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Resting atop Thomas Peacock’s desk is an ordinary-looking brown rock. Roughly the size of a potato, it has been at the center of decades of debate. Known as a polymetallic nodule, it spent 10 million...
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Six MIT faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The new fellows are among a group of 443 AAAS members elected by their peers in...
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Last November, much of the buzz at the Los Angeles Auto Show was generated by a company few people had heard of. According to RJ Scaringe SM '07, PhD '09 founder and CEO of Rivian Automotive, that...
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While so many faculty and researchers at MIT are developing technologies to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy sustainability, one class puts the power in students’ hands. In class 2.S999,...
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In the early 20th century, just as electric grids were starting to transform daily life, an unlikely advocate for renewable energy voiced his concerns about burning fossil fuels. Thomas Edison...
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In the quest to make buildings more energy efficient, windows present a particularly difficult problem. According to the Department of Energy, heat that either escapes or enters windows accounts for...
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There are about a dozen aluminum pellets in the palm of Peter Godart’s hand. He has been working on harnessing enough energy from these small pellets to power desalination and generate electricity to...
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Many first-year students arriving on campus each year share a driving force that brought them to MIT – a passion for making. Whether it’s tinkering with robots, building motors, or designing devices...
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An autonomous robotic system invented by researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) efficiently sniffs out the most scientifically interesting — but hard-to-find — ...
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Researchers from MIT will be collaborating with colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder on an experiment scheduled to be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) on Nov. 2. The...
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Imagine a device that can sit outside under blazing sunlight on a clear day, and without using any power cool things down by more than 23 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). It almost sounds...
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One event has become a hallmark of nearly every academic conference: the poster session. Posters summarizing research are tacked onto endless rows of bulletin boards. Leaders in any given field...
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In 2004, a few days into his first semester at MIT, Folkers Rojas ’09, SM ’11, PhD ’14 stopped by the office that housed the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Having worked through...
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For millions of people globally, cooking in their own homes can be detrimental to their health, and sometimes deadly. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.8 million people a year die as a...
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When a guitar string is plucked, it vibrates as any vibrating object would, rising and falling like a wave, as the laws of classical physics predict. But under the laws of quantum mechanics, which...
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It’s a phenomenon many preschoolers know well: When you mix cornstarch and water, weird things happen. Swish it gently in a bowl, and the mixture sloshes around like a liquid. Squeeze it, and it...
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Through dedication and a willingness to face challenges both expected and unforeseen, an MIT team recently brought the air-powered hovercraft from the world of Saturday-morning cartoons to reality,...
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Students from the MIT Driverless team, together with students from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), placed third overall — in a field of 20 university competitors — in the Driverless...
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Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants is widely considered an essential component of any climate change mitigation plan. Many research efforts focus on developing and deploying...
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A newly developed material that is so perfectly transparent you can barely see it could unlock many new uses for solar heat. It generates much higher temperatures than conventional solar collectors...