As clean as electric aircraft can be, there’s still one kind of pollution they still produce: noise. Even that might go away before long, though. MIT researchers have successfully flown an ionic wind-powered aircraft that doesn’t use any moving parts. The 16-foot wide machine stays aloft by charging wires with a high enough voltage (40,000V) that they strip negatively-charged electrons from air molecules, which are promptly attracted to negative electrodes at the back of the aircraft. The collisions from that newly-formed ionic wind create the thrust needed to keep the vehicle airborne.
An MIT professor has built a prototype device that can wirelessly track your health — even through walls — using a mix of radio signals and machine learning. Dina Katabi’s gadget resembles a WiFi router and is designed to sit in your pad and monitor your breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more as you go about your day. It’s already doing that in over 200 homes around the US of both healthy people and those with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, depression, and pulmonary diseases.
The Earth’s atmosphere bears precious little resemblance to what it looked like at the start of the Industrial Revolution. As radio technology has advanced and spread, the signals that transmitters produce — specifically the Very Low Frequency (VLF) variety — have changed the way that the upper atmosphere and the Van Allen Radiation Belts interact, according to a study recently published in the journal Space Science Reviews. In effect, these radio waves may be enveloping the globe like an electromagnetic comforter, protecting it from satellite-frying space radiation.
Watching glasses-free 3D on a TV is no longer an outlandish concept, but that hasn’t been true for movie theaters. How are you supposed to create the same parallax effect for everyone, whether they’re up front or way in the back? Researchers at MIT CSAIL and Israel’s Weizmann Institute for Science finally have a practical answer.
For the second time this year, physicists at the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Waves Observatory (LIGO) are giddy with excitement. They’ve just confirmed the second detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime proposed by Albert Einstein a century ago. It seems we’ve officially entered the age of gravitational wave astronomy.
Learning to play any instrument isn’t just about correctly following every last note on a sheet of music. Being expressive, and imaginative, is just as important to learn. That’s what led MIT’s Xiao Xiao and Hiroshi Ishii to develop Andante, which adds lively animated figures to a self-playing piano.
Every cosmetics company on the planet has a product it claims will reduce wrinkles and erase the signs of aging, but researchers at MIT have developed agenuine facelift-in-a-tube with a new cream that creates an extra layer ofinvisible artificial skin to smooth out the wearer’s natural skin.