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The Society of Engineering Science (SES) announced on Dec. 7 that Pedro Reis, the Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and Markus...
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An MIT assessment of solar energy technologies concludes that today’s widely used crystalline silicon technology is efficient and reliable and could feasibly be deployed at the large scale needed to...
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It's hard to ignore the fact that a worldwide maker movement is well underway. Over the past 10 or so years, community Maker Faires have become all the rage; fabrication shops have popped up around...
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State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent...
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Are you a doodler or a scribe? Do you prefer pen and paper, or keyboard and mouse? Do you outline your thoughts, or let them flow freely?
Maria Yang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering...
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In the 20 years that David Wallace has been teaching the mechanical engineering course “product engineering processes,” known by its course number 2.009, he has spiced up the class by donning...
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MIT engineers have designed what may be the Band-Aid of the future: a sticky, stretchy, gel-like material that can incorporate temperature sensors, LED lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny...
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Nature has developed innovative ways to solve a sticky challenge: Mussels and barnacles stubbornly glue themselves to cliff faces, ship hulls, and even the skin of whales. Likewise, tendons and...
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Boiling water, with its commotion of bubbles that rise from a surface as water comes to a boil, is central to most electric power plants, heating and cooling systems, and desalination plants. Now,...
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Harbor seals have an amazingly fine-tuned sense for detecting prey, as marine biologists have noted for years. Even when blindfolded, trained seals are able to chase the precise path of an object...
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Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in...
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On a hot fall day this September, Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) graduate students were carefully hanging up posters along the perimeter of Walker Memorial’s main room. More than 125...
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India has set some of the most aggressive near-term energy goals of any nation in the world. The man tasked with bringing those goals to fruition, Piyush Goyal, met with researchers from the MIT...
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Deep in the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, residents of the remote Mexican village of La Mancalona are producing clean drinking water using the power of the sun.
For nearly two years now, members...
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The surface of a single cell contains hundreds of tiny pores, or ion channels, each of which is a portal for specific ions. Ion channels are typically about 1 nanometer wide; by maintaining the right...
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Leon Glicksman designs buildings with an eye toward improved energy efficiency, and, like many of his MIT colleagues, he brings with him a high-tech portfolio. He develops aerogel panels to improve...
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Ronan McGovern, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been working on an innovative way to import beer. His approach allows foreign beer to reach our shores fresher than ever...
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Senior Carrington Motley spends a lot of his time at MIT surrounded by sand.
“Yeah, sand is everywhere,” he admits with a laugh. “It was already in all of my clothes, and now it’s in my backpack.”...
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The boiling of water is at the heart of many industrial processes, from the operation of electric power plants to chemical processing and desalination. But the details of what happens on a hot...
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Got rope? Then try this experiment: Cross both ends, left over right, then bring the left end under and out, as if tying a pair of shoelaces. If you repeat this sequence, you get what’s called a “...