• Sep. 16, 2014
    Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature’s most skillful camouflage artists, able to change both the color and texture of their skin within seconds to blend into...
  • Aug. 20, 2014
    Where the river meets the sea, there is the potential to harness a significant amount of renewable energy, according to a team of mechanical engineers at MIT. The researchers evaluated an emerging...
  • Aug. 1, 2014
    Paper wrinkles, tape tears, cables kink, columns buckle, eggshells break. Pedro M. Reis hopes to transform today’s annoyances into tomorrow’s technology. Reis, who holds a dual appointment in...
  • Aug. 1, 2014
    Researchers at MIT and in Saudi Arabia have developed a new way of making surfaces that can actively control how fluids or particles move across them. The work might enable new kinds of biomedical or...
  • Jul. 29, 2014
    Several years ago, as a graduate student at MIT, Amos Winter spent a summer in Tanzania surveying wheelchair technology. What he found was a disconnect between products and the lives of their...
  • Jul. 23, 2014
    In a recent study published in the Journal of Membrane Science, MIT professor John Lienhard and postdoc Ronan McGovern, both of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, reported that, contrary to...
  • Jul. 22, 2014
    Rohit Karnik, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, addresses real-world challenges with his microfluidics and nanofluidics research. The studies that Karnik and his team have...
  • Jul. 14, 2014
    In the movie “Terminator 2,” the shape-shifting T-1000 robot morphs into a liquid state to squeeze through tight spaces or to repair itself when harmed. Now a phase-changing material built from wax...
  • Jun. 24, 2014
    There is a story about how the modern golf ball, with its dimpled surface, came to be: In the mid-1800s, it is said, new golf balls were smooth, but became dimpled over time as impacts left permanent...
  • Jun. 16, 2014
    Feathers have long been recognized as a classic example of efficient water-shedding — as in the well-known expression “like water off a duck’s back.” A combination of modeling and laboratory tests...
  • Jun. 5, 2014
    Lallit Anand, the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2014 Daniel C. Drucker Medal. Established by the Applied Mechanics Division of the...
  • May. 20, 2014
    Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the...
  • May. 13, 2014
    Researchers at MIT's School of Engineering, working with colleagues at the Pontificial University of Chile in Santiago, are harvesting potable water from the coastal fog that forms on the edge of one...
  • Mar. 25, 2014
    The Atlantic razor clam uses very little energy to burrow into undersea soil at high speed. Now a detailed insight into how the animal digs has led to the development of a robotic clam that can...
  • Jan. 7, 2014
    Their effect on the surface of the ocean is negligible, producing a rise of just inches that is virtually imperceptible on a turbulent sea. But internal waves, which are hidden entirely within the...
  • Dec. 10, 2013
    Fog-harvesting system developed by MIT and Chilean researchers could provide potable water for the world’s driest regions.   By David Chandler, MIT News Office   Photo courtesy of researchers. In...
  • Dec. 10, 2013
    Droplets Break a Theoretical Time Barrier on Bouncing   By David Chandler, MIT News Office   Those who study hydrophobic materials — water-shedding surfaces such as those found in nature and created...
  • Nov. 11, 2013
    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...
  • Nov. 8, 2013
    Stephen H. Crandall, the Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus at MIT, a pioneer in random vibrations and rotordynamics, and a leader in transforming mechanics into an engineering science, passed...
  • Nov. 6, 2013
    An MIT mathematician and a celebrity chef have combined talents to create two culinary novelties inspired by nature. John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics, and renowned Spanish chef José...

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