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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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Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in...
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India has set some of the most aggressive near-term energy goals of any nation in the world. The man tasked with bringing those goals to fruition, Piyush Goyal, met with researchers from the MIT...
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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...
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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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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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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,...
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Conduction and thermal radiation are two ways in which heat is transferred from one object to another: Conduction is the process by which heat flows between objects in physical contact, such as a pot...
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Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a new kind of solar cell that combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harvest a broader range of the sun’s...
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One day in the 1990s, as he was riding home from high school in São Paulo, Tonio Buonassisi looked out the bus window at the Brazilian city’s long lines of traffic, and its smoggy haze. In that...
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Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu ’09 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT’s D-Lab: a bike-mounted maize sheller....
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You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab.
The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
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Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
But it’s not easy, or sometimes even economically feasible, to build...
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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 key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light...
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While Evelyn Wang (SB '00), an associate professor of mechanical engineering, attended MIT as an undergraduate, her connection to the Institute goes back much further than that: This is where her...
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MIT engineers have fabricated a new elastic material coated with microscopic, hairlike structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, the microhairs can...
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The magnets cluttering the face of your refrigerator may one day be used as cooling agents, according to a new theory formulated by MIT researchers.
The theory describes the motion of magnons — quasi...
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A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun.
The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure...