-
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...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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.”...
-
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...
-
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 “...
-
Learn about 2.009, an iconic MechE product development class taught by fun-loving Professor David Wallace.
-
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...
-
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,...
-
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...
-
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,...
-
Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and...
-
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,...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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....
-
Albert Wang has had robots on his mind for a long time.
“When I was about four years old,” he recalls, “I dreamt about building a robot vacuum. I remember wandering around the house, while my parents...
-
All you have to do is think about it.
Or at least that’s what it would look like to someone watching you use the robotic finger system that PhD student Faye Wu is designing in Professor Harry Asada’s...
-
Assistant Professor Alberto Rodriguez led a team in this past May’s Amazon Picking Challenge, winning second place out of 28 entrants for their robot. The challenge, whose judging panel included...