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Designing products for the developing world can be a hit-or-miss endeavor: While there may be a dire need for products addressing problems such as access to clean water, sanitation, and electricity,...
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You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab.
The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
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Among the 20 students selected by Aviation Week magazine as "Tomorrow's Engineering Leaders: The Twenty20s" are Michael Stern, a Lincoln Scholar assigned to MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Rapid Prototyping...
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Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a...
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Global Research Innovation and Technology (GRIT), an MIT MechE spinoff started by Tish Scolnik ’10, Mario Bollini ’09 SM ’12, Benjamin Judge ’11 MEng ’12, and Assistant Professor Amos Winter SM ’05...
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"Michelangelo didn’t attend a semester of lectures,” says Sanjay Sarma, “he learned in the studio with a master looking over his shoulder.” And the future of higher education, Sarma says, will carry...
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Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
But it’s not easy, or sometimes even economically feasible, to build...
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DropWise, a new startup created by Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) Associate Professor Kripa Varanasi; Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE) Professor and Associate Provost Karen...
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As world population continues to grow, so does the need for water and food. It would be easy if the fix were laying down more pipes and cultivating more crops. But it’s not that simple. The global...
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When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar, what does he do? He makes it himself, of course.
At age 13, Nathan Spielberg — now an MIT senior — began building his...
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This week a team featuring multiple Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous...
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Three MIT-led research teams have won awards from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) initiative to support research and development on the next generation of nuclear...
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MIT researchers have developed a new way of creating surfaces on which droplets of any desired shape can spontaneously form. They say this approach could lead to new biomedical assay devices and LED...
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When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it’s about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding...
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The key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light...
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Last week, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, MIT researchers unveiled an oval-shaped submersible robot, a little smaller than a football, with a flattened panel on...
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Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature’s most skillful camouflage artists, able to change both the color and texture of their skin within seconds to blend into...
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Speed and agility are hallmarks of the cheetah: The big predator is the fastest land animal on Earth, able to accelerate to 60 mph in just a few seconds. As it ramps up to top speed, a cheetah pumps...
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Where other mechanical engineering faculty come bearing specific innovative artifacts, Maria Yang offers conceptual strategies for innovation, regardless of the technology. For her, innovation first...
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Objects in space tend to spin — and spin in a way that’s totally different from the way they spin on earth. Understanding how objects are spinning, where their centers of mass are, and how their mass...