Lifeboat Foundation

The universe is big, as Douglas Adams would say.

The most distant light we can see is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. This marks the edge of the observable universe, and while you might think that means the universe is 26 billion light-years across, thanks to cosmic expansion it is now closer to 46 billion light-years across. By any measure, this is pretty darn big. But most cosmologists think the universe is much larger than our observable corner of it. That what we can see is a small part of an unimaginably vast, if not infinite creation. However, a new paper published on the arXiv preprint server argues that the observable universe is mostly all there is.

In other words, on a cosmic scale, the universe is quite small.

This talk is about how you can use wireless signals and fuse them with vision and other sensing modalities through AI algorithms to give humans and robots X-ray vision to see objects hidden inside boxes or behind other object.

Tara Boroushaki is a Ph.D student at MIT. Her research focuses on fusing radio frequency (RF) sensing with vision through artificial intelligence. She designs algorithms and builds systems that leverage such fusion to enable capabilities that were not feasible before in applications spanning augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, smart homes, and smart manufacturing. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Besides recognizing cancer signatures, liquid biopsy technologies are informing treatment decisions and predicting patient outcomes.

Congestive heart failure (also called heart failure) is a serious condition in which the heart doesn’t pump blood as efficiently as it should. Despite its name, heart failure doesn’t mean that the heart has literally failed or is about to stop working. Rather, it means that the heart muscle has become less able to contract over time or has a mechanical problem that limits its ability to fill with blood. As a result, it can’t keep up with the body’s demand, and blood returns to the heart faster than it can be pumped out—it becomes congested, or backed up. This pumping problem means that not enough oxygen-rich blood can get to the body’s other organs.

The body tries to compensate in different ways. The heart beats faster to take less time for refilling after it contracts—but over the long run, less blood circulates, and the extra effort can cause heart palpitations. The heart also enlarges a bit to make room for the blood. The lungs fill with fluid, causing shortness of breath. The kidneys, when they don’t receive enough blood, begin to retain water and sodium, which can lead to kidney failure. With or without treatment, heart failure is often and typically progressive, meaning it gradually gets worse.

More than 5 million people in the United States have congestive heart failure. It’s the most common diagnosis in hospitalized patients over age 65. One in nine deaths has heart failure as a contributing cause.

We don’t treat Isla’s vision loss as a sad circumstance or as something that is broken in her. It’s so important for us that she knows her vision impairment is not something that makes her less than. If anything, it makes her a stronger, more amazing person, and we couldn’t be prouder of who she is.

Vision impairment is the only symptom she displays of this disease, and we are fighting with everything we have to ensure it stays this way. We were told on diagnosis day that that day was the healthiest Isla would ever be, and that she was at her peak; two years later, and she has continued to defy that, Stockdale added.

The family believes that Isla’s incredible development is a result of the medication, called Miglustat, which she has been taking since November 2022.

Testing time: To see whether the modified VR headset could accurately record brain activity, the researchers had four participants wear it while opening or closing their eyes on command. There is typically an increase in alpha waves in a person’s brain when their eyes are closed, and the researchers could see this increase in the EEG data recorded by their headset.

They also had the participants wear the headset while playing a custom game designed to trigger a type of brain activity that occurs when a person is preparing for an event. As hoped, the researchers were able to see this activity in the recorded EEG data, too.

Looking ahead: The UT Austin team has started filing the paperwork to patent their tech and say they’d be open to working with VR companies to incorporate it into their systems. They don’t say what it costs to make the soft electrodes, so it’s not clear exactly how much consumers or professionals should expect to pay for a modified VR headset.

“As a child, I wished for a robot that would explain others’ emotions to me” says Sharifa Alghowinem, a research scientist in the Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group (PRG). Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Alghowinem says she dreamed of coming to MIT one day to develop Arabic-based technologies, and of creating a robot that could help herself and others navigate a complex world.

In her early life, Alghowinem faced difficulties with understanding social cues and never scored well on standardized tests, but her dreams carried her through. She earned an undergraduate degree in computing before leaving home to pursue graduate education in Australia. At the Australian National University, she discovered affective computing for the first time and began working to help AI detect human emotions and moods, but it wasn’t until she came to MIT as a postdoc with the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women, which is housed in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, that she was finally able to work on a technology with the potential to explain others’ emotions in English and Arabic. Today, she says her work is so fun that she calls the lab “my playground.”

Alghowinem can’t say no to an exciting project. She found one with great potential to make robots more helpful to people by working with Jibo, a friendly robot companion developed by the founder of the Personal Robots Group (PRG) and the social robot startup Jibo Inc., MIT Professor and Dean for Digital Learning Cynthia Breazeal’s research explores the potential for companion robots to go far beyond assistants who obey transactional commands, like requests for the daily weather, adding items to shopping lists, or controlling lighting. At the MIT Media Lab, the PRG team designs Jibo to make him an insightful coach and companion to advance social robotics technologies and research. Visitors to the MIT Museum can experience Jibo’s charming personality.

Astronomers from the University of Maryland and the Michigan Technological University, have inspected a mysterious ultra-high energy gamma-ray source known as LHAASO J2108+5157. Results of the study, published August 31 on the pre-print server arXiv, could help us unveil the true nature of this source.

Sources emitting gamma radiation with photon energies between 100 GeV and 100 TeV are called very-high energy (VHE) gamma-ray sources, while those with photon energies above 0.1 PeV are known as ultra-high energy (UHE) gamma-ray sources. The nature of these sources is still not well understood; therefore, astronomers are constantly searching for new objects of this type to characterize them, which could shed more light on their properties in general.

A team of astronomers led by University of Maryland’s Sajan Kumar decided to take a closer look at one such UHE gamma-ray source designated LHAASO J2108+5157. It is a point-like source with an extension less than 0.39 degrees, known to be associated with the molecular cloud [MML2017]4607—located some 10,700 light years away.

A recent study found that an AI chatbot-powered software company could develop software in under seven minutes for less than $1 in costs, on average. ILYA SEDYKH/Getty.