technology

You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

The world's first-ever smartshoe is called Le Chal, which means "let's go" in Hindi. Designed by Anirudh Sharma, who works at the MIT Media Lab, and Krispian Lawrence, these shoes work as haptic navigation devices that connect to your smartphone.

The basic idea is pretty simple. You simply tell your phone where to go using the app's voice recognition software, and the app uses GPS to plot the course from your current location. Once you're on your way, the shoes vibrate when it's time to turn—on the left side for a left turn and on the right for a right turn. The vibrations become more intense as you get closer to your destination.

You're not actually covering the answers up... you know that right?

A projector mounted above the surface provides context to the shapeshifting pins, giving them color and highlighting depth. In a video released by MIT, the table is shown moving a ball, mirroring a book, displaying 3D charts, and giving an extremely visible smartphone notification.

Forget frozen pizza; science has finally created a slice that can last three years on the shelf before going bad.

No, it's not DiGiorno. It's a ready-to-eat meal — known as a MRE — created for the military. In combat zones where field kitchens are not an option, soldiers rely on these meals, which don't need to be refrigerated or frozen.

The Bionic Leg provides motorized assistance with extension (straightening your knee), which kicks in when you're standing up from a seated position, swinging your leg forward between steps, and going up stairs. It also provides resistance for flexion (bending your knee), so it kicks in when you're lowering yourself down to sitting, squatting, or when you're going down stairs. It enables patients to move without having to compensate in ways that would slow down their rehab or possibly cause other complications.

Founded in 1997 with the ambitious goal to develop a robotic humanoid soccer-playing robot by 2050, the RoboCup is an annual robotics competition that sees robots play soccer against each other in an exercise of AI and applied robotics.

Each year of the competition also features a robot-on-human soccer game. And every once in a while, the robots will score a goal on the humans, just as they did this year in the above GIF.

They've happened in the past, but robot-on-human soccer goals at RoboCup are becoming a bigger deal. It's simply a function of goal quality being so dramatically improved over years before — robot AI is increasingly capable of masterminding some soccer strategy on our flesh-and-blood would-be Beckhams, and then putting that strategy to work effectively.

It's been the subject of many previous studies and the stuff of sci-fi for decades, but space-based solar power could at last become a reality—and within 25 years, according to a proposal from researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The agency, which leads the world in research on space-based solar power systems, now has a technology road map that suggests a series of ground and orbital demonstrations leading to the development in the 2030s of a 1-gigawatt commercial system—about the same output as a typical nuclear power plant.