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Last November, much of the buzz at the Los Angeles Auto Show was generated by a company few people had heard of. According to RJ Scaringe SM '07, PhD '09 founder and CEO of Rivian Automotive, that...
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While so many faculty and researchers at MIT are developing technologies to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy sustainability, one class puts the power in students’ hands. In class 2.S999,...
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In the early 20th century, just as electric grids were starting to transform daily life, an unlikely advocate for renewable energy voiced his concerns about burning fossil fuels. Thomas Edison...
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In the quest to make buildings more energy efficient, windows present a particularly difficult problem. According to the Department of Energy, heat that either escapes or enters windows accounts for...
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There are about a dozen aluminum pellets in the palm of Peter Godart’s hand. He has been working on harnessing enough energy from these small pellets to power desalination and generate electricity to...
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Imagine a device that can sit outside under blazing sunlight on a clear day, and without using any power cool things down by more than 23 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). It almost sounds...
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One event has become a hallmark of nearly every academic conference: the poster session. Posters summarizing research are tacked onto endless rows of bulletin boards. Leaders in any given field...
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In 2004, a few days into his first semester at MIT, Folkers Rojas ’09, SM ’11, PhD ’14 stopped by the office that housed the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Having worked through...
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For millions of people globally, cooking in their own homes can be detrimental to their health, and sometimes deadly. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.8 million people a year die as a...
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When a guitar string is plucked, it vibrates as any vibrating object would, rising and falling like a wave, as the laws of classical physics predict. But under the laws of quantum mechanics, which...
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By 2025, experts estimate the number of “internet of things” devices — including sensors that gather real-time data about infrastructure and the environment — could rise to 75 billion worldwide. As...
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Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants is widely considered an essential component of any climate change mitigation plan. Many research efforts focus on developing and deploying...
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A newly developed material that is so perfectly transparent you can barely see it could unlock many new uses for solar heat. It generates much higher temperatures than conventional solar collectors...
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The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) recently awarded seven grants totaling approximately $1 million through its Seed Fund Program, which supports early-stage innovative energy research at MIT through...
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The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum announced that MIT D-Lab has won the National Design Award in the Corporate and Institutional Achievement category. Nominations were solicited from...
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MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the eighth year in a row MIT has received this distinction.
The full 2019-...
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The formation of air bubbles in a liquid appears very similar to its inverse process, the formation of liquid droplets from, say, a dripping water faucet. But the physics involved is actually quite...
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It’s a process so fundamental to everyday life — in everything from your morning coffeemaker to the huge power plant that provides its electricity — that it’s often taken for granted: the way a...
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A broad class of materials called perovskites is considered one of the most promising avenues for developing new, more efficient solar cells. But the virtually limitless number of possible...
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Unlike water, liquid refrigerants and other fluids that have a low surface tension tend to spread quickly into a sheet when they come into contact with a surface. But for many industrial processes it...