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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 “...
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Learn about 2.009, an iconic MechE product development class taught by fun-loving Professor David Wallace.
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Deep in the basement of MIT’s Building 3, a two-legged robot named HERMES is wreaking controlled havoc: punching through drywall, smashing soda cans, kicking over trash buckets, and karate-chopping...
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The progress that’s been made in the field of robotics over the past 50 years is nothing short of remarkable. From Professor Robert Mann’s Boston Arm to Associate Professor Hugh Herr’s bionic limbs,...
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Most robots on a factory floor are fairly ham-handed: Equipped with large pincers or claws, they are designed to perform simple maneuvers, such as grabbing an object, and placing it somewhere else in...
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In the last two decades, prosthetic limb technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Today, the most advanced prostheses incorporate microprocessors that work with onboard gyroscopes, accelerometers,...
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Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and...
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When graduate student Natasha Wright began her PhD program in mechanical engineering, she had no idea how to remove salt from groundwater to make it more palatable, nor had she ever been to India,...
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It’s an introduction to robotics – for some students, that’s all they need to know to get excited about the popular class that goes by the number 2.12. For a mechanical engineering student, it’s a...
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A condensed version of a story by Courtney Humphries, MIT Technology Review
Uncomfortable shoes. Awkward crutches. Painful artificial limbs. When technology meets biology, the interface is rarely...
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MechE/EECS alumna Helen Greiner (SB ‘89, SM ‘90) is a household name – quite literally.
She’s a co-developer of the famous robot vacuum, the Roomba, and co-founder of the Roomba’s producer, iRobot....