Posts tagged with ‘mit’

Teenager from Sierra Leone impresses MIT with his home-built, spare parts radio station

At any age, what Kelvin Doe has managed to accomplish would be remarkable. The self-taught inventor from Sierra Leone literally goes through the trash to find parts to build batteries, a generator and an entire home FM radio station, under his on-air identity is DJ Focus. And he is only 15. Doe’s feats were brought to the attention of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, leading to his invitation to the university’s Visiting Practitioner’s Program — the youngest participant in its history. Even more impressive, Doe’s feats have real-life applications. Because a consistent source of electricity his hard to come by in many parts of Sierra Leone, Doe has also produced batteries to light homes in his neighborhood.

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Theory of Relativity as a game: “A Slower Speed of Light”

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. A custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics engine allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay.

LiquiGlide coating will one day provide for a smoother ketchup pour

Regardless of the fact that tomato ketchup is the consistency it is because people like thicker ketchup, MIT has developed a spray-on coating called LiquiGlide that will make things like slow pouring ketchup or mustard a thing of the past. Whew… glad that’s solved.

It turns out Smith and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at MIT hit upon the solution called LiquiGlide. It’s described as a “structured liquid” that can be sprayed on. It adheres as a solid, but provides a liquid-like lubrication that tackles that tenacious ketchup.

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MIT students turn a building into a giant game of Tetris

On April 20th, hackers at MIT converted the Green Building on campus into a giant playable game of Tetris.

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Lecture of the day: Walter Lewin, Physics I: Classical Mechanics

If you didn’t know that YouTube has a page chock full of awesome university lectures, this is your intro course. This is Dr. Walter Lewin of MIT starting his Physics I class from 1999. It’s all about an intro to physics, and specifically in this video, it’s about knowing your margin of error and uncertainty and working with testable principles, not assumptions.

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Meet Kombusto, MIT’s little interactive social dragon robot

Kombusto may be sort of cute or ugly, depending on your perpective, but he’s an interesting experiment in cloud robotics. Instead of just having one robot that learns from being played with, Kombusto learns from everyone that owns one, and as one learns, they all get smarter. Right now, one of these will cost you around $1000 from MIT, but in the near future, these kinds of social cloud based robots will not only be Christmas toys, but computers in your home or in your car.

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MIT invents radar that can see through concrete walls

Some clever guys from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory invented a machine that uses a radar array to “see” through a thick solid concrete wall that could possibly be used in urban warfare situations or search and rescue situations to try and determine if there might be people on the other side. As you can see from the video, it’s still a pretty rudimentary system, but it’s better than nothing.

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MIT Media Lab’s folding car could be the city car of the future

There are several companies that are trying to create smaller, more compact and more energy efficient city cars of the future, but the big brains at MIT have gone one step further, by creating a car that folds up to save parking. This particular car is just a model— nobody’s that small to fit in there. Maybe Verne Troyner, but he’s a drunk. I wouldn’t want him driving my prototype futuristic car.

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How do you get a TARDIS on the top of a building without being noticed? CalTech pranksters reveal their secrets

Last year, a group of students from CalTech managed to put a wooden model of the TARDIS on top of a building at MIT. In this video, their secrets are finally revealed.

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Thanks to Delsyd for the link