These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
but having a gravitational lens offers a way to improve the measurements particularly if scientists can find more examples at different distances.
Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
which combined parachutes with landing gear powered by retrorockets that could lower the rover to the surface on tethers.
Such weight can't be slowed adequately by parachutes in the Martian air which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
and a giant parachute twice the size of Curiosity's. The decelerator would attach to the outer rim of a capsule-like entry vehicle.
and moments later the parachute will fire. The saucer should gently splash down in open water.
Some of us are already conjuring up ways to get back there and do just that.
which would let nutrients from the surface make their way into the liquid ocean. It looks promising
Then after spending decades building the ISS the US cancelled the space shuttle the vehicle originally intended for transport to the ISS as part of its post-Apollo programme.
After the shuttle's last flight in 2011 though the US became dependent on Russia for transport to the ISS using Soyuz at a cost of nearly $71 million for each seat it requires.
Whether that for-the-camera useless blame game can translate into much needed political will to accelerate backup plans for ISS transport remains to be seen
NASA's suspension of working with the Russians will likely be received in Russia much the same way other sanctions over its actions in Ukraine have been:
accelerating the diversification of ISS transport options and rethinking the propensity of using space as a foreign policy surrogate.
and offers us a way to keep track of the planet's defences. It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
The most reliable way of doing this is to vary the time interval between light pulses with a long interval representing a 0 say
Much of the weight of today's rockets comes from their own propellant so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for much more ambitious human missions.
Virgin galactic's Spaceshiptwo is a six passenger two pilot suborbital craft designed to give wannabe astronauts a few minutes in space.
This is a neat way of suggesting prebiotic material could be produced regardless of the external conditions of the planet says Goldman.
Japan's newest rocket scheduled for its maiden voyage this week is designed to be a smaller cheaper way to get science satellites into space.
But perhaps the most exciting aspect of the inaugural launch will be Epsilon's cargo: the world's first space telescope designed to study the planets from afar.
and the way it is redirected can reveal the atmospheric composition. But extreme UV radiation coming from space is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere
Starlight captured by the Kepler space telescope has revealed that the amount a star flickers is tied to its size offering a better way to measure a wide variety of stars and their associated planets.
Kepler was designed to spot transits the periodic dips in a star's brightness indicating that a planet has passed in front of it.
When a planet transits a star the amount of light it blocks is used to calculate its size.
No one has given people access to satellites in the same way that we're doing with Ardusat says Chris Wake of Nanosatisfi the San francisco company that builds
Now NASA has proved that even rocket motors can be made this way. Engineers led by Tyler Hickman in the Game Changing Technology Program at NASA's Glenn Research center in Cleveland Ohio worked together with rocket motor maker Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento California.
The next step will be to find a way to scan these worlds for signs of life she adds.
As an alternative says Sarri the beams can be used to mimic the way particle fountains from black holes
If the idea is sound there must be a way to make vortices without first making giant planets perhaps involving the star heating the gas until it creates a region of instability.
Since the space shuttles retired in 2011 NASA has been contracting with private firms to deliver cargo and soon hopefully astronauts to the space station.
Its Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape canaveral in Florida carrying a Dragon capsule filled with cargo and science experiments.
Antares was designed to deliver the company's Cygnus cargo craft to the ISS. For the test flight the rocket climbed high into a clear blue sky carrying a mock cargo ship with the same mass
When the real Cygnus flies it will carry about 2 tonnes of cargo per trip.
But while Dragon can return from its missions loaded with cargo no Cygnus craft will ever make it back to Earth.
If all goes well the company is contracted to make a total of eight cargo missions to the station over the next three or four years y
If not we'll get on the road. In the immediate future Curiosity will be going temporarily silent.
an alternative route to customers via satellites will be invaluable. It's not the only reason."
"Beaming down Radio transmission is the most common way to communicate between satellites and Earth.
"That way every rocket that goes up is kicking off Cubesats, "he says, with each small orbiter perhaps holding only a fraction of a functional communications rig."
"It's a brand new space race in many ways, "says Cutler.""But instead of being fuelled from a defence perspective,
As an analogy Weitzner says imagine trying to shape environmental policy without any way of measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere
Sociometric s system based on years of MIT research consists of employee identification badges with built-in Bluetooth sensors that track location and which way someone s facing.
and objective performance metrics Sociometric can pinpoint areas where management can build more productive offices in ways as surprising as providing larger lunch tables or moving coffee stations to increase interaction.
