and reuse it in photovoltaic panels that could go on producing power for decades. Amazingly because the perovskite photovoltaic material takes the form of a thin film just half a micrometer thick,
When the panels are retired eventually, the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,
Some companies are already gearing up for commercial production of perovskite photovoltaic panels, which could otherwise require new sources of lead.
This week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT report that they have delivered successfully small RNA therapies in a clinically relevant mouse model of lung cancer to slow
This mouse model reflects many of the hallmarks of human lung cancer and is used often in preclinical trials.
Researchers then compared mouse survival time among four treatment options:##no treatment; treatment with cisplatin a small-molecule standard-care chemotherapy drug;
We took the best mouse model for lung cancer we could find we found the best nanoparticle we could use
Photo courtesy of the researchersfull Screen As soon as researchers successfully demonstrated that this system could work in cells other than bacteria Niles started to think about using it to manipulate Plasmodium falciparum.
what s called a cyclic fold where you have a bunch of panels connected together in a cycle
But as Demaine explains in origami 180-degree folds are used generally to join panels together.
With 150-degree folds the panels won t quite touch but that s probably tolerable for many applications In the meantime Demaine is planning to revisit the theoretical analysis that was the basis of the researchers original folding algorithm to determine
To investigate the potential usefulness of CRISPR for creating mouse models of cancer the researchers first used it to knock out p53 and pten
Many models possiblethe researchers also used CRISPR to create a mouse model with an oncogene called beta catenin
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video.
In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof Glass in other experiments,
Michael Rubinstein of Microsoft Research, who did his Phd with Freeman; and Gautham Mysore of Adobe Research.
Reconstructing audio from video requires that the frequency of the video samples the number of frames of video captured per second be higher than the frequency of the audio signal.
Commodity hardware In other experiments however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most camerassensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.
it less expensive to design the sensor hardware so that it reads off the measurements of one row of photodetectors at a time.
#Vision-correcting displays Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects no glasses (or contact lenses) required.
The technique could lead to dashboard-mounted GPS displays that farsighted drivers can consult without putting their glasses on
The first spectacles were invented in the 13th century says Gordon Wetzstein a research scientist at the Media Lab and one of the display's co-creators.
We have a different solution that basically puts the glasses on the display rather than on your head.
Wetzstein and his colleagues describe their display in a paper they're presenting in August at Siggraph the premier graphics conference.
The display is a variation on a glasses-free 3-D technology also developed by the Camera Culture group.
Essentially the new display simulates an image at the correct focal distance somewhere between the display and the viewer's eye.
The difficulty with this approach is that simulating a single pixel in the virtual image requires multiple pixels of the physical display.
which light would arrive from the same image displayed on the screen. So the physical pixels projecting light to the right side of the pupil have to be offset to the left
The use of multiple on-screen pixels to simulate a single virtual pixel would drastically reduce the image resolution.
and colleagues solved in their 3-D displays which also had to project different images at different angles.
The MIT and Berkeley researchers were able to adapt that algorithm to the problem of vision correction so the new display incurs only a modest loss in resolution.
In the researchers prototype however display pixels do have to be masked from the parts of the pupil for which they re not intended.
That requires that a transparency patterned with an array of pinholes be laid over the screen blocking more than half the light it emits.
instead using two liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) in parallel. Carefully tailoring the images displayed on the LCDS to each other allows the system to mask perspectives
Wetzstein envisions that commercial versions of a vision-correcting screen would use the same technique.
Indeed he says the same screens could both display 3-D content and correct for vision defects all glasses-free.
MIT researchers explain how their vision-correcting display technology works. The key thing is they seem to have cracked the contrast problem Dainty adds.
Dainty believes that the most intriguing application of the technology is in dashboard displays. Most people over 50 55 quite probably see in the distance fine
whose advanced emotion-tracking software called Affdex is based on years of MIT Media Lab research.
