In April, design major Karyn Nakamura ’23 transformed Simmons Hall into an interactive art project. Her piece, titled “116 x 31” after the number of squares in Simmons’s façade, converted audio into dynamically projected color patterns evocative of vintage video games. Read More
Monthly Archives: August 2022
The MIT inventors of tiny artificial muscles that flap the wings of robotic insects have now added electroluminescent particles that enable them to emit colored light during flight, similar to fireflies. The artificial muscles, called actuators, are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode material and then rolling the stack of…
Doctors can’t tell a person’s race from medical images such as x-rays and CT scans. But a team including MIT researchers was able to train a deep-learning model to identify patients as white, Black, or Asian (according to their own description) just by analyzing such images—and they still can’t figure out how the computer does…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: The Gender Issue Our first ever gender issue tackles a topic this magazine and the wider tech sector has given too little thought to for too many decades. When we started planning…
Windows 8 was released nearly 10 years ago. A former Microsoft employee has revealed what the missing Windows 8 startup sound was supposed to be. Microsoft has used unique startup sounds in Windows versions for decades, but Windows 8 ended that tradition with a silent bootup process. While startup sounds eventually returned for Windows 11,…
Image: Nintendo Despite feeling uncannily similar to play as past installments, Splatoon 3 is packed with smart changes and updates that will likely lead to people — or at least, me — keeping the game in rotation for much longer than before. I got to play over an hour of the game’s various modes ahead…
Image: Nintendo Following the mid-August Nintendo Direct that showed off what to expect with Splatoon 3, fans of the game speculated that Shiver, one of the faces in the new game, might identify as nonbinary. So we asked Nate Bihldorff, Nintendo’s SVP of development and publishing, who confirmed to The Verge that Shiver identifies as…
Can’t tell the Versa 4 or Sense 2 apart? Squint, and you might see the Sense 2’s sensor on the edges of the display. | Image: Fitbit After several leaks and a not-so-subtle teaser yesterday, Fitbit officially announced what we all knew was coming: the Sense 2, the Versa 4, and the Inspire 3. And…
Enlarge (credit: Fitbit) Today, Fitbit announced the availability of three new fitness trackers: the Inspire 3, Versa 4, and Sense 2. All successors to previous-generation devices, the three run the gamut from Fitbit’s highest-equipped to most basic fitness wearables. “Basic” is a relative term among fitness trackers, as they all continuously edge closer to full-blown…
Enlarge (credit: Getty | picture alliance) The incubation period for COVID-19—the time between when SARS-CoV-2 first infects a person and when resulting COVID-19 symptoms first appear—has gradually shortened as the pandemic has stretched on and the virus has mutated. That’s according to a new meta-analysis published this week in JAMA Network Open by researchers in…