If someone figures out a really good way to pitch to customers you talk to them
There are a couple of different ways to retrieve this stored information. If the DNA is inserted into a nonfunctional part of the genome sequencing the genome will reveal
Solving transport problems The Keystone system value lies in skirting wind turbine transportation constraints that have plagued the industry for years.
so trucks can safely haul them on highways and under bridges. This means that in the United states, most towers for 2-or 3-megawatt turbines are limited to about 260 feet.
Smith explains. ut there no way to weld together a tower in a factory that 20 feet in diameter and ship it to the wind farm.
at developing advanced drivetrain controls and rotor designs. ut out of that study we spotted tower transport as one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the industry,
but to do so with considerable mobility, enabling immediate transport to a construction site, streamlining delivery and increasing construction efficiency.
and be on your way. Once again, Spielberg role in the lab is with optimizing the 3-D printer that makes the device.
then choose the optimal route to avoid a close encounter. As the robot considers its options,
Lines, each representing a possible route for the robot to take, radiate across the room in meandering patterns and colors,
with a green line signifying the optimal route. The lines and dots shift and adjust as the pedestrian and the robot move.
and other autonomous, route-planning vehicles. s designers, when we can compare the robot perceptions with how it acts,
The team developed the system as a way to visually represent the robotsdecision-making process.
such as a robot possible routes, and its perception of an obstacle position. They projected this information on the ground in real time,
Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
If all midsized carrier networks were to replace current radio amplifiers with Eta Devices technology he says the reduction in greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking about 5 million cars off the road.
There are so many ways to leverage high efficiency if you have it Dawson says. In August the World Economic Forum named Eta Devices the 2015 Technology Pioneer a designation awarded previously to Dropbox Spotify
#Spinning out a company has been the best way to validate the technology especially with novel power-electronics hardware Dawson says.
A new study from MIT Brigham and Women s Hospital and Johns hopkins university suggests that delivering chemotherapy directly into the brain cavity may offer a better way to treat tumors that have metastasized to the brain.
There just aren t good ways to do it. To overcome these delivery issues Cima s lab is working on small implantable devices to deliver drugs for ovarian cancer and bladder disease as well as brain cancer.
Michael Lim an associate professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins says the new approach seems like a promising way to expand the range of treatments available for brain tumors
#Microscopic walkers find their way across cell surfaces Nature has developed a wide variety of methods for guiding particular cells enzymes and molecules to specific structures inside the body:
White blood cells can find their way to the site of an infection while scar-forming cells migrate to the site of a wound.
But finding ways of guiding artificial materials within the body has proven more difficult. Now a team of researchers at MIT led by Alfredo Alexander-Katz the Walter Henry Gale Associate professor of Materials science and engineering has demonstrated a new target-finding mechanism.
The new system allows microscopic devices to autonomously find their way to areas of a cell surface for example just by detecting an increase in surface friction in places where more cell receptors are concentrated.
Cells have a way of locating areas that bear a specific kind of chemical signature a process called chemotaxis.
Our system is very simple Alexander-Katz says similar to the way in which bacteria locate nutrients they need.
The team s goal now is to demonstrate the ability of the microscopic walkers to find their way toward concentrations of receptors in actual living tissue.
or monitor the target area in different ways. This animation shows micro walkers tumbling across a surface under the influence of a rotating magnetic field until they find areas where friction is represented highest by the orange area.
MIT researchers have developed now a new way to model the effects of these genetic mutations in mice.
There has to be a functional way of assessing the role of these cancer-gene candidates as they appear in sequencing studies Sanchez-Rivera says.
This method also offers new ways to seek personalized treatments for cancer patients depending on the types of mutations found in their tumors the researchers say.
here has to be a better way,?says Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering.
to difficulties delivering drugs in a sustained way. Last year, Taris entered a research collaboration with Astrazeneca to develop novel treatments for bladder cancer. his device is a platform
The new method produces the combination of desired properties in as small a package as possible Bawendi says which could help pave the way for particles with other useful properties such as the ability to bind with a specific type of bioreceptor or another
and postdoc Ou Chen the nanoparticles crystallize such that they self-assemble in exactly the way that leads to the most useful outcome:
so that they interact in specific ways with molecules or structures within the cell either for diagnosis or treatment.
Grinspun says. e want to capture the motion of hair and clothing in a realistic way,
and we can start having traffic back and forth, Reis says. This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation
Now Stephanopoulos and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a new way to boost yeast tolerance to ethanol by simply altering the composition of the medium in
This work goes a long way to squeezing the last drop of ethanol from sugar adds Gerald Fink an MIT professor of biology member of the Whitehead Institute and the paper s other senior author.