We believe there s an opportunity to sit between any human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction point capture data
In using Affdex Affectiva recruits participants to watch advertisements in front of their computer webcams tablets and smartphones.
or confusion and pushes the data to a cloud server where Affdex aggregates the results from all the facial videos (sometimes hundreds)
Importantly the software looks for hooking the viewers in the first third of an advertisement by noting increased attention
But if a smirk subtle asymmetric lip curls separate from smiles comes at a moment when information appears on the screen it may indicate skepticism or doubt.
As a Phd student at Cambridge university in the early 2000s el Kaliouby began developing facial-coding software.
if you showed the computer an expression of a person that s somewhat surprised or subtly shocked it wouldn t recognize it el Kaliouby says.
-and with a big push by Frank Moss then the Media Lab s director they soon ditched the wearable prototype to build a cloud-based version of the software founding Affectiva in 2009.
Kaliouby says training its software s algorithms to discern expressions from all different face types and skin colors.
and can avoid tracking any other movement on screen. One of Affectiva s long-term goals is to usher in a mood-aware Internet to improve users experiences.
Sometime in the future this could mean computer games that adapt in difficulty and other game variables based on user reaction.
For this the software indicates for instance if a student is bored frustrated or focused which is especially valuable for prerecorded lectures el Kaliouby says.
#Making the cut Diode lasers used in laser pointers barcode scanners DVD players and other low-power applications are perhaps the most efficient compact and low-cost lasers available.
a 3-foot cube that comes with multiple laser engines a control computer power supplies and an output head for welding
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month the Broad Institute is today home to a community of more than 2000 members including physicians biologists chemists computer scientists engineers staff and representatives of many other disciplines.
Now this wireless electricity (or Witricity) technology licensed through the researchers startup Witricity Corp.#is coming to mobile devices electric vehicles and potentially a host of other applications.
But it could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware which would lower costs for manufacturers and consumers.
Last month Witricity signed a licensing agreement with Intel to integrate Witricity technology into computing devices powered by Intel.
At present Witricity technology#charges devices#at around 6 to 12 inches with roughly 95 percent efficiency#12 watts for mobile devices and up to 6. 6 kilowatts for cars.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen The Witricity technology can charge an electric car with the vehicle parked about a foot above the transmitting pad.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen Stronger couplingsimilar wireless charging technologies have been around for some time. For instance traditional induction charging
An expectationthese days Gruzen sees wireless charging as analogous to the evolution of a similar technology Wifi that he witnessed in the early 2000s as senior vice president of global notebook business at Hewlett packard.
At the time Wifi capabilities were implemented rarely into laptops; this didn t change#until companies began bringing Wireless internet access into hotel lobbies libraries airports and other public places.
It could be encrypted an server in the cloud but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk.
Any cellphone app online service or big data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store
and Samuel Wang a software engineer at Foursquare who was a graduate student in the Department of Electrical engineering
The result of this screen, Jaws, retained its red-light sensitivity but had a much stronger photocurrent enough to shut down neural activity. his exemplifies how the genomic diversity of the natural world can yield powerful reagents that can be of use in biology and neuroscience,
the researchers were able to shut down neuronal activity in the mouse brain with a light source outside the animal head.
Roska and Busskamp tested the Jaws protein in the mouse retina and found that it more closely resembled the eye natural opsins
where the ability to adjust the texture of panels to minimize drag at different speeds could increase fuel efficiency,
or processing units a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes.
Daya intends to load them with a version of the Linux operating system, modified to run on 36 cores,
At that point, she plans to release the blueprints for the chip, written in the hardware description language Verilog,
That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),
Remote access to a Web server would be controlled much the way it is now through passwords and encryption.
But every time the server transmitted a piece of sensitive data it would also send a description of the restrictions on the data s use.
And it would log the transaction using only the URI somewhere in a network of encrypted special-purpose servers.
It would be up to software developers to adhere to its specifications when designing their systems. But HTTPA compliance could become a selling point for companies offering services that handle private data.
