The city of Amsterdam envisions a future where fleets of autonomous boats cruise its many canals to transport goods and people, collect trash, or self-assemble into floating stages and bridges. To further that vision, MIT researchers have given new capabilities to their fleet of robotic boats—which are being developed as part of an ongoing project—that…
Generating High-quality Single Photons for Quantum Computing
MIT researchers have designed a way to generate, at room temperature, more single photons for carrying quantum information. The design, they say, holds promise for the development of practical quantum computers. Quantum emitters generate photons that can be detected one at a time. Consumer quantum computers and devices could potentially leverage certain properties of those photons as…
Achieving Greater Efficiency for Fast Data Center Operations
Today’s data centers eat up and waste a good amount of energy responding to user requests as fast as possible, with only a few microseconds delay. A new system by MIT researchers improves the efficiency of high-speed operations by better assigning time-sensitive data processing across central processing unit (CPU) cores and ensuring hardware runs productively.…
Engineers Produce Smallest 3D Transistor Yet
Researchers from MIT and the University of Colorado have fabricated a 3-D transistor that’s less than half the size of today’s smallest commercial models. To do so, they developed a novel microfabrication technique that modifies semiconductor material atom by atom. The inspiration behind the work was to keep up with Moore’s Law, an observation made…
Simple, Scalable Wireless System Uses the RFID Tags on Billions of Products to Sense Contamination
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a wireless system that leverages the cheap RFID tags already on hundreds of billions of products to sense potential food contamination—with no hardware modifications needed. With the simple, scalable system, the researchers hope to bring food-safety detection to the general public. Food safety incidents have made headlines around the…
Fleets of Drones could Aid Searches for Lost Hikers
Finding lost hikers in forests can be a difficult and lengthy process, as helicopters and drones can’t get a glimpse through the thick tree canopy. Recently, it’s been proposed that autonomous drones, which can bob and weave through trees, could aid these searches. But the GPS signals used to guide the aircraft can be unreliable…
Machine-Learning System Determines the Fewest, Smallest Doses That Could Still Shrink Brain Tumors
MIT researchers are employing novel machine-learning techniques to improve the quality of life for patients by reducing toxic chemotherapy and radiotherapy dosing for glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is a malignant tumor that appears in the brain or spinal cord, and prognosis for adults is no more than five years. Patients…