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News Wire - MechE Stories from the MIT News Office  

For many people, it has become routine to go online to check out a map before traveling to a new place. But for blind people, Google maps and other visual mapping applications are of little use. Now, a unique device developed at MIT could give the visually impaired the same kind of benefit that sighted people get from online maps.

Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering John J. Leonard has been appointed the new director of the Ford-MIT Alliance, Chancellor Phillip Clay announced on Tuesday. Leonard will succeed Professor John Heywood, who retired in June.

During a tour of MIT labs prior to his talk at Kresge Auditorium last Friday, President Barack Obama saw demonstrations of several clean-energy technologies being developed at MIT: batteries that can be self-assembled by genetically engineered viruses; long-lasting high-efficiency light bulbs; windows that can double as solar energy collectors; and structures that could provide offshore windmills with built-in power storage.

The October issue of Glamour Magazine has named 2009 Truman Scholar Tish Scolnik as one of their Top 10 College Women, recognizing her work on mobility issues for the disabled. Words to live by, according to Tish, quoted in Glamour Magazine, are “‘Haba na haba hujaza kibaba,’ a Swahili proverb that can translate to ‘little by little fills the pot.’”

In April 2009, the Deshpande Center issued its annual Institute-wide call for proposals for two levels of grant awards — Ignition and Innovation. The grants target projects focusing on novel, enabling and potentially useful ideas and innovations in all areas of technology. Funding for Ignition awards — up to $50,000 per grant — might enable only exploratory experiments and limited proof of concept, and an Ignition Grant can position projects to receive further funding to continue to develop an innovation.  Funding for Innovation awards — for as much as $250,000 per grant — is meant to benefit projects that have progressed beyond their earliest stages and are closer to commercialization. After a rigorous three-month process of collection, evaluation, presentation and selection, all under the guidance of the center's executive director, Leon Sandler, and its faculty director, Professor Charles Cooney, the final award decisions were made in August 2009 and announced publicly on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009. The center is pleased to announce the following fall 2009 grantees:

Fuel cells, devices that can produce electricity from hydrogen or other fuels without burning them, are considered a promising new way of powering everything from homes and cars to portable devices like cellphones and laptop computers. Their big advantage — the prospect of eliminating emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants — has been outweighed by their very high cost, and researchers have been trying to find ways to make the devices less expensive.

In recent years, quantum computers have lost some of their luster. In the early 1990s, it seemed that they might be able to solve a class of difficult but common problems — the so-called NP-complete problems — exponentially faster than classical computers. Now, it seems that they probably can't. In fact, until this week, the only common calculation where quantum computation promised exponential gains was the factoring of large numbers, which isn't that useful outside cryptography. In a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, however, MIT researchers present a new algorithm that could bring the same type of efficiency to systems of linear equations — whose solution is crucial to image processing, video processing, signal processing, robot control, weather modeling, genetic analysis and population analysis, to name just a few applications.

Many residents of New Longoro, a small village in the countryside of Ghana, are small-scale farmers, and one of the crops they grow is groundnuts — what we call peanuts. But harvesting and processing the nuts is a long and labor-intensive process, and the hardest part is the threshing — scraping the uprooted plants to release the pods containing the nuts. A better, faster way to thresh the nuts could enable each farmer to grow more of them and get them to market faster, thereby boosting their incomes.

To a robot designer like Sangbae Kim, the animal kingdom is full of inspiration.

"I always look at animals and ask why they are the way they are," says Kim, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "As an engineer, looking at them and speculating is fascinating."

MIT professor Leona Samson is among 18 scientists nationwide to receive a 2009 Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health, the NIH announced today. Samson, director of MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences and professor of toxicology and biological engineering, will receive $2.5 million over five years.