Robots could soon be infiltrating urban sewage systems to identify potential outbreaks of disease before they happen, according to architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti (+ interview). Ratti's team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a prototype robot called Luigi, which is able to collect samples from city sewers, as part of a project called Underworlds. According to Ratti, these samples could be used create a map of human health from biological data that would help scientists predict outbreaks of disease and possibly prevent them. "We could be looking at epidemics before they happen," said Ratti. "So we're able to see the influenza virus before people have influenza." The ongoing Underworlds project, which includes a team of MIT biologists and researchers, aims to prove that cities can make use of their waste water systems. "We're collecting this information and we're using it to understand the micro-biome of the city," Ratti told Dezeen. "The applications of this are diverse."...

Advertisement Supported by By John Markoff It was a vision that never saw the light of day. The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire. One of those visionaries was Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation. Two years later, he wrote “The Human Use of Human Beings,” a popularization of those ideas and an exploration of the potential of automation and the risks of dehumanization by machines. In 1949, The New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be,” in the words of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel. Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared....

Despite our best intentions, keeping a houseplant alive can be a struggle for a lot of us. But that vague wave of sadness you feel when you end up unceremoniously dumping your potted pal in the bin is about to reach a new and slightly disturbing level, as researchers from MIT have found a way to use robotics to tap into plants' human-like characteristics. Meet Elowan, a "cybernetic lifeform" that connects a houseplant with a machine that responds to its basic need for light (and is presumably named after the sentient plant creatures in Starflight 3). When a regular plant needs light, it fires off internal electrical signals that cause it to bend and grow towards it. When Elowan needs light, these internal electrical signals are interpreted by a machine that then simply wheels the plant towards the light. The plant can essentially move itself around because it needs to. "Plants have natural bioelectrochemical signals inside them," explains Harpeet Sareen, assistant professor at Parsons School of Design. "They get excited in response to environmental conditions and conduct these signals between tissues and organs. Such electrical signals are produced in response to changes in light, gravity, mechanical stimulation, temperature, wounding, and more. They are electrically active systems readily occurring in nature."...

Engineers at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are developing a teleoperated robot that uses a special operator vest to give it human-like balance and reflexes. Called Little Highly Efficient Robotic Mechanisms and Electromechanical System (HERMES), the small-scale bipedal robot is a third of the size of an adult person and can run, jump, and mostly move in sync with the operator. When it comes to dealing with disasters, robots have a lot of obvious attractions as responders and rescuers, but there's still a long way to go before we see humanoid robotic firefighters dashing into collapsed burning buildings. One of the biggest problems is that though robots today can run, jump, and do backflips like a parkour artist, they are still terrible at balancing. So if a bipedal robot tries something like forcing open a door, it's very likely to simply slip and end up on the floor. This is because, although we do them every day without thinking, tasks like standing, walking, running, and forcing open a door or swinging a hammer are actually very complex processes of balancing forces, centers of gravity and centers of pressure....