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As a grape slowly dries and shrivels, its surface creases, ultimately taking on the wrinkled form of a raisin. Similar patterns can be found on the surfaces of other dried materials, as well as in...
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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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MechE faculty members are engineering for global change through their research, but that’s not the only way to make the world a better place.
Several are also collaborating with international...
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From a mechanical perspective, granular materials are stuck between a rock and a fluid place, with behavior resembling neither a solid nor a liquid. Think of sand through an hourglass: As grains...
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The boom in oil and gas produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is seen as a boon for meeting U.S. energy needs. But one byproduct of the process is millions of gallons of water that’s...
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When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it’s about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding...
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The world’s fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...