geekosystem

Why didn't Yogurt see the merchandising potential of Spaceballs, the robotics competition? Students from the U.S. and Europe can sign up to be challenged in what is described as "the ultimate robot game" to navigate floating spheres through the International Space Station in culmination of the Zero Robotics programming competition. I'm not even allowed to compete, and I'm excited about this.

After last night's shooting at MIT and the ongoing manhunt that followed,  the entire city of Boston and the surrounding area are on lockdown this morning. Moments ago, Governor Deval Patrick spoke to reporters urging people in the area to stay in their homes with their doors locked until further notice. While one of the shooters has died of wounds sustained in a gunfight with police, another remains at large and is considered armed and dangerous.

Things are still becoming clear, but multiple sources are reporting a shooter on MIT's campus. As of a little before 11:00 Eastern, one MIT police officer has been shot and killed, per the Cambridge Police. Updating

Taking cues from animals when designing robots is all the rage right now, and the big cats have been a particularly popular creature among engineers. We've looked at fast models designed by DARPA and air-powered examples from Osaka University in Japan. Not to be outdone, researchers in MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab have been hard at work on their cheetah-bot for more than a year, but unlike other labs that are aiming to mimic the feline's famous fleetness of foot, Sangbae Kim and his team at MIT are concentrating on building a more energy-efficient robot that can go farther on less power.

A new analysis of the surface of Mercury has revealed that the planet closest to the Sun was once totally badass. The results of a study by researchers at MIT suggest that at one point, some billions of years ago, the planet hosted a rolling ocean of flowing magma.

Aaron Swartz's suicide last week was just the beginning. The public outcry from the tech community has been massive, with a petition to remove the prosecuting attorney for Aaron's case, one Carmen Ortiz, from office hitting the required number of signatures for an official White House response relatively quickly. In large part, a majority of these complaints center around the opinion that the prosecution was overzealous at best. Ortiz, for her part, has remained mum on the subject. Until last night, that is. Her office has released an official statement on the matter of Swartz's prosecution and, uh, it's... definitely something.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, and while no one but Swartz will ever truly know why, many have speculated that the legal troubles he was facing were a factor. He was being aggressively prosecuted for unlawfully obtaining information and recklessly damaging a protected computer after he made repeated efforts to steal files from JSTOR. The District Attorney leading the case against him was D.A. Carmen Ortiz, and the We the People petition to have her fired has already hit the required number of signatures needed to receive a White House response.

The hacker group Anonymous defaced pages of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) site just hours after the school announced it would launch a full investigation into their role in Aaron Swartz's death. Swartz committed suicide on Friday while facing millions of dollars in fines and up to 50 years in prison for stealing documents from MIT and academic database JSTOR. In response, Anonymous has publicly called for the reform of computer crime laws and prosecution, and they've been busy the last few days petitioning the White House to classify DDoS attacks as a form of protest while also engaging in this hack of MIT.

We all learned in elementary school that the three states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas. Then if you took science classes in high school you probably learned plasma was a state of matter too. For most people, it stops there, but there are actually a lot more states matter can get itself into, and science just went and found a new one. MIT researchers have discovered a new state of matter, complete with its own unique form of magnetism. We can't wait to see what the Insane Clown Posse has to say about this.

A contingent of MIT researchers working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) think they've found something no one has ever seen in the depths of the reams of data provided by the LHC's particle smashups, and no, it's not the Higgs boson, because jeez, you guys, there's more to life than the Higgs boson, you know? By studying collision patterns in heavy metals, researchers think they may be seeing the first signs of a theorized state of matter known as color glass condensate, which could be the result of particles colliding at near-light speed entering a state of quantum entanglement, becoming inexplicably connected to one another.

You may think of guinea pigs as just furry little machines designed to process alfalfa into poop, but they are so much more than that! They are furry little poop machines that also make convenient batteries, like potatoes, that have fur and squeal! It's not just them, either -- pretty much any mammal can be turned into a battery, courtesy of our highly conductive inner ears, meaning the plot of The Matrix just got more plausible.

The potential for a huge asteroid impact is something that doesn't just concern science fiction these days. Scientists have spent a number of hours pondering exactly how the world might deal with an incoming catastrophe from space. Somehow blowing up any wayward asteroids is a constant suggestion in popular culture, but the reality is that an explosion might just create more debris with which to deal. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT grad student, has suggested that we should instead fire two volleys of paintballs at any asteroid on a collision course.

You may be reading this while you're slowly updating a Steam game or watching a buffering Netflix show on your PS3 even though you pay for a fairly speedy Internet. Regardless of how far we've come regarding Internet speed, and how our phones can watch television shows while we wait in line at the bank, there's always something left to be desired when it comes to Internet speed. The maximum speed provided by an Ethernet cable is often preferred to the ease, but slower maximum available speed of a wireless signal, but with the addition of a bit of algebra to clear of network clogging, Wi-Fi signals may become much faster without the addition of any new hardware.

Carbon nanotubes could be a great way to detect toxic gases in environments from hospitals to mines. So far, though, the detectors have been too expensive and difficult to produce to put into wide practice. That could change thanks to the work of a team at MIT who have developed a new method of deploying the nanotubes, which can be tweaked to detect many different types of gases. By compressing the tubes into a graphite-like substance, the ream has made crafting a nanotube gas detector as easy as drawing a line with a mechanical pencil.

It's unfortunate that social media popularity doesn't always translate to popularity in meatspace. In order to connect these disparate parts, Melissa Chow, Phil Seaton, and Andy Payne from MIT have created the Like-A-Hug vest. Specifically, the vest inflates to simulate a hug whenever someone "Likes" the wearer's photos, videos, or status updates on their connected Facebook account. So not only can you look silly, but everyone can tell just how forever alone you are when it never inflates.