What s also exciting to us is that this could apply beyond ethanol to more advanced biofuel alcohols that upset cell membranes in the same way Lam says.
While many studies have examined ways to boost ethanol tolerance at low glucose levels the MIT team used concentrations of about 300 grams per liter similar to
and other platforms play in the way people communicate, the effect that rapid and fluid communication can have
#High-speed biologics screen MIT engineers have devised a way to rapidly test hundreds of different drug-delivery vehicles in living animals making it easier to discover promising new ways to deliver a class of drugs called biologics
It is challenging to find safe and effective ways to deliver them. Biologics is the fastest growing field in biotech
This is a finding of fundamental importance in the biology of pancreatic cancer says David Tuveson a professor at the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who was involved not in the work.
and giving them the chance to jettison their cargo. It s very expensive for port security to use traditional robots for every small boat coming into the port says Sampriti Bhattacharyya a graduate student in mechanical engineering who designed the robot together with her advisor Ford Professor of Engineering
and routing of maritime traffic. The MIT research was funded by the National Science Foundation n
We ve been interested in finding new ways to combat antibiotic resistance and these papers offer two different strategies for doing that.
if researchers can find a safe and effective way to deliver them. Combigem also enables the generation of combinations of three or four genes in a more powerful way than previously existing methods.
We re excited about the application of Combigem to probe complex multifactorial phenotypes such as stem cell differentiation cancer biology
Keeping it tightthe group s next challenge is finding a way to keep the suit tight.
Sangbae Kim an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT hypothesizes that this force-control approach to robotic running is similar in principle to the way world-class sprinters race.
In bounding an animal s front legs hit the ground together followed by its hind legs similar to the way that rabbits hop a relatively simple gait that the researchers chose to model first.
As a result they re way louder Kim says. Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals.
A five-year stretch at Boeing as an engineer for the U s. military A160 Hummingbird UAV and as a commercial pilot put Downey in contact with drone manufacturers, who,
and Microsoft DOS paving the way for personal computers in the 1980s. Before those components became available,
-speak programs run in a distributed way across multiple machines and allow concurrent interactions for multiple people,
#Ride sharing could cut cabs road time by 30 percent Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity:
and even as it faces legal wrangles a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up.
What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had a button on it that let you indicate that you were willing to share a ride with another passenger?
How drastically could cab-sharing reduce traffic fares and carbon dioxide emissions? Authoritatively answering that question requires analyzing huge volumes of data
and the Italian National Research Council s Institute for Informatics and Telematics present a new technique that enabled them to exhaustively analyze 150 million trip records collected from more than 13000 New york city cabs over the course of a year.
If passengers had been willing to tolerate no more than five minutes in delays per trip almost 95 percent of the trips could have been shared.
if the passengers are using cellphone apps. So the researchers also analyzed the data on the assumption that only trips starting within a minute of each other could be combined.
In analyzing taxi data for ride sharing opportunities Typically the approach that was taken was a variation of the so-called traveling-salesman problem Santi explains.
and the travel times between them there is a route that would allow a traveling salesman to reach all of them within some time limit.
First they characterize every taxi trip according to four measurements: the time and GPS coordinates of both the pickup and the dropoff.
if it ran on a server used to coordinate data from cellphones running a taxi-sharing app.
whereas the GPS data indicated that on average about 300 new taxi trips were initiated in New york every minute.
Finally an online application designed by Szell Hubcab allows people to explore the taxi data themselves using a map of New york as an interface.
David Mahfouda the CEO of the car-and taxi-hailing company Bandwagon whose business model is built specifically around ride sharing says that his company hired analysts to examine the same data set that Santi
We did analysis of rides from Laguardia Airport and were able to build really detailed maps around where passengers were headed from that high-density departure point he says.
But he adds we definitely simplified the problem in order to focus on a particular real-world problem that we thought we could solve.
Mahfouda says that his company is founded on the assumption that a very significant number of taxi rides are shareable.
Over a four-day period he says ride sharing saved $18000 in fares and operational costs and more than 1000 pounds in carbon emissions.
But he says it also saved passengers time. Something that doesn t get mentioned a lot in this space is the amount of time that gets saved through ride consolidation he says.
#A new way to diagnose malaria Over the past several decades malaria diagnosis has changed very little.
The researchers have devised a way to use magnetic resonance relaxometry (MRR) a close cousin of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI to detect a parasitic waste product in the blood of infected patients.
This technique could offer a more reliable way to detect malaria says Jongyoon Han a professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering at MIT.
