• Jul. 21, 2014
    A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure...
  • Jul. 14, 2014
    Last year, MIT researchers discovered that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic surfaces during condensation, they can gain electric charge in the process. Now, the same...
  • Jul. 1, 2014
    Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water, the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets, called an emulsion, that is extremely hard to separate — and that can cause severe damage to...
  • Jun. 12, 2014
    The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) recently presented three researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering — C. Justin Kamp, Alex G. Sappok, and Victor W. Wong — with the 2014 Arch T...
  • May. 21, 2014
    Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants; researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy....
  • May. 15, 2014
    Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Precision Engineering Group, teaches and conducts research in the area of precision machine design. Precision...
  • Apr. 29, 2014
    Materials that can be used for thermoelectric devices — those that turn a temperature difference into an electric voltage — have been known for decades. But until now there has been no good...
  • Jan. 2, 2014
    Researchers have tried a variety of methods to develop detectors that are responsive to a broad range of infrared light — which could form imaging arrays for security systems, or solar cells that...
  • Dec. 10, 2013
    Making Silicon Devices Responsive to Infrared Light   Photo Credit: Dr. Mark Winkler   by David Chandler, MIT News Office Researchers have tried a variety of methods to develop detectors that are...
  • Nov. 13, 2013
    Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years: They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a...
  • Nov. 5, 2013
    The concept of a market-based mechanism to curb emissions of greenhouse gases — and thus slow the pace of climate change — has often been suggested in recent decades. But one particular version of...
  • Oct. 25, 2013
    MIT doctoral candidate Ronan K. McGovern SM '12 has received the Best Presentation Award of the Young Leaders Program at this year's World Congress on Desalination and Water Reuse, hosted by the...
  • Oct. 2, 2013
    In a completely unexpected finding, MIT researchers have discovered that tiny water droplets that form on a superhydrophobic surface, and then “jump” away from that surface, carry an electric charge...
  • Sep. 20, 2013
    Steam condensation is key to the worldwide production of electricity and clean water: It is part of the power cycle that drives 85 percent of all electricity-generating plants and about half of all...
  • Jun. 26, 2013
    Efficiency Innovation for Water Purification   From left to right: Karim Chehayeb, Gregory Thiel, Steven Lam, Prakash Narayan Govindan, Max St. John, Ronan McGovern,and Professor John Lienhard...
  • Aug. 3, 2012
    Professor Nick Fang Explores Etching at the Nanoscale     Using electrochemical and optical processes, programmable metamaterials, composed of functional micro- and nanostructures, are...
  • Dec. 5, 2011
      Yang Shao-Horn is tackling the world’s energy problem by exploring — and manipulating — the surfaces of particles only billionths of a meter in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of these particles...

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