mit

Regardless of whether spent fuel from today's nuclear reactors is treated as waste or reused as fuel in the future, an expert commission says the U.S. should create a centralized storage system, an issue drawn into sharp focus because of Japan's current nuclear crisis.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology today released a report called the "Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle," where a panel argued that U.S. policy needs to make spent-fuel treatment an integral part of nuclear plant operations, rather than an "afterthought." Today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the underpinnings of the World Wide Web, isn't just concerned about getting browsers on more mobile devices. Architects of the Web need to consider how it will affect all humanity as it evolves.

Berners-Lee was one of the speakers here this afternoon at Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything, a conference organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his talk, Berners-Lee reprised his role in writing the protocols now used on the Web and how a few chance encounters led to the World Wide Web Consortium being first located at MIT. … Read more

Smartphones have been around for at least several years now, but they still have certain limitations. Despite having a plethora of wireless technologies built-in--Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, etc.--there's no simple way to transfer "clippings" of data from one device to another. But a new research project at MIT called Sparsh is aiming to fix that oversight.

Sparsh (the Hindi word for "touch") isn't an app, at least not in the way we generally use the word. It's a tool that's supposed to be part of a mobile operating system, like "undo" or "select all," running within apps at all times. It creates a virtual cloud-based clipboard where any data, like a phone number or photograph, can temporarily live until it's "pasted" to another device.

For it to work, at least two devices need to be Sparsh-enabled. A user wanting to share data becomes, in concept, an avatar for a copy-and-paste-like function. The person touches data on a device, such as a photo or text, and Sparsh sends it to the cloud. The same person then touches another device, and presto! The relevant information is pasted in as if it had been copied from the same machine.

Sparsh isn't the only tool for transferring small amounts of device-to-device data on the scene. Indeed, a popular iPhone app called Bump allows people to trade photos, apps, contact info, and even music from one phone to another simply by bumping the devices together.

Bump is very cool, but it requires both the sender and recipient to be running the app. In addition, it's not open with what it can send or where it can send it--it only works from phone to phone, and while there are many options for things it can send, there are more things it simply can't. Sparsh aims to live in the devices we use at the operating-system level, meaning it would seem intuitive to use and be available within any app for almost any type of data. … Read more

Oil has climbed to over $100 a barrel and there's historical unrest in oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Yet, at times it's hard to tell how strong this country's commitment to clean-energy technologies is.

A vivid example is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which was funded two years ago to research potential breakthrough energy technologies and determine their commercial potential.

The U.S. prides itself on its technology and many people believe that innovation will revitalize our economy. Economic competitiveness was perhaps the dominant theme at the ARPA-E Summit, a conference held last week. Yet … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory is a trip into the past and, if nuclear power grows in this country, perhaps a glimpse into the future.

A stone's throw from busy Massachusetts Avenue here is a large blue cylinder about the height of a two-story building, which houses the reactor, built with an attached research lab in 1958 at the dawn of the nuclear power industry.

The mission of the lab has changed over the years, most recently shifting its primary emphasis from medical research to experiments on new materials and fuels for nuclear power. Its director envisions … Read more

The technology to shift U.S. transportation from oil to electricity is basically ready to go, but political and infrastructure issues could stymie growth beyond a niche set of drivers, according to a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The report, put out today by the MIT Energy Initiative, said that the two main reasons for electrifying transportation are to lower greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce dependence on imported oil.

Conventional hybrids lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to gasoline engines by about 33 percent, it found. If a plug-in hybrid were charged by carbon-free electricity, such as … Read more

What if your toothpaste could tell you whether you needed to leave the house carrying an umbrella? Or how hot the day was going to be?

Odd as it may sound, David Carr of MIT's Media Lab is working on just such a prototype product, "Tastes Like Rain."

Carr and his colleagues are focused on super-mechanicals, or the idea of taking a basic object and giving it dynamic properties (consider, for example, the Proverbial Wallets, also out of MIT's Media Lab, that know your financial state).

In this case, toothpaste is modified to dispense one of three flavors depending on the weather. If it's mint, you know it's colder out than yesterday. Cinnamon means it's hotter. Blue stripes indicate tartar precipitation.

The prototype is currently hooked up to a small Linux computer that pulls forecasts, using custom software to compare previous and current temperatures and divvy up the flavors.

Then, linear actuators squeeze out the proper variety of toothpaste through a heavily modded Mentadent dispenser. … Read more

On today's show, we follow the Google Chrome announcements live, but we'll have the real wrap-up tomorrow, because wow, did that thing go on and on. In other news today, Julian Assange is arrested but Wikileaks soldiers on; unsurprisingly, the DecorMyEyes guy turns out to be a bona fide sociopath; and whatever you do, do not buy anyone an iPhone or iPad for Christmas--just give them an IOU. Trust Shaw Wu on this one. Plus: Koreaceratops! --Molly

Imagine if you could pray to your computer to stop the beach ball of doom from spinning, the blue screen of death from staring you in the face.

Perhaps someday sooner than we think, such a simple, palm-to-palm gesture might actually serve to trigger a series of operations that would lead to an appropriate fix.

As reported by Engadget and Read, Write, Web, a group of students at MIT's Media Lab has hacked around with Microsoft's Kinect gaming technology, Google's Chrome browser, and Javascript to allow Web surfers to manipulate a browser with nothing more than gestures. … Read more