This 3D printer can watch itself fabricate objects
Computer vision enables contact-free 3D printing, letting engineers print with high-performance materials they couldn’t use before.
MIT physicists turn pencil lead into “gold”
Thin flakes of graphite can be tuned to exhibit three important properties.
MIT engineers are on a failure-finding mission
The team’s new algorithm finds failures and fixes in all sorts of autonomous systems, from drone teams to power grids.
In online news, do mouse clicks speak louder than words?
Partisan media might deepen political polarization, but we should measure people’s media habits more carefully before drawing conclusions, researchers say.
How “blue” and “green” appeared in a language that didn’t have words for them
People of a remote Amazonian society who learned Spanish as a second language began to interpret colors in a new way, an MIT study has found.
How adults understand what kids are saying
It’s not easy to parse young children’s words, but adults’ beliefs about what children want to communicate helps make it possible, a new study finds.
Wobbly gel mat trains muscle cells to work together
The vibrating platform could be useful for growing artificial muscles to power soft robots and testing therapies for neuromuscular diseases.
Soft optical fibers block pain while moving and stretching with the body
The fibers could help with testing treatments for nerve-related pain.
MIT receives major National Science Foundation grant for quantum science
Center for Ultracold Atoms gets funding boost to “punch through tough scientific barriers and see what's on the other side.”
From a five-layer graphene sandwich, a rare electronic state emerges
A newly discovered type of electronic behavior could help with packing more data into magnetic memory devices.
New technique helps robots pack objects into a tight space
Researchers coaxed a family of generative AI models to work together to solve multistep robot manipulation problems.
Study: Deep neural networks don’t see the world the way we do
Images that humans perceive as completely unrelated can be classified as the same by computational models.
Practicing mindfulness with an app may improve children’s mental health
New research suggests daily mindfulness training at home helped reduce kids’ stress levels and negative emotions.
Boom, crackle, pop: Sounds of Earth’s crust
MIT scientists find the sounds beneath our feet are fingerprints of rock stability.