On every HTTP request the server should say OK here are the usage restrictions for this resource and log the transaction in the network of special-purpose servers.
The network of servers is where the heavy lifting happens. When the data owner requests an audit the servers work through the chain of derivations identifying all the people who have accessed the data and what they ve done with it.
Seneviratne uses a technology known as distributed hash tables the technology at the heart of peer-to-peer networks like Bittorrent to distribute the transaction logs among the servers.
Redundant storage of the same data on multiple servers serves two purposes: First it ensures that
if some servers go down data will remain accessible. And second it provides a way to determine
whether anyone has tried to tamper with the transaction logs for a particular data item such as to delete the record of an illicit use.
A server whose logs differ from those of its peers would be easy to ferret out.
Seneviratne used 300 servers on Planetlab to store the transaction logs; in experiments the system efficiently tracked down data stored across the network
In practice audit servers could be maintained by a grassroots network much like the servers that host Bittorrent files or log Bitcoin transactions s
That why KGS aims to ake buildings betterwith cloud-based software, called Clockworks, that collects existing data on a building equipment specifically in HVAC (heating, ventilation,
The software then translates the data into graphs, metrics, and text that explain monetary losses, where it available for building managers, equipment manufacturers,
Phd 0. The software is now operating in more than 300 buildings across nine countries, collecting more than 2 billion data points monthly.
Last month, MIT commissioned the software for more than 60 of its own buildings, monitoring more than 7, 000 pieces of equipment over 10 million square feet.
Previously, in a yearlong trial for one MIT building, the software saved MIT $286, 000. Benefits, however, extend beyond financial savings,
The software can also help buildings earn additional incentives by participating in utility programs. e have major opportunities in some utility territories,
which is a finer level of granularity than meter-level analytics software that may extract,
But it also helps the software produce rapid, intelligent analytics such as accurate graphs, metrics, and text that spell out problems clearly.
it helps the software to rapidly equate data with monetary losses. hen we identify that there a fault with the right data,
KGS Buildingsfoundation The KGS cofounders met as participants in the MIT entry for the 2007 Solar Decathlon an annual competition where college teams build small-scale, solar-powered homes to display at the National Mall
Throughout 2010, they began trialing software at several locations, including MIT. They found guidance among the seasoned entrepreneurs at MIT Venture Mentoring Service learning to fail fast,
and advancing its software into other applications. About 180 new buildings were added to Clockworks in the past year;
by the end of 2014, KGS projects it could deploy its software to 800 buildings. arger companies are starting to catch on,
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
and Justin Burkhart SM 0 FINSIX has developed the world smallest laptop adapter, called the Dart.
The 65-watt Dart can power most laptops, smartphones, and tablets. By November, FINSIX aims to deliver its first shipment of around 4, 500 Darts to Kickstarter backers and other customers.
flat-screen TVS, gaming consoles, laptops, electric bikes, and air conditioners, while reducing the cost of manufacturing.
the company started focusing on laptop adapters. In traditional adapters, an array of switches flip to one state and take in AC voltage from a wall outlet,
In that analogy, the bucket is the adapter that collects the water (electricity) from a full tank (outlet) and dumps it into an empty tank (laptop battery.
which can then be recombined using a computer algorithm to recreate the 3-D structure. f you have one light-emitting molecule in your sample,
#Glasses-free 3-D projector Over the past three years, researchers in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab have refined steadily a design for a glasses-free, multiperspective, 3-D video screen,
which are like tiny liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) positioned between the light source and the lens. Patterns of light and dark on the first modulator effectively turn it into a bank of slightly angled light emitters that is,
The screen combines two lenticular lenses the type of striated transparent sheets used to create crude 3-D effects in,
Exploiting redundancy For every frame of video, each modulator displays six different patterns which together produce eight different viewing angles:
But like the researchersprototype monitors, the projector takes advantage of the fact that, as you move around an object,
but by tailoring their algorithm to the architecture of the graphics processing units designed for video games,
One of the problems with LCD screens is that they don enable rue black A little light always leaks through even the darkest regions of the display. ormally you have contrast of,
and project through it and use this software algorithm, and you end up with a 4k image.
