The ‘New’ You Need
The fun, innovative, newsy stuff happening right around you.
Happy hump day, ITK readers! Hope your week is smooth-sailing so far. If you like what you read here, please pass on the love. I’m told it’s more fun when shared.
ROCycle: In 2018, China implemented a policy that banned 24 types of scrap, including paper, plastic and scrap metal. For decades, the country imported trash from the west that it recycled. But since early 2018, in order to redirect its efforts towards going green and limiting pollutants, China vowed to stop taking materials that contained food scraps and non-recyclables.
Every year trash companies sift through an estimated 68M tons of recycling, which is the weight equivalent of more than 30M cars. And the Chinese ban, unsurprisingly, does not bode well for the U.S.
But as with most things nowadays, robots are stepping in to find a fix.
A recent collaboration between MIT’s CSAIL Lab and Yale Universityhas created ‘ROCycle,’ a robot that uses tactile sensors on its fingertips to detect an object’s size and stiffness to determine whether it can be recycled. For instance, it can reliably distinguish between two identical-looking Starbucks cups made of paper and plastic. Read more: Meet ROCycle, MIT’s New Robot That Helps Sort Recyclable Waste
GoT Harvard Edition: We’re back with our Game of Thrones update. Harvard University professor Racha Kirakosian is especially interested in the final season of the series, as she teaches a course called “The Real ‘Game of Thrones’: Culture, Society and Religion in the Middle Ages.” Kirakosian approaches various subject topics in the course using Game of Thrones as a reference.
SOLD: The University of Massachusetts Lowell sold its 34-acre west campus in an auction for $3.245M to Alice Cui of Lexington. The 34-acre land tract is located in Chelmsford and its distance the university’s core campus is what prompted the sale. |
