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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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Oral contraceptives are one of the most popular forms of birth control: In the United States, about 12 percent of women between 15 and 49 use them. However, their effectiveness depends on being taken...
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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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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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“He was here to dream, and I said 'OK, let's dream together,'” recalls Professor Mircea Dincă of his first encounter with Automobili Lamborghini Head of Development Riccardo Parenti in February 2017...
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In today’s factories and warehouses, it’s not uncommon to see robots whizzing about, shuttling items or tools from one station to another. For the most part, robots navigate pretty easily across open...
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Inspired by a sticky substance that spiders use to catch their prey, MIT engineers have designed a double-sided tape that can rapidly seal tissues together.
In tests in rats and pig tissues, the...
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Rescuing victims from a burning building, a chemical spill, or any disaster that is inaccessible to human responders could one day be a mission for resilient, adaptable robots. Imagine, for instance...
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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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Engineers at MIT and elsewhere have tracked the evolution of individual cells within an initially benign tumor, showing how the physical properties of those cells drive the tumor to become invasive,...
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MIT researchers have compiled a dataset that captures the detailed behavior of a robotic system physically pushing hundreds of different objects. Using the dataset — the largest and most diverse of...
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If you’re at a desk with a pen or pencil handy, try this move: Grab the pen by one end with your thumb and index finger, and push the other end against the desk. Slide your fingers down the pen, then...
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Woodie Flowers SM ’68, MEng ’71, PhD ’73, the Pappalardo Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering, passed away on Oct. 11 at the age of 75. Flowers’ passion for design and his infectious kindness...
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If you were to pry open your smartphone, you would see an array of electronic chips and components laid out across a circuit board, like a miniature city. Each component might contain even smaller “...