Margaret by Moonlight ~ Making Mirrors Display!

Epic homage to Apollo software engineer Margaret Hamilton!

Breastpump Hackathon ~ MomTech @ Media Lab!

Today's Day 1 of Breastpump Hackathon here at the MIT Media Lab has explored a wide range of prospective new, better, and alternative approaches to improved connections between babies and busy moms!

"The health benefits of breastfeeding (both to mother and baby!) are numerous and include the reductions of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, female cancers, heart disease and osteoporosis. Despite the overwhelming data and worldwide endorsement of breastfeeding for at least two years, many women do not breastfeed at all or wean after several months. In particular, low-income, working women are rarely able to take extended maternity leave, to afford the cost of a pump, or to pump breastmilk at their workplace. In emerging economies around the world, women who go back to work wean their babies rather than using a breast pump."

There's lots of room for improvement and creative re-imagination of the current and prospective enabling technologies! Here's just a few of the key people -- Media Lab students, alums, and and friends, including many Moms and Dads -- who are making this goodness happen...

GEMSI ~ Hackerspaces & Ventures in MENA...

Just had nice chat with Bilal Ghalib one of the instigators of GEMSI -- the Global Entrepreneurship & Maker Space Initiative...

"We help hacker spaces take root in the Middle East and beyond. Together, we can create inclusive spaces to solve problems, start businesses, and strengthen our communities."

Hack This Book ~ Art of Tinkering's e-Cover!

Check out the Art of Tinkering's conductive ink cover...

"Its cover is printed with a special ink that conducts electricity, allowing readers to make their own circuits right on the book and get in on all the tinkering fun."

Circuit Stickers ~ Peelable Sticky Chibitronics!

MIT Media Lab's Jie Qi and Bunnie Huang announce Circuit Stickers and advance purchasing via Crowd Supply...

Glass Teardown ~ Guts of Google's Wearable...

Star Simpson and Scott Torborg teardown Google Glass...

Bare Conductive ~ CNN Spots Electric Bodypaint!

CNN Blueprint's Arion McNicoll and Stefanie Blendis spotlight new materials+design venture Bare Conductive in their piece Liquid lights and musical posters: Welcome to the world of electric paint...

"Imagine if you could paint a working light switch directly onto your wall, without any need for sockets, cables or wiring. A group of students from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London has made that possible by creating electrically conductive paint. The paint acts as a form of liquid wiring. Unlike conventional wires, it can be applied to almost any surface, including paper, plastic, metal and even fabric. [...] Its inventors, RCA graduates Isabel Lizardi, Matt Johnson, Bibi Nelson and Becky Pilditch, call their creation "Bare Paint." While they don't claim to be the first group to have invented a conductive ink, they are pioneering new ways it can be used."

Raspberry Pi ~ Tiny Computer, Million Tinkerers

NYTimes John Biggs writes A Tiny Computer Attracts a Million Tinkerers...

"The story of the Raspberry Pi begins in 2006 when Eben Upton and other faculty members at the University of Cambridge in Britain found that their incoming computer science students were ill-prepared for a high-tech education. While many students in the previous decade were experienced electronics hobbyists by the time they got to college, these freshmen were little more than skilled Web designers. Easy-to-use, modern PCs hide most of the nuts and bolts behind a pleasing interface. Mr. Upton posited that parents did not want their children to destroy their expensive computers by experimenting with their insides. But a cheaper machine would be fair game for messing around. The Raspberry Pi -- about 3 inches by 2 inches and less than an inch high -- was intended to replace the expensive computers."

It's become a hot-selling DIY hit kit!

DIY Toy Car ~ Cameroonian Kid Proto-Engineer!

UD spots Recycled Toy Car Made In Cameroon by DIY proto-engineer clever kid! A few more years and he'll be ready for MIT...

Binbot ~ Smart Trashbox is Robo-Receptacle!

The Mirror spots Smart Trashbox!

iMod ~ Adafruit's iPhone + CharlieCard Mashup...

Thanks to BostInno's Steve Annear for spotting Adafruit's How to Turn Your iPhone Into an MBTA CharlieCard...

Green Building Tetris ~ Playing Games @ MIT!

Nadya Peek spots Green Building Tetris @ MIT! Nice...

Kinect Magic Mirror ~ Augmented Reality "X-Rays"

Thanks to MIT Media Lab colleague Vitor Pamplona (of NETRA fame working in the Camera Culture group) for spotting this TU Munich Kinect "X-Rays" Magic Mirror project...

"The Kinect allows tracking of users without additional markers. We develop a magic mirror that generated an overlay of a video image with volume visualization from a CT volume. Such a system could be used for education of anatomy."

And much more!

Kinect Hand Detection ~ MIT CSAIL Interface...

Cool, MIT CSAIL does Kinect hand detection! Work done by CSAIL's LIS Group and Robot Locomotion Group.

SEGFAULT ~ DIY Analog Balancing Scooter

Charles Z Guan delivers again, this time SEGFAULT...

Fluidic Kinect ~ Web Browsing By Gesturing...

Simple gestures, powerful Kinect hack, MIT Media Lab'ers...

DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

Kinect Hacking ~ 3D Video Reconstruction!

Kinect Hacking is blossoming, for instance... Watch thru to the end!

MITERS ~ MIT's Exploratory Research Space...

Go DIY @ MITERS...

Stepford Labs ~ Building A Better Student Body

Thanks to Eric Schmiedl for his photoessay on MIT's latest research in Biological Engineering, the Stepford Labs, where they are dedicated to building a better student body...

BUILDS ~ BU's DIY Hackerspace Inauguration!

Great to see that Boston University (BU) is inaugurating BUILDS, the BU Information Lab & Design Space. BUILDS is a student-run research lab and workshop giving motivated undergrads tools and resources for conducting their own student-led DIY tech projects. They open this Wednesday...