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The Society of Engineering Science (SES) announced on Dec. 7 that Pedro Reis, the Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and Markus...
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It's hard to ignore the fact that a worldwide maker movement is well underway. Over the past 10 or so years, community Maker Faires have become all the rage; fabrication shops have popped up around...
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State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent...
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Are you a doodler or a scribe? Do you prefer pen and paper, or keyboard and mouse? Do you outline your thoughts, or let them flow freely?
Maria Yang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering...
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In the 20 years that David Wallace has been teaching the mechanical engineering course “product engineering processes,” known by its course number 2.009, he has spiced up the class by donning...
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MIT engineers have designed what may be the Band-Aid of the future: a sticky, stretchy, gel-like material that can incorporate temperature sensors, LED lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny...
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Nature has developed innovative ways to solve a sticky challenge: Mussels and barnacles stubbornly glue themselves to cliff faces, ship hulls, and even the skin of whales. Likewise, tendons and...
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Boiling water, with its commotion of bubbles that rise from a surface as water comes to a boil, is central to most electric power plants, heating and cooling systems, and desalination plants. Now,...
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On a hot fall day this September, Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) graduate students were carefully hanging up posters along the perimeter of Walker Memorial’s main room. More than 125...
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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...
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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...
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Learn about 2.009, an iconic MechE product development class taught by fun-loving Professor David Wallace.
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...