Robot Overcomes Uncertainty to Retrieve Buried Objects

the team of researchers with their project
Caption:Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab (far left) with (from left to right) Tara Boroushaki, Nazish Naeem, and Laura Dodds, research assistants in the Signal Kinetics group.
Credits:Image: James Day, MIT Media Lab

FuseBot is a new robotic system that fuses visual information and radio-frequency signals to efficiently find hidden items buried under a pile of objects, whether or not the targeted item has an RFID tag.

For humans, finding a lost wallet buried under a pile of items is pretty straightforward — we simply remove things from the pile until we find the wallet...

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Is there a Right-handed version of our Left-handed Universe?

From left, ORNL’s Matthew Frost and Leah Broussard used a neutron scattering instrument at the Spallation Neutron Source to search for a dark matter twin to the neutron. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can “live” outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe. They designed a mind-bending experiment at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to try to detect a particle that has been speculated but not spotted...

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Innovative Lung-Imaging Technique shows cause of Long COVID symptoms

Innovative lung-imaging technique shows cause of long-COVID symptoms
By having study participants inhale polarized xenon gas while inside the MRI, the researchers see in real-time the function of the 300-500 million tiny alveolar sacs, which are responsible for delivering oxygen to the blood. Credit: Paulina Wyszkiewicz / Western University

Many who experience what is now called “long COVID” report feeling brain fog, breathless, fatigued and limited in doing everyday things, often lasting weeks and months post-infection. Using functional MRI with inhaled xenon gas, researchers have now identified for the first time that these debilitating symptoms are related to microscopic abnormalities that affect how oxygen is exchanged from the lungs to the red blood cells.

The LIVECOVIDFREE study, based at five centers across Ontario, and led by Western Universi...

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From Transistor to Memristor: Switching Technologies for the Future

From transistor to memristor: switching technologies for the future
Three-dimensional schematic of a memristor made of multilayer hexagonal boron nitride. Credit: Mario Lanza / KAUST

The invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratory in 1947 ushered in an era of electronic devices that were smaller and ran cooler using far less power than their bulky and fragile vacuum tube counterparts. Transistors function as a binary switch to facilitate electrical current from off to on states. Radios, calculators and telephones were among the first wave of instruments to replace vacuum tubes with the new semiconductor technology...

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