Latest MIT Stories

MIT researchers have developed a new algorithm that could prevent the midair collisions of up to 10 to 12 small aircraft every year. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated that by 2020, all commercial aircraft must be equipped with a new tracking system that broadcasts GPS data, providing more accurate location information than ground-based radar. The FAA has asked MIT researchers to lead the investigation of the system's limits and capacities in anticipation of the deadline. The...

MIT researchers have developed a device that can clip on to any smartphone and provide a diagnosis of cataracts within a few minutes. The standard test to detect cataracts requires a $5,000 piece of equipment called a slit lamp, as well as a trained physician to interpret its results. The new-inexpensive device scans the lens of the eye and creates a map showing its position, size, shape and density of cataracts, according to the researchers. Ramesh Raskar, the NEC Career Development...

Founded by an MIT grad and two professional California firefighters, FireWhat Inc. provides critical tools and necessary training materials to the emergency service industries. With a variety of site features ranging from wildland fire imagery to product reviews, this completely free platform is truly a game-changer for the Fire Service of tomorrow. Burlingame, CA (PRWEB) July 01, 2011 Today FireWhat Inc unveiled firewhat.com, a revolutionary new website, through which the company...

Researchers from MIT, the University of Waterloo and Tufts University have established the relationship between the number of squares in a Rubik's-cube-type puzzle and the maximum number of moves required to solve it.The team's evidence provides an efficient algorithm for solving a cube that is in its worst-case state. The researchers showed the maximum number of moves required to solve a Rubik's cube with N squares per row is proportional to N2/log N."That that's the answer, and not N2, is a...

According to MIT researchers, new fossils suggest life had a rapid recovery after a global freeze. Researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Smith College discovered hundreds of microscopic fossils in rocks dating back about 710 million years, which is around the time frame that the planet emerged from the "Snowball Earth" event. The team said new fossils are remnants of tiny organisms that survived the harsh post-glacial environment by building armor and reaching out with...

Geologists at MIT and Harvard have discovered fossils along the Alaska-Canada border that reveal protective plates for microscopic organisms.  Phoebe Cohen, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Francis Macdonald, an assistant professor of geology at Harvard University, spent two weeks chiseling out rock samples during the summer of 2007 in a remote mountain range in the Yukon.They brought the rocks back to Cambridge and made a surprising...

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Over the past two decades, scientists have shown that babies only a few months old have a solid grasp on basic rules of the physical world. They understand that objects can't wink in and out of existence, and that objects can't "teleport" from one spot to another.Now, an international team of researchers co-led by MIT's Josh Tenenbaum has found that infants can use that knowledge to form surprisingly sophisticated expectations of how novel situations will...

An international team of researchers found that infants can use their knowledge of the physical world to form sophisticated expectations of how novel situations unfold. The scientists developed a computational model of infant cognition that accurately predicts the infants' surprise at events that violate their conception of the physical world. The model calculates the probability of a particular event, given what it knows about how objects behave.  MIT's Josh Tenenbaum, co-leader of the...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- TechConnect World (www.techconnectworld.com) announced today that Harvard University's Office of Technology Development and the MIT Technology Licensing Office will present the Harvard and MIT Technology Showcase at TechConnect World, taking place June 13-16, 2011, at the Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, US. The Harvard and MIT Technology Showcase on June 14 is a unique opportunity to see faculty research presentations from both...

MIT neuroscientists have found that the most memorable photos taken are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human scale objects.  The researchers said that landscapes are the most forgettable images in most cases. "Pleasantness and memorability are not the same," MIT graduate student Phillip Isola, one of the lead authors of the paper, said in a statement.  This study is the first to model what makes an image memorable. "People did not think it was possible...