Drones are stupid. This isn't a subjective judgement; without the hands of a canny pilot, most flying quadcopters or remotely controlled planes will crash into obstacles in their path, like the world's largest, clumsiest insects. That's fine for casual flight in open fields, but if drones are ever to navigate dense obstacles like forests or the insides of buildings, they need to be a lot smarter. Thanks to a project by MIT's Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), drones can now navigate dense obstacle courses without crashing. It works for quadcopters:

Right now, the typical 3D printer is a tool for making plastic objects. Assembling them in layers according to a pre-programmed plan, the printers can quickly make weirdly shaped parts, but they're often limited to working with just one material at a time. Additive manufacturing, as 3D printing is also known, offers so much more. A new printer, created by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), can print up to 10 materials into a single object —and incorporate other, finished parts directly into the design— all at a fraction of the cost of complex industrial 3D printers

In recent years, researchers have figured out that the constellation of diseases known as cancer is in fact hundreds of distinct diseases. Though each one may manifest itself a little differently, diagnosing the type of cancer is extremely difficult, and makes a huge difference in how doctors treat the disease. Now researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have teamed up with doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital to develop a computer model that can pull in a patient's data to suggest diagnoses to their physicians. The researchers published their work earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.