geekosystem

There's always a lot of fuss about getting other things to go as fast or faster than the speed of light. But what about changing the speed of light? Is there anything useful we could do by slowing light down rather than speeding things up? As it turns out, there are all kinds of benefits to be had from slowing light down and making it easier to capture, which is why MIT has been working on nanotech "metamaterials" that can do just that: Slow down the speed of light.

Renowned as a premiere institute of higher learning for the sundry sciences, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a new program that will bring a free version of one of its classes online. The program is called MITx, and the first of its fully automated courses kicks off this fall with 6.002x Circuits and Electronics. In addition to no costs, there are no prerequisites, anyone anywhere can sign up, and will receive a certificate upon completion. Seems like everyone is giving away university courses these days, huh?

In a bid to get some insight into how it feels to be an aging member of American society without having to wait to get old, researchers at MIT's Agelab have developed a suit that will make you feel like a 75-year-old when you wear it. The suit, called AGNES --a pained acronym for "Age Gain Now Empathy System"-- aims to accurately recreate the experience of being elderly through the use of various bands and other gadgets that do everything from mimic joint stiffness to curve the spine. Think "Harrison Bergeron." The suit does basically everything except give you stories from "back in your day."

When you think of intuitive forms of transportation, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably a self-balancing, motorized unicycle. No? Well then your mind is broken. Such a device does, in fact, exist, having been built by MIT student Stephen Boyer. While the unicycle is motorized in every sense of the word, it is not exactly as self-balancing as you might expect. It has the ability to balance on the axis parallel to the direction of travel, but not perpendicular. It'll keep you from falling backwards, but not to the side. Essentially, the balance assist makes it comparable to riding a bike.

High-speed cameras are pretty awesome. So awesome, in fact, that Discovery has an entire series devoted to just shooting things with them. Some of the more impressive ones will capture around 40,000 frames per second, but a new camera developed by Andreas Velten and Ramesh Raskar at MIT blows that out of the water with an almost unbelievable 1 trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to capture footage of traveling photons.

From the second I got behind the wheel for the first time, everyone was always reminding me -- annoyingly -- that it doesn't matter how safely I drive; I needed to be aware of other drives who might not be driving safely. Fortunately, that never really applied to me because I'm a pretty awful driver myself. If you aren't and you want to try and spot drivers like me so you can avoid us, MIT has been working on an algorithm that might be able to help you out. It can spot drivers that are likely to run a red light.

Spell check pretty much revolutionized writing in a word processor. You used to have to know how to spell things if you wanted to look like you had a brain, now you just have to sound it out, get it close enough, and let the computer do the rest. This is something I freekewntly frequentely frequently do. Now that that's been done, and grammar checking is about as good as we can expect it to get (not good enough!), where do we go from here? How about a fact checker? That's what MIT student Dan Schultz is working on: An algorithm that can be used to fact check written articles. An Internet lie detector of sorts.

Ostriches are famous the world over for being fast runners, and also some of the most evil, foul-tempered creatures on the planet. That speed has got the people at MIT and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition interested as they work to develop FastRunner, a bipedal ostrichbot capable of moving incredibly fast over land. As far as the ill-tempered nature of the robot's natural analog, that might perk some interest at DARPA, who are apparently fostering the bot's development. The challenge was laid down by DARPA, the military research organization that brought you the Internet and BigDog, to build a robot that can run at sustained speeds of 25mph. FastRunner, though still in development, is predicted easily match that goal thanks to an incredible leg design.

According to researchers at MIT, graphene generates an electrical current when struck by light. If you aren't familiar, graphene is something of a miracle material. It's basically a one-atom thick sheet of carbon that manages to come in sheets as thin as paper while being as strong as steel. That's already pretty impressive, so the ability to generate electricity from light is just icing on the cake.

The way it works is that when hit by light, pretty much any kind of light, graphene generates a hot carrier response. This means that the electrons of the molecules in the graphene sheet gain enough energy to start moving (creating the current) but the carbon underneath still manages to stay cool.

We're getting to the point where smartphones can do everything PCs do and more. They play and store media, let us read emails, surf the web, take pictures, so why not give them another challenge and let them help us drive our cars? A new technology, SignalGuru, is aiming to do just that and the results are looking promising, according to researchers from MIT and Princeton.

