MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh have shot some photos of the planet by launching a homemade weather balloon — which is legal, apparently — from Sturbridge for just under $150.
Using off-the-shelf components — a 300g latex balloon, party-store helium, styrofoam cooler, handwarmers, GPS-enabled mobile phone, digital camera, parachute, duct tape, etc. — the students got the balloon camera to take pictures of the earth’s curvature and space from 18 miles up.
The students posted the photos to CNN’s user-generated iReport.com, and launched a website, 1337arts.com, to showcase “scientific art.”
Coincidence that on the same day that Turbine Inc. officially launched the free-to-play version of its MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online the Bay State declared today to be Video Game Innovation Day? Probably, but still good timing on somebody’s part.
On the Mass Innovation blog, Gov. Patrick declared today Video Game Innovation Day in the commonwealth:
Whereas In 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell and Wayne Wiitanen invented the game Spacewar!, one of the first video games ever created; and …
Whereas On this day, Harmonix Music Systems, the Cambridge-based inventors of Rock Band and developer of the original Guitar Hero games, is releasing The Beatles: Rock Band, a game that will not only bring the creativity and joy of The Beatles music to countless people, but will introduce the Fab Four to new generations of fans,
Now, Therefore, I, Deval L. Patrick, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, do hereby proclaim September 9th, 2009 to be, Video Game Innovation Day and urge all the ctizens of the Commonwealth to take cognizance of this event and participate fittingly in its observance.
You heard the man, get innovating.
Not to be overshadowed by the governor’s declaration, Westwood-based Turbine today opened up to all comers a free version of its game based on the long-standing virginity-enhancement tool known as Dungeons & Dragons. Turbine has had the “freemium” — that is, you can play for free but the really good stuff is gonna cost you “Turbine Points” which conveniently can be bought with “real cash” — version of DDO open for beta testing over much of the summer.
For perspective on how far we have and have not come, watch video after the jump of The Beatles: Rock Band, a video game released today featuring music made around the time Spacewar! was released. (more…)
Speaking of swine flu — Peter Doshi, a doctoral student in MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program (winner of the weirdest placement of “ands” in an organization’s name) says we may be overreacting to H1N1:
The sudden emphasis on laboratory testing for H1N1 in the first weeks of the outbreak, particularly in the U.S., produced what I call concern bias, in which concern and anxiety may drive events more than the disease itself.
Microfluidics CEO Mike Ferrara
Meanwhile, New Scientist reports the threat posed by swine flu is deadly serious.
Whichever view pans out, Newton-based medical devices company Microfluidics is betting on demand for an H1N1 vaccine being big. MHT staff writer Julie Donnelly talked to CEO Mike Ferrara last week:
As demand for seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine skyrockets, the Newton-based company is aiming to cash in as one of a relatively few companies experienced in mixing vaccines with adjuvants — substances that may be added to the vaccines to make them work better.
Intuitive Automata has posted video of its Autom weight-loss coach robot. The company is an MIT Media Lab spinout making robots for the health care industry.
Intuitive Automata CEO Cory Kidd has turned up in MHT before, talking about the then-unnamed Autom and robotics in general. The company has since moved to Hong Kong.
Kidd worked in the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, also home to Nexi, the emotion-mimicking robot. Autom itself has slimmed down a bit since its Media Lab days — it’s also lost the molded plastic hair and added a mouth. After the jump, watch video of Kidd presenting an earlier version of the robot.
CNNMoney talks to Harmonix founders Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos about starting the company:
ALEX: As we were finishing grad school at lab, we were doing work in an area so weird that I figured no one would actually pay me to do it. Getting a job didn’t seem like an option. Starting a company was the only avenue at my disposal to continue to do the type of work that I wanted to do.
And about developing its latest product, The Beatles: Rock Band:
ALEX: Yoko was sitting on the couch pointing out that no, she wanted John’s eyes to move that way…
The Wall Street Journal talks to Hugh Herr, founder of Cambridge-based iWalk, which makes the PowerFoot One, a robotic, prosthetic ankle and foot device. Herr is also director of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.
In the video above, Herr presents his research at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
Last week, iWalk received $20 million of a $21 million Series B round to fund development of the prosthetic from General Catalyst and New York-based WFD Ventures.
Herr, who MHT first interviewed in 2005, was trapped in a snowstorm while climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in 1982 at age 17. He was rescued, but suffered frostbite, and subsequently had both legs amputated just below the knee. The ordeal led him to take up engineering to develop better prosthetics.
Popular Science writer Josh Dean finds out what happens when you try to get an MIT education using the legal five-finger discount. Dean “took” a class taught by MIT physics professor Walter Lewin, who, incidentally, has developed a following via OpenCourseWare. In the video above, Lewin swings from a wire to demonstrate a pendulum. Dean learns, if nothing else, free isn’t the same as easy:
I stuck with it, for a while. In a week, I watched three of Lewin’s 50-minute lectures and understood almost none of them. The stunts for which he’s become famous are undeniably entertaining — I think it’s fair to call this prop-wielding genius the Gallagher of science — but at the end of each hour I’d look down at my scrawls and realize they were useless to me. They looked like hieroglyphics.
I got that long-dormant lost-in-class feeling that triggers notebook doodles and clock watching, and I started to dread “going.” And so, in a departure lounge at Miami International Airport, around the time Lewin said, “We now come to a much more difficult part, and that is multiplication of vectors,” I decided to drop the class.
If you’re afraid of contracting H1N1, or you’re a hypochondriac, or you’re just morbidly curious — and you have an iPhone — then get yourself to the App Store ASAP. Children’s Hospital reports it has developed an H1N1-alerting and reporting iPhone app with the MIT Media Lab:
The new application also features an option for users to submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries around the world to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process. Users may take photos – of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease – with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.
The free app, called OutbreaksNearMe, is based on HealthMap, another Children’s project — in conjunction with MIT and Harvard — marking cases of infectious diseases on an interactive map.
Scott Kirsner writes about two spinouts from the MIT Media Lab — Waltham-based Affectiva, which makes an emotion-sensing wristband to help study autism, and an unnamed robotics startup founded by Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, which developed emotion-imitating robot Nexi.
Much more nascent is Cynthia Breazeal’s new company. I’ve been told that it’s going to develop some remotely-operated robotic toys, but Breazeal will only say via e-mail that she’s “doing something innovative in the transmedia space.” It’s not yet incorporated, and she hasn’t yet started pitching investors (though one VC I spoke to last week had already heard about it through the grapevine.) “We’re still working through the concept,” she writes, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a name.
If you’re afraid of contracting H1N1, or you’re a hypochondriac, or you’re just morbidly curious — and you have an iPhone — then get yourself to the App Store ASAP. Children’s Hospital 
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