Submission + - Inside MIT, New Wave of Fusion & Robot Innovat
An anonymous reader writes: Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some very cool first looks: robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers at the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras at the aerospace controls lab, electric scooters with super-cheap assembly at the Media Lab and, perhaps most exciting, a fight for funding with the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. From the fusion article: "That means we'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century. Even that protracted timeline now appears optimistic. Since 2006, when seven member countries committed to the ITER's $10 billion budget, federal funding for scientific research in the United States appears to have bottomed out. The U.S. agreed to pay 9.1 percent of the project's total cost — but of the $160 million contribution planned for this year, Congress has approved just $10.7 million."