We save a lot of time for nurses that way. Similar systems exist for catching medication errors:
and Carnegie mellon University have devised a new way to separate cells by exposing them to sound waves as they flow through a tiny channel.
This is a most gentle way to separate cells, and there no artificial labeling necessary, says Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT Department of Materials science and engineering and one of the senior authors of the paper,
it a good way to study cancer biology and diagnose whether the primary cancer has moved to a new site to generate metastatic tumors,
and displacement in 3-D in their browser, he says. e think it a great way to show students the value of fast, 3-D simulations.
and this work goes a long way in showing that this is achievable. RNA therapies are very flexible
This study is a terrific example of the potential of new RNA therapies to treat disease that was done in a highly collaborative way between biologists
A team of MIT chemical engineers has developed now a fast reliable method to detect this type of modification known as methylation which could offer a new way to choose the best treatment for individual patients.
#An easier way to manipulate malaria genes Plasmodium falciparum the parasite that causes malaria has proven notoriously resistant to scientists efforts to study its genetics.
And when these devices lift up from the ground into the third dimension they do it in a thoughtful way.
and the whole thing moves in the way that you want Demaine explains. It lets you transfer just one degree of freedom into a whole complicated motion all through the mechanics of the structure.
Folding I think is a good way to get to the smaller robots. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Research at Harvard and the Air force Office of Scientific research h
#A new way to model cancer Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of mutations associated with cancer.
One way to discover the role of these mutations is breed to a strain of mice that carry the genetic flaw
They are now working on ways to deliver the necessary CRISPR components to other organs allowing them to investigate mutations found in other types of cancer.
The flexibility of this technology as delivery gets better in the future will give you a way to pretty rapidly test those combinations says Institute Professor Phillip Sharp an author of the paper.
While this is an effective way to get genetic material to the liver it would not work for other organs of interest.
because different objects are going to respond to sound in different ways. In ongoing work, the researchers have begun trying to determine material and structural properties of objects from their visible response to short bursts of sound.
the rotor of a helicopter may actually move detectably between the reading of one row and the reading of the next.
what s on them Researchers at MIT and in Saudi arabia have developed a new way of making surfaces that can actively control how fluids
But at present even in desert locations the only way to counter this fouling is to hose the arrays down a labor-and water-intensive method.
We need a way to reduce the dust accumulation. Watch a water droplet get pulled across an active surface designed by MIT researchers.
Now researchers at MIT have found a way to control how the material conducts electricity by using extremely short light pulses
The researchers found that by controlling the concentration of electrons in a graphene sheet they could change the way the material responds to a short but intense light pulse.
But if the graphene starts out with high electron concentration the pulse decreases its conductivity the same way that a metal usually behaves.
and bipolar disorder represent the best way to gain molecular insights into these disorders. The discovery of specific genes associated with these disorders provides significant clues to their biological basis and points to possible molecular targets for novel therapies.
We still have a long way to go but for the first time we can point to specific genes and biological processes.
Recently, scientists have explored ways to improve the efficiency of solar-thermal harvesting by developing new solar receivers and by working with nanofluids.
This is a completely intuitive and natural way to move your robotic fingers says Harry Asada the Ford Professor of Engineering in MIT s Department of Mechanical engineering.
and grab an orange in a different way than say a mug just two general patterns of motion are used to grasp objects:
and adds to the many ways that robotics can change our perceptions of ourselves. Down the road Asada says the robot may also be scaled down to a less bulky form.
Wearable robots are a way to bring the robot closer to our daily life e
Frustrated and standing half awake he contemplated ways to harness power from all around to charge the phone.
this didn t change#until companies began bringing Wireless internet access into hotel lobbies libraries airports and other public places.
You can have a charging surface wherever you go from a kitchen counter to your workplace to airport lounge
You as a user have absolutely no way of knowing what that means. The permissions don t tell you anything.
A navigation application might for instance be authorized to identify the subway stop or parking garage nearest the user.
I don t see another way of making big data compatible with constitutional rights and human rights s
But MIT researchers have discovered a new inexpensive way of getting the two fluids apart again.
an ingenious process that makes large holes on one side that penetrate most of the way through the material providing little resistance to flow as well as nanoscale holes on the other surface in contact with the emulsion to be separated.
This noninvasive approach could pave the way to using optogenetics in human patients to treat epilepsy and other neurological disorders,
or impossible to achieve in any other way. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, MIT Charles E. Reed Faculty Initiatives Fund, the Wallonie-Bruxelles International, the Belgian American Education Foundation,
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