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Ever notice an earthy smell in the air after a light rain? Now scientists at MIT believe they may have identified the mechanism that releases this aroma, as well as other aerosols, into the...
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One day in the 1990s, as he was riding home from high school in São Paulo, Tonio Buonassisi looked out the bus window at the Brazilian city’s long lines of traffic, and its smoggy haze. In that...
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You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab.
The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
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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...
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MIT engineers have fabricated a new elastic material coated with microscopic, hairlike structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, the microhairs can...
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The fields of data communication, fabrication, and ultrasound imaging share a common challenge when it comes to improving speed and efficiency: light’s diffraction limit. Nicholas Fang thinks his...
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What’s the difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument?
Both structures soar to impressive heights, and each was the world’s tallest building when completed. But the Washington...
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Those who study hydrophobic materials — water-shedding surfaces such as those found in nature and created in the laboratory — are familiar with a theoretical limit on the time it takes for a water...
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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...
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When an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, knocking out emergency power supplies, crews sprayed seawater on the reactors to cool them — to no avail.
One...
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There are good bacteria and there are bad bacteria — and sometimes both coexist within the same species.
Take, for instance, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a microbe common in soil and water. This...
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MIT researchers have found a new family of materials that provides the best-ever performance in a reaction called oxygen evolution, a key requirement for energy storage and delivery systems such as...
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In a New Microchip, Cells Separate by Rolling Away
Associate Professor Rohit Karnik in his lab.
Karnik’s new microfluidic device isolates target cells (in pink) from the rest of the flow...
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Professor Nick Fang Explores Etching at the Nanoscale
Using electrochemical and optical processes, programmable metamaterials, composed of functional micro- and nanostructures, are...
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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...