Stacy Shepard writes for Boston Magazine about FitBark, a product created by MIT alumnus Davide Rossi that monitors a dog’s activity and health statistics. “Our pets are full members of the family, and we needed a way to monitor how they are doing,” says Rossi.
In an article examining graphene, John Colapinto of The New Yorker highlights Prof. Tomas Palacios’ work integrating graphene into everyday objects. “Rather than using graphene to improve existing applications, as Tour’s lab mostly does, Palacios is trying to build devices for a future world,” writes Colapinto.
Cynthia Graber of Scientific American reports that MIT researchers have developed a new technique that turns a smartphone into a sensor that can detect hazardous gases and environmental pollutants. "The method was tested with ammonia, cyclohexanone and hydrogen peroxide. And the tags could sense the substances at levels of a few parts per million,” reports Graber.
“There’s an enormous richness of information by looking in the water that’s indicative of what’s going in a city in a real-time fashion,” says Prof. Eric Alm in an interview with Wudan Yan of The Daily Beast of his idea to examine public health by tracking the transmission of pathogens in sewers.
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr profiles the work of Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at the MIT Media Lab, Pentland’s new book, “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lesson From a New Science,” argues that data collected about everyday human interaction can be used to accelerate the pace of innovation.