Vladimir Bulovic is the man! This MIT professor shows us how OLEDs work by electrocuting a pickle. When the electrons pass through the above pickle, it glows when the substance is charged. Once the positive and negative charges collide, light is emitted. Knowledge is power!

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered up to conduct a study in determining one’s sexual orientation. The basis is that those that tend to have many homosexual friends will end up homosexual themselves. The two students even designed software using specific algorithms to predict sexual orientations. The software worked only for men, but not for women.

“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” stated MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson in an interview with Boston.com. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.” The two students involved are Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree.

Based on the concept, the computer software algorithm could technically make assumptions about a person’s political preferences and emotions. As a matter of fact, Professor Murat Kantarcioglu at the University of Texas-Dallas used a similar concept to predict political preferences. Kantarcioglu and a student used 167,000 profiles to make 3 million links.

In the case of the Gaydar project, the students used a sample size of 1,544 straight men, 21 bisexual men, and 33 gay men. The 33 gay men had a great proportion of gay friends than the straight men.

Above is a picture of Leonard Kleinrock, a Distinguished Professor at UCLA.  He is known as the “father of the Internet.”  He is best known for developing the concept of packet-switching, the premise behind how the Internet works.  He put this together when he was a graduate student at MIT.

On September 2, 1969 about 20 people had been sitting around at Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA to watch two computers pass data to each other through a 15 foot cable.  This is what led to the creation of ARPANET.  Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah joined UCLA on the project by the end of the year.  Several years later, the Internet started growing at a rapid pace.  In the 1970’s, the TCP/IP protocols were introduced.  And then in the 1980’s, the term .com and .org was introduced.

In the 1990’s Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, an Internet subset that made it simple to link websites to each other.  People around the world wanted to get their hands on the Internet by the 1990’s so they started signing up for services such as America Online, CompuServ, and Prodigy.  Even though the U.S. government had funded the early development of the Internet, they let the people run wild with the invention.

In the 1990’s Netscape had an IPO and technology sky-rocketed from there. Microsoft created their own browser and so did Apple. AOL ended up buying Time Warner and Netscape and has seen its valuation plummet since. Google bought 5% in AOL but ended up selling it off again. In the 2000’s websites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.com, Yahoo, eBay and Wikipedia grew into prominence. And the rest is history.

Thank you Internet for allowing me to make money off of you.

It is not everyday that you see an Asian cruising around in a shopping cart. MIT student Charles Guan made it happen though. The shopping cart is powered by a lithium nanophosphate cell from an A123, a 33 Ah battery pack, and a Briggs and Stratton ETEK DC pancake electric motor. All of this put together is called the LOLrioKart.

[via AutoBlog]

Inspired by the inner ear, MIT associate professor Rahul Sarpeshkar and student Soumyajit Mandal have developed a radio chip that requires very little power to function as a universal wireless device for electrical signals by mobile devices.  The chip is called the radio frequency cochlea, named after the inner ear.

The radio chip is designed to perceive signals at a million fold higher than frequencies for wireless applications.  The RF cochlea is inscribed on a silicon chip that is measured 1.5mm x 3mm and works as an analog spectrum analyzer that detects all of the electromagnetic signals in the area.  The two have filed a patent for the device.

[via GizmoWatch/MIT]

A couple of MIT geniuses have put together a gesture-based project at the Media Lab. The Fluid Interfaces Group within the Media Labs developed a wearable computing device that feeds you information based on what you are looking at. For example, the above video shows a student looking at a book and it automatically pulls up the reviews. The project is called the Sixth Sense and it was built with about $350 worth of goods.

The team used a web cam, a battery-powered projector with a small mirror. There is also a necklace that communicates with a cell phone to pull the information for the goods that are looked at. The Sixth Sense gadget was put together by Fluid Interfaces Group founder and MIT associate professor Pattie Maes along with MIT grad student Pranav Mistry.

There are many everyday uses for the Sixth Sense. Using the gadget you can make phone calls by projecting a keypad on your hand. Maps can be called up on a wall and you can zoom in and zoom out as well as pan around. By gesturing a square, you can take a picture and project them onto other surfaces. Reading experiences can be enhanced by calling related videos to an article or book that you are reading. Flight status updates and gate change announcements can be called up by having the system recognize your airline boarding pass. The limits are endless with the Sixth Sense.

[via Engadget/PCW]

Kelly Dobson is a former student at MIT and she invented a device for anyone that just feels like screaming without causing a commotion. The device is called the ScreamBody, “a portable space for screaming.” The only problem with the device is that it is the size of a pillow and it makes you look fat. After screaming in the ScreamBody, you can play back the scream through the built-in speakers. Its pretty weird, but I give it points for creativity.

Another interesting project made by MIT students is an art display called “The World’s Eyes” which uses Flickr to float images that are taken based on geographic locations.

[via Gizmodo]

Every time someone on Flickr uploads an image, they let people know the location of where each photograph was taken.  Each photo is also tagged.  In the Design Museum in Barcelona, the above video is being used and the display is called “Los Ojos Del Mundo.”

The display tracks local photographers throughout their adventures around Spain and transmits it into the video. According to the MIT City Lab website:

When posting photos online, users of the photo sharing platform Flickr transmit to the world their perspective of a place or event through the lens of a digital camera. Each digital photo file codes both the time when that photo was taken and the location it captures. Analyzing this information allows us to follow the trail that each Flickr photographer travels through Spain. (Un)photographed Spain maps thousands of these public, digital footprints over one year. As photos overlap in certain locations, they expose the places that attract the photographer’s gaze . In contrast, the absence of images in other locations reveal the unphotographed spaces of a more introverted Spain.

[via GearCrave]