Tag: MIT

The visionaries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) never cease to amaze. MIT frequently produces innovative creations, and one of the university's research groups apparently hopes to revolutionize the field of digital photography. While digital-camera technology is already advancing at an astounding rate, the New York Times reports that MIT's Camera Culture department is currently ...

While it may not garner any fashion awards, a line of climate-controlled clothing developed by an MIT student can help regulate the body's temperature. According to Co.Design, Kranthi Kiran Vistakula's ClimaWare apparel can operate for eight hours on a single charge, and the vest (pictured right) weighs the same as a pair of jeans. Vistakula's apparel, which also includes a helmet, neckwrap and ...

Share It's gotten a little too easy to overspend during the holidays. The sales start earlier and end later, there are deals everywhere you look, and it can be hard avoiding the temptation to treat yourself. The good people at MIT Media Labs have you covered, though, with a new series of wallets designed to help you keep your spending in line. Each of the Lab's three designs -- the Bumblebee, ...

After years of work, an MIT scientist has perfected a cheap way to convert and store clean energy using sunlight and water -- much as a plant does during photosynthesis. According to Fast Company, professor Daniel Nocera used solar power captured during the day to split a water molecule into its basic elements -- oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen gas is stored in a fuel cell, which is used to ...

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) consistently produce ingenious and creative feats of technology. Those innovative creations often pertain to energy and power, and the University's engineers -- with official support from Philips -- now intend to develop a revolutionary, responsive and environmentally-friendly LED home lighting system. According to Engadget, MIT's ...

A new wristband from the MIT Media Lab-spawned company Affectiva can purportedly detect stress levels in the wearer, and give cues to their emotional state. The Q Sensor operates similarly to a polygraph by detecting electrical changes in the user's skin. When a person is excited, worried or upset, moisture begins to gather under the skin's surface, often as a prelude to sweating. The Q Sensor ...

An MIT graduate student has discovered a way to check a person's pulse with a plain-old, low-res webcam. According to MIT, Ming-Zher Poh has used open-source face-tracking software, and measured the variations in brightness resulting from blood vessels pumping blood in the face. Poh's method, which doesn't involve any sensors, produced pulse readings that were within three beats per minute of the ...

The ever-clever researchers at MIT have created what could be a revolutionary approach to cleaning up certain oil spills that stick around longer than they should. They call it Seaswarm, and we'd like to think of it as the high-tech paper towel of the sea. The Seaswarm devices are actually comprised of a group of autonomous, solar-powered robots (no, wait: before you run screaming, hear them ...

We've held off from reporting on Sergey Larenkov's computational rephotography, perhaps due do to the link-bait, ludicrous headlines that other outlets have chosen to run, like "Ghosts Now Officially Exist" and "Camera Software Lets You See Into the Past." Computational rephotography is the process of matching a historic photo's perspective with a new one, and it has lately been automated by the ...

The big brains at MIT aren't just interested in solar cells, robot desk lamps and gesture interfaces; they're also applying their evolved understanding of tech to decipher ancient languages. The team of Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, have created a computer program that successfully deciphered a chunk of Ugaritic, a dead Semitic ...

If you were meandering around Facebook or LinkedIn, and happened to stumble across the profile of a woman named Robin Sage, you'd probably be impressed. She attended a prestigious New England prep school, got a degree from MIT and, judging from her profile picture, was pretty easy on the eyes, too. All in all, she's an over-achieving geek's dream date. So, what's the catch? She's not real. ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. In 1855, ...

While they aren't full-blown 'Transformers,' ultra-thin smart sheets developed by MIT and Harvard researchers could pave the way for machines that fold into different shapes. According to Popular Science, the fiberglass sheets, which are made from .5-inch wide, .5-millimeter thick, triangular tiles, are dubbed 'programmable matter.' The researchers equipped the smart sheets with ultra-thin, ...

A team of MIT Media Lab researchers has created a simple and cheap device that performs on-the-spot eye exams. The Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment (NETRA) is a small plastic device that attaches to a cell phone screen. Users peer into it, and press buttons on the phone until a set of green lines overlaps with a set of red lines on the screen. In less than two minutes, the software ...

The first step to solving the Gulf Coast oil crisis, as with any problem, is figuring out just how large and expansive the spill really is. As scientists, lawmakers, and Kevin Costner continue to debate the best way to stop the gushing, a group of academics at MIT are doing their part to track the disaster as it unfurls. The project, called Grassroots Mapping, uses camera-equipped kites to ...