is the prototype screen. here is this invariant of optical systems that says that if you take the area of the plane
We couldn figure out a way around that. hey came up with a screen that instead of stretching the image
At Greentown employees engage in computer modeling and design build electronics and circuit boards develop algorithms
Among the tools that computer scientists are developing to make the profusion of video more useful are algorithms for activity recognition or determining
At the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June Hamed Pirsiavash a postdoc at MIT and his former thesis advisor Deva Ramanan of the University of California at Irvine will present a new activity
They found that according to metrics standard in the field of computer vision their algorithm identified new instances of the same activities more accurately than its predecessors.
#Computer system automatically solves word problems Researchers in MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory, working with colleagues at the University of Washington, have developed a new computer system that can automatically solve the type of word problems common in introductory algebra classes.
In the near term, the work could lead to educational tools that identify errors in studentsreasoning
One is the computer algebra system Macsyma, whose initial development at MIT in the 1960s was a milestone in artificial-intelligence research.
we need ways to monitor neural function deep in the brain with spatial, temporal, and functional precision, he says.
And we have a solution. ompared to our competitors at the panel level, we can recover twice as much energy under partial shading conditions, at a fraction of existing costs, added Arthur Chang,
Existing solutions for partially shaded solar panels optimize power at the panel level. But these bulky oxesrely on costly energy storage components
The idea is that providing power balance for individual PV cells instead of for an entire panel allows for finer tuning of power optimization. hen youe at the cell level,
which houses computers for automation and control, and expandable 20,000-gallon treatment units. In these units, microbes called xoelectrogensexecute a unique process, electromethanogenesis which is being used for the first time ever in treating wastewater.
The researchers also believe this test could be exploited to screen for new drugs that inhibit
and to monitor whether treatments are having the desired effect according to the researchers who describe the device in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 21.
and power throughout all the stages of a gait using software created by Herr s group a process the company calls Personal Bionic Tuning.
Several of these prototype designs with exposed mechanical parts and looping wires are on permanent display at the MIT Media Lab. Still today Herr can remember stepping into the group s first bionic leg prototype and then back
Herr s experience commercializing a computer-controlled knee joint designed by his group for the Icelandic company Ossur inspired him to launch iwalk in 2006.
One could just bolt these pieces together to produce a humanoid hardware platform Herr says.
based on computer analysis. But translating that theoretical work into a practical material proved daunting: In order to reach the desired energy density the amount of energy that can be stored in a given weight
what their computer simulations showed they would need, the material nevertheless seemed to deliver the heat storage they were aiming for.
and privacy filters for display screens. The work is described in a paper appearing this week in the journal Science,
The filtering could also be applied to display screens on phones or computers so only those viewing from directly in front could see them.
Using a computer algorithm that traces the shapes of neurons and groups them based on structural similarity,
the researchers sorted more than 350 mouse retinal neurons into 15 types, including six that were unidentified previously.
Using a computer algorithm, they traced along the many branches, known as dendrites, that extend from each cell to connect with other cells.
the researchers used a computer program to align and condense each one so that the arbors were represented by smaller,
the computer program correctly classified all of the known neurons. Among the randomly selected neurons, some ended up being grouped with the known types,
Results can be plugged into the company software, which tracks contaminated products and can provide analytics on
and paper or spreadsheets to track contamination hich makes it nearly impossible to gather large amounts of data,
He used the lab s 3-D printer to build the mold in which he cast the fish s tail
It would be impractical to do this kind of large-scale protein screen in patients, but it could be possible to test samples for certain proteins using antibodies,
Custom software reads the driver s braking habits and optimizes the system. The startup also collects operational data from the vehicles to inform fleet managers of the best vehicles for the technology usually ones traveling in the stop
For example the program has produced the first of a planned series of science centers a simple concrete building outfitted with computers
The program links MIT teachers and mentors to Tibetan community programs through Skype supplemented by regular travel by Dalai lama Center staff alumni and students who among other work teach weeklong leadership
Patients play a video game by maneuvering the robot arm, with the robot assisting as needed. While the robot has mainly been used as a form of physical therapy,
#Cochlear implants with no exterior hardware Cochlear implants medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf.
low-power signal processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware.
Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to dispensing with the skull-mounted hardware.
and found a low-power way to implement it in hardware. Two of their collaborators at MEEI Konstantina Stankovic, an ear surgeon who co-led the study with Chandrakasan,
The MIT researchers are now using representational similarity analysis to study the accuracy of computer models of vision by comparing brain scan data with the modelspredictions of how vision works.
#Bringing the world reboot-less updates It s an annoyance for the individual computer user:
You ve updated your operating system and now you need to reboot. This is so the computer can switch to the modified source code.
Imagine however having to update and reboot hundreds or thousands of computers operating in large companies and organizations:
It can have a significant impact in lost time and money as computers and online services shut down sometimes for hours.
To avoid downtime organizations will usually wait for low-traffic periods to update but this can leave the servers outdated or vulnerable to cyber attacks.
In 2008 Jeff Arnold 07 MENG 08 along with a team of MIT computer scientists and engineers began solving this issue by developing
and commercializing software called Ksplice that automatically applies patches (security updates or bug fixes) to an operating system on the fly without requiring a reboot.
Based on Arnold s award-winning MIT master s thesis the novel software compares changes between the old
and updated code and implements those changes into a running Linux kernel an operating system s core data-processing component.
In essence it does something that could normally be achieved only by shutting down the operating system. The software also incorporates novel techniques that remove the need for programmer intervention with the code (a trademark of performing updates without Ksplice)
which decreases the cost and risk of error Arnold says. The aim is to allow administrators the benefit of the update
while eliminating both the cost and downtime for the users Arnold says. After winning the 2009 MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for the software Arnold co-founded Ksplice Inc. with Waseem Daher 07 MENG 08 Tim Abbott 07 SM 08
and Anders Kaseorg 08 in Cambridge to launch it as a commercial product. Arnold served as the company s CEO.
In just 18 months Ksplice accumulated 700 customers independent firms government agencies and Fortune 500 companies that were running the software on more than 100000 servers.
Then the startup sold for an undisclosed amount to technology giant Oracle which is now providing the software to its Oracle Linux customers
which include banks retail firms and telecommunications companies worldwide. After the purchase the Ksplice team joined Oracle to help the company integrate the software in its products.
As of today Ksplice has only ever run on Linux operating systems. But Daher says the code is written in a way that should make it potentially expandable to other products such as Mac and Windows operating systems.
Object focusedthe process of updating running kernels is called hot updating or hot patching and predates Ksplice.
But Ksplice s novelty is that it constructs hot patches using the object code binary that a computer can understand instead of the source code computer instructions written
and modified as text by a programmer (such as in C++ or Java). Hot patching a program without Ksplice requires a programmer to construct replacement source code
or manually inspect the code to create an update. Programmers might also need to resolve ambiguity in the code say choosing the correct location in computer memory
when two or more software components have the same name. Ksplice however hot patches the object code using two novel techniques invented by Arnold.
The first called pre-post differencing creates object code before a patch (pre) and object code modified by the patch (post) on the fly.
It then compares the pre and post code to determine what code has been modified extracts the changed code
The second technique called run-pre matching computes the address in computer memory of ambiguous code by using custom computation to compare the pre code with the finalized running kernel (run code.
while the servers were in heavy use he delayed installing the update until the weekend.
This wait unfortunately resulted in a cyber attack that required reinstalling all the system software. That s what motivated
You can t bring servers down right away and can t wait until you have a chance to update
Arnold and Daher are now working on another software startup at the Cambridge Business Center and still keep in touch with the VMS they say.
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