Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Over the coming weeks, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range of voices from people helping to build Africa’s tech future. This week, mobile innovator Ken Banks argues that technology has become a vital tool in the fight against poverty. Read More »

Aaron was one of our community's best and brightest, and he acheived great things in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to major technological developments (like RSS), and an all-around Internet freedom rock star. As Wired noted, the world will miss out on decades of magnificent things Aaron would have accomplished had his time not been cut short. Read More »

Every year, more than 3,500 people in the United States swallow button batteries. Between 2005 and 2014, doctors reported 11,940 cases of children under the age of 6 who ingested a battery. Swallowed batteries don’t cause harm if they are digested normally. But if they become lodged in the tissue of the stomach or esophagus, they can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, a chemical that burns and damages tissue. But now researchers at MIT have developed a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule...

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[...] We academics rarely think about our work as a commodity, the mechanisms through which the public is denied access, and the profits corporations make by selling that access to mostly cash strapped public universities at exorbitant prices. But Swartz’s death is an indication that academic work is a high stakes game that can leave many of us with blood on our hands. Read More »

Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It’s similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object. At the moment, primary applications of lidar are autonomous vehicles and robotics, but also include terrain and ocean mapping and UAVs...

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A couple of weeks ago, it looked like the federal government would (finally) start releasing what amounts to thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the Secret Service's investigation into Aaron Swartz. [...] Read More »