The main thing SignalGuru tries to do is help you pace yourself so that you can time traffic lights perfectly, just like you do out of sheer luck every now and again. SignalGuru, through the use of a smartphone's camera, GPS and traffic signal data, might be able to make this an everyday occurrence by anticipating when a dumb (fixed interval) light will change with a margin of error around two-thirds of a second and when a smart (varies based on traffic flow) light will change with a margin of one to two seconds.

Some of the biggest human health threats facing the world today come from viruses which can cause anything from the common cold to deadly hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. Over the years, researchers have struggled to find an efficient way to treat viral infections, leaving many people to struggle with disease. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced the creation of a broad spectrum treatment for viral infections that works by killing just the cells in the body infected with the virus. The research was led by a team from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and was published in the journal PLoS One. Invented by researcher Todd Rider, the treatment is a drug called DRACOs (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizers). It was tested on human cells in a lab and in mice against 15 different viruses and was effective against all of them, including the common cold, H1N1 (swine flu), influenza, polio, and dengue fever.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a link between problems with how dyslexics hear language and how the brain processes that information. Dyslexia is commonly regarded as a visual processing problem, with sufferers mixing up written letters and words. But, researchers now believe that the reading difficulty characteristic of dyslexia is merely part of a larger overall problem with how the brain processes language. Published in the journal Science, the research led by professor of cognitive neuroscience John Gabrieli, and graduate student Tyler Perrachione examined the ability of people with and without dyslexia to recognize voices. The researchers asked participants to match a voice speaking in English and Mandarin to an avatar. Non-dyslexics were able to do this 70% of the time in English and 50% of the time in Mandarin. Dyslexics were only able to match the voice correctly 50% of the time regardless of language.

Yesterday, Aaron Swartz, former co-owner of Reddit, was arrested for downloading upwards of 4.5 million articles from the JSTOR academic archive, willfully evading MIT's attempts to stop him. The charges, according to Ars Technica, allege that Swartz "unlawfully obtain[ed] information" and "recklessly damag[ed]" a protected computer. Considering JSTOR is an academic, electronic library and most schools pay for unlimited access, these charges straddle a weird line between Swartz's potentially authorized uses and his suspected unauthorized intent. David Segal, an executive from the advocacy group Demand Progress that Swartz helped found, likened the charges to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library." While this may technically be the case, Swartz's methods of downloading this articles were decidedly suspicious, and clearly, defiantly against the wishes of MIT.

Scientists at MIT have undertaken the righteous goal of trying to raise computer literacy. No, not how many people understand and can use computers, but rather, how well computers can read. In their experiment, they "handed" a computer a copy of the instruction manual for the strategy game Civilization II , gave it ample time to read up (2 or 3 seconds if Short Circuit is any indication) and told it to start playing. Impressively enough, it proceeded to win 79% of the games it played, which is, according to my meticulous calculations, almost as high as a human geek. This is a really impressive example of software that can be used not only to take in and parse text, but also put it into some sort of context and use it, instead of just storing it somewhere. That last bit is what will probably lead to the robot apocalypse. Civ isn't a particularly simple game either, which highlights the computer's ability to construct a pretty solid algorithm from words that were never intended for a computer. Also, it's worth mentioning that the instruction manual must have been exhaustive and extremely well written in order to serve as an apt introduction of Civ to an entity that probably didn't even know what a game was before it started reading. Props to you, manual writer, may your future projects not lead to robots learning how to effectively defeat humans 79% of the time. (via Gamasutra)

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for creating solar cells that is significantly easier and less-expensive than current production methods by directly printing the components of the solar cell onto pieces of paper or fabric. The technique is conducted in a vacuum, and layers special "inks" in a specific pattern onto the flexible substrate (the paper or fabric on the bottom). The printed solar cell can be bent or folded without losing its ability to conduct electricity. Led by Professor of Chemical Engineering Karen Gleason, Professor of Electrical Engineering Vladimir Bulovic, and graduate student Miles Barr, the researchers developed a solar cell creation method that differs from current methods in several ways. The printable way uses vapors and relatively low temperatures (less than 120 degrees Celsius) compared to the liquids and high heat needed with current methods.