• Nov. 3, 2014
    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...
  • Nov. 3, 2014
    An MIT-Olin team took home the grand prize this October from the 2014 Maritime RobotX Challenge in Marina Bay, Singapore. The team was comprised of students from MIT’s Department of Mechanical...
  • Oct. 30, 2014
    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...
  • Oct. 21, 2014
    The boom in oil and gas produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is seen as a boon for meeting U.S. energy needs. But one byproduct of the process is millions of gallons of water that’s...
  • Oct. 10, 2014
    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...
  • Oct. 7, 2014
    This past Saturday, nearly 3,000 attendees ascended upon the North Court of MIT campus for the first-ever MIT Mini Maker Faire. A celebration of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (...
  • Oct. 6, 2014
    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...
  • Oct. 3, 2014
    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...
  • Oct. 3, 2014
    The world’s fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or...
  • Oct. 1, 2014
    MechE alumna Grace Young ’14 has experienced something that few people in the world ever will: life underwater. As part of Mission 31, a project led by Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of legendary...
  • Sep. 29, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 26, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 17, 2014
    In high school, Ernesto Ramirez had a routine he followed religiously: Every weeknight, he’d stay up late to watch David Letterman on TV, followed by the “Jeopardy!” game show. “Then I could finally...
  • Sep. 16, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 15, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 12, 2014
    Ice bucket challenges are all the rage, raising awareness about ALS and the efforts to treat and cure the devastating neurodegenerative disease. On campus, President L. Rafael Reif and the mechanical...
  • Sep. 10, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 10, 2014
    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...
  • Sep. 9, 2014
    Stefano Brizzolara, a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the newly established Innovative Ship Design Lab (i-Ship), led three Naval Construction and...
  • Sep. 8, 2014
    Around the world, there is more salty groundwater than fresh, drinkable groundwater. For example, 60 percent of India is underlain by salty water — and much of that area is not served by an electric...

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