Right now, MIT alumni and friends are voicing their support for: America’s scientific and technological leadership Merit-based admissions and affordable education Advances that increase US health, security, and prosperity Our community is standing up for MIT and its mission to serve the nation and the world. And we need you to join us at this…

Our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies, coordinating 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments to perform countless nuanced movements and gestures. So far, robots have been notoriously bad at mimicking that dexterity, in part because researchers struggle to capture what is actually going on under our skin in order…

With an adaptable fastener designed at CSAIL, pitching a tent or adjusting the cast for a broken bone could be almost as easy as zipping your coat. The researchers, led by associate professor Stefanie Mueller, were inspired by an abandoned prototype for a three-sided zipper that William Freeman, PhD ’92 (now an MIT professor), patented…

A technology developed by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, and colleagues could offer new hope to the thousands of Americans with chronic liver disease who are waiting for an organ transplant or not strong enough to tolerate one. The liver is involved in regulating blood clotting, removing bacteria from the bloodstream, metabolizing drugs,…

MIT engineers have found the first direct evidence that plant seeds can sense sounds in nature: Rice submerged in shallow water germinated 30% to 40% more quickly when exposed to vibrations from water dripping on the surface. They think other types of seeds may respond similarly. When a raindrop hits a puddle’s surface or the…

With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. The idea is that a person would first breathe in nanoparticles that are specially…

The best robot vacuums are the ones you barely have to think about, and the Roborock Saros 20 fits that description well. It’s why it’s one of our favorite robovac / mop hybrids, and thanks to Prime Day, you can get it on sale at Amazon and Roborock for $1,359.99 ($240 off), a new low […]

The Meta Quest 3S VR headset with 128GB of storage is $296.79 (about $53 off) at Amazon. This is Meta’s entry-level VR headset, which launched back in 2024 for $299.99 before getting a price increase this year to $349.99. So it’s not exactly the most exciting deal, but it’s about as good as you’re likely […]

In Mexico, WhatsApp isn't a channel — it's the channel. It's where customers ask for prices, book appointments, and decide whether to buy from you or from the competitor who answered faster. And that last part is the problem: most small and medium businesses lose customers simply because nobody replied in time — after hours, during a rush, or while the owner was busy doing the actual work. At Proxxa , the AI automation agency I run in Mexico City, this is the single most common pain we solve. So I want to walk through how I built a production-grade WhatsApp AI assistant that answers, qualifies, and books 24/7 — using Claude and n8n, with no third-party chatbot platform in the middle. Why the WhatsApp Cloud API directly (no BSP) A lot of guides will tell you that you need a BSP (Business Solution Provider) to use the WhatsApp Business API. You don't. Meta's Cloud API is hosted by Meta itself and you can build on it directly. Skipping the BSP means no per-seat middleman tax, full control over the logic, and the client owns their own number and data. The stack n8n (self-hosted on a small VPS via Docker) as the orchestration layer. Claude (Haiku) as the intelligence layer — fast and cheap enough to answer every message. Postgres for conversation memory, a knowledge base, and a lightweight CRM. WhatsApp Cloud API for the messaging. Gemini for transcribing voice notes. The pattern that made it powerful: meta-blocks Instead of bolting on a separate "agent framework," I let Claude emit small structured blocks inside its answer, which a parsing node extracts and strips before sending — to schedule an appointment, escalate to a human, capture a lead, or generate a payment link. The user only ever sees clean text; the system reacts to the blocks. This kept the whole thing debuggable and predictable. With that pattern, the assistant handles eleven capabilities: natural-language conversation, per-customer memory, Google Calendar booking, vision (it reads a photo a customer sends

Yochai is a Socratic AI "chevruta" or learning guide, powered by a foundational library of 1,000+ primary sources from the Jewish canon, (and a knowledge graph of 2.5M entities, and 16M entity relationships, 375,000 searchable passages, and 17,000 canonical concepts that we developed around our own ontology). Yochai, uniquely, takes you directly to the sources and pushes you to discover and articulate your own insights about them. we open sourced our knowledge graph so others can build on our fo

Between Prime Day deal and the screen-free technology, the Yoto Player is a great gift you can get the kids in your life without any guilt.

Promo video comes as more US police departments fly drones as first responders.

You probably don't need to use the latest HDMI standards or components just for streaming Netflix.

Oracle is spending billions on data center infrastructure to support AI.

The Xteink X4 and smaller X3 e-readers are discounted to $55.20 (regularly $69) and $63.20 (normally $79), respectively, as part of Amazon’s Prime Day promotions this week. Both e-readers are significantly smaller and more pocketable than any of the Kindle and Kobo models currently available, and feature magnetic mounts so they can be stuck to […]