>> Expanding polymer enables self-folding without heating or immersion in water BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As 3-D printing has become a mainstream technology, industry and academic researchers have been investigating printable structures that will fold themselves into useful three-dimensional shapes when heated or immersed in
>> General-purpose technique sheds light on inner workings of neural nets trained to process language BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Artificial-intelligence research has been transformed by machine-learning systems called neural networks, which learn how to perform tasks by analyzing huge volumes of training
> Study finds faulty research creates a significant drop in use of prior published work BY PETER DIZIKES, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Life scientists who have published papers that are retracted by journals subsequently suffer a 10 percent drop in citations of their remaining work,
Flash-memory system could reduce power consumption of data center “caches” by 90 percent BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results
Approach may enable robots to move around hospitals, malls, and other areas with heavy foot traffic BY JENNIFER CHU, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Just as drivers observe the rules of the road, most pedestrians follow certain social codes when navigating a hallway or a crowded
Study explains conflicting results from other experiments, may lead to batteries with more energy per pound BY DAVID L CHANDLER, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Battery researchers agree that one of the most promising possibilities for future battery technology is the lithium-air (or lithium-oxygen) battery,
Findings suggest two mechanisms may have powered the moon’s ancient churning, molten core BY JENNIFER CHU, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — New evidence from ancient lunar rocks suggests that an active dynamo once churned within the molten metallic core of the moon, generating a magnetic field
New design boosts the power output of the best-performing chip-scale terahertz laser by 80 percent BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Terahertz radiation — the band of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and visible light — has promising applications in medical and industrial imaging
System can apply a range of styles in real-time, so that the viewfinder displays the enhanced image BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The data captured by today’s digital cameras is often treated as the raw material of a final image. Before uploading pictures
Software lets designers exploit the extremely high resolution of 3-D printers BY LARRY HARDESTY, MIT NEWS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Today’s 3-D printers have a resolution of 600 dots per inch, which means that they could pack a billion tiny cubes of different materials into a volume