” Three MIT students decided that 3D printers just aren’t interesting enough on their own any more. They wanted to design a new type of printer that would really get young kids engaged. What’s more engaging to children than sugary treats? The team got together to develop a new 3d printer that prints ice cream.
The machine is built around a Solidoodle. ”
Continued at Hackaday
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MIT Researchers Discover Possible ‘Vaccine’ For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
” It’s a breakthrough that could help thousands of American soldiers returning from dangerous deployments. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they may have discovered a way to create a vaccine that could prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
” What it’s going to do is that they’ll still have perfectly strong memories of the event. They just won’t have the bad health consequences,” said Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
The key is a lesser-known hormone produced by the stomach called ghrelin. “
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” In early November, two MIT PhD students, Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer, introduced an eye-catching project from the MIT Media Lab: A table built with motors, linkages and pins, that can render a person physically in real time via a digital source. Some articles hailed the technology with potential to change the world and others were captivated by its strange, almost science fiction-type quality. The consensus was that this thing was really, really cool. But for a concept so complex, the initial idea came from a simple beginning. “
“ We were inspired by those pinscreen toys where you press your hand on one end, and it shows on the other side,” Leithinger says. However, the 15-by-15-inch table, known as inFORM, is much more complicated than a toy. Leithinger says it’s best to imagine the device as a pinscreen, but with each pin attached to an individual motor. That’s 900 pins, each a half-inch wide, with 900 separate motors. Getting 900 motors in such a dense area was a challenge, Follmer says .”
MIT Students Develop Wearable Cooling Device That Could Make Air Conditioning Obsolete
” We come across quite a lot of cool technology, but it’s not every day that we find something that can literally cool you down.
Developed by four engineering students at MIT, Wristify is a prototype wearable device that leverages the physical phenomenon known as the Peltier effect to reduce your body temperature.
Wristify is basically a series of these junctions (called a Peltier cooler) powered by a small battery and attached to a wrist strap. When placed against the skin, the device makes you feel cooler by reducing the temperature of your wrist a few fractions of a degree per second for a couple seconds at a time. Over the course of a few minutes, this process will cause you to perceive a whole-body cooling of a couple degrees Celsius. “
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” The report published by Nature magazine details how scientist has discovered a new way of binding photons together in order to form a new molecule which replicates almost exactly the nature of the iconic weapons favoured by both Jedi Knights and Sith Lords
“Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless and do not interact,” said Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin. “What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules.”
While this may not sound much like George Lucas’ vision of a galaxy far, far away, Lukin himself makes a Star Wars analogy:
“It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers. When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.” “
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Tsarnaev Brothers Killed MIT Officer Because They Needed A Gun
“The original question is they walked up to that car and appeared they shot the officer in the head unprovoked, that it was an assassination. But why? How did that fit into their plan? The operating theory now in the investigation is they were short one gun. The older brother had a gun. They wanted to get a gun for the younger brother and the fastest and most efficient way they could think of doing it was a surprise attack on a cop, to take his weapon and go. Officer Collier had a locking holster, it’s like a three-way lock. If you don’t know how to remove the gun, you’re not going to get it out. There was apparently an attempt to yank it and they couldn’t get it and left. “
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One Boston Bombing Suspect Is Dead
” One of two suspects wanted in Monday’s deadly Boston marathon bombing was killed early Friday in a violent standoff with the police in a quiet residential neighborhood just west of Boston. The second suspect remained at large following what authorities described as a deadly crime spree that left one police officer dead and another seriously wounded.
A Watertown resident, Andrew Kitzenberg, 29, said he looked out his third-floor window to see two young men of slight build in jackets engaged in “constant gunfire” with police officers. A police SUV “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway.
The two shooters, he said, had a large, unwieldy bomb that he said looked “like a pressure cooker.”
“They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it. But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one of the two men ran toward the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.
Meanwhile, the other young man, said Mr. Kitzenberg, got back into the SUV, turned it toward officers and “put the pedal to the metal.” The car “went right through the cops, broke right through and continued west.” “
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” Hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous, a loose-knit group of internet activists, defaced pages on MIT websites, calling the case against Mr Swartz “a grotesque miscarriage of justice”.
“Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for – freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it – enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing – an ideal that we should all support,” it said.
“Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.”
The message, labelled “in memoriam”, was posted on at least two hacked MIT web pages, but the hackers said they did not “consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened”. ”
As They , Say … Faster Please
” Scientists have theorized that paper-thin composite nanomaterials could stop bullets just as effectively as heavy weight body armor, but progress has been hampered by their inability to reliably test such materials against projectile impacts. Researchers at MIT and Rice University have developed a breakthrough stress-test that fires microscopic glass beads at impact-absorbing material. Although the projectiles are much smaller than a bullet, the experimental results could be scaled up to predict how the material would stand up to larger impacts. “
Eric Allie’s Furious Diaper
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