployment Consortium (SGDC) and Expanding the HILLTOP+ Platform.” The grant was made available through ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies, which fosters […]
Read MoreAutomated method helps researchers quantify uncertainty in their predictions
Pollsters trying to predict presidential election results and physicists searching for distant exoplanets have at least one thing in common: They often use a tried-and-true scientific technique called Bayesian inference. Bayesian inference allows these scientists to effectively estimate some unknown parameter — like the winner of an election — from data such as poll results. […]
Read MoreMIT researchers remotely map crops, field by field
Crop maps help scientists and policymakers track global food supplies and estimate how they might shift with climate change and growing populations. But getting accurate maps of the types of crops that are grown from farm to farm often requires on-the-ground surveys that only a handful of countries have the resources to maintain. Now, MIT […]
Read MoreResearchers release open-source space debris model
MIT’s Astrodynamics, Space Robotics, and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab) announced the public beta release of the MIT Orbital Capacity Assessment Tool (MOCAT) during the 2023 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Space Forum Workshop on Dec. 14. MOCAT enables users to model the long-term future space environment to understand growth in space debris and assess […]
Read MoreCo-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling
Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative. […]
Read MoreSmart irrigation technology covers “more crop per drop”
In agriculture today, robots and drones can monitor fields, temperature and moisture sensors can be automated to meet crop needs, and a host of other systems and devices make farms more efficient, resource-conscious, and profitable. The use of precision agriculture, as these technologies are collectively known, offers significant advantages. However, because the technology can be […]
Read MoreTo excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds
ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before. But […]
Read More“Pangea” study aims to modernize national test and training infrastructure
Whenever the United States develops a new system — say, a plane — this system needs to be tested and validated to ensure all of its components are working as intended. That’s where the U.S. national test and training infrastructure comes into play. Across the country are many different ranges focused on assessing the systems […]
Read MoreTeachers embrace hands-on learning in Materials Genome Camp
Amid the brick furnaces of MIT’s forge and foundry, Mike Tarkanian poured liquid metal into a mold until it filled, then he emptied the rest into a trough. To demonstrate how quickly it solidified in the ambient temperature of the room, the senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) kicked […]
Read MoreHow to help high schoolers prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence
Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make care decisions for patients? Though the future of AI may conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computers intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) addressed questions surrounding the use of AI in health through their […]
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