For more than a year, four crew members of NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha communicated, ate, slept and acted out a simulated experience as if they were stationed more than 200 million miles away on the Red Planet. The mission, which marked the first completed portion of three planned programs of NASA’s Crew Health and Performance … Read more
Sam Dillavou, a postdoctoral fellow in the Durian Research Group in the School of Arts & Sciences, built the components of this contrasting local learning network, an analog system that is fast, energy-efficient, scalable, and can learn nonlinear tasks. Credit: Erica Moser Scientists face many trade-offs in building and scaling brain-like systems that can perform … Read more
Stay up to date with free updates Simply register for the Pension sector myFT Digest — straight to your inbox. The writer is an FT editor When the shortcomings of the British pension system are analysed, attention is often focused on Canada and its giant pension funds. These have become major players in international finance, … Read more
The art of reveal is a difficult business – and in our current industry, most publishers prefer trailers packed with pre-rendered CGI or snippets captured in-game. However, I have always preferred a different approach: a linear series of events that shows what is possible in the game. This style was memorably used to unveil Metal … Read more
We could be entering a renaissance in human spaceflight research, as record numbers of private citizens go into space—and as scientists improve the techniques for collecting data on these intrepid test subjects. A sign that the renaissance is imminent emerged earlier this week, when the journal Nature published a series of articles detailing the physical … Read more
For people with paralysis or amputation, neuroprosthetic systems that artificially stimulate muscle contraction with electrical current can help them regain limb function. However, despite years of research, this type of prosthesis is not widely used because it leads to rapid muscle fatigue and poor control. MIT researchers have developed a new approach that they hope … Read more