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As world population continues to grow, so does the need for water and food. It would be easy if the fix were laying down more pipes and cultivating more crops. But it’s not that simple. The global...
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When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar, what does he do? He makes it himself, of course.
At age 13, Nathan Spielberg — now an MIT senior — began building his...
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An MIT-Olin team took home the grand prize this October from the 2014 Maritime RobotX Challenge in Marina Bay, Singapore. The team was comprised of students from MIT’s Department of Mechanical...
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This week a team featuring multiple Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers took home the grand prize in an international competition centered on autonomous...
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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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Three MIT-led research teams have won awards from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP) initiative to support research and development on the next generation of nuclear...
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This past Saturday, nearly 3,000 attendees ascended upon the North Court of MIT campus for the first-ever MIT Mini Maker Faire.
A celebration of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (...
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MIT researchers have developed a new way of creating surfaces on which droplets of any desired shape can spontaneously form. They say this approach could lead to new biomedical assay devices and LED...
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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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MechE alumna Grace Young ’14 has experienced something that few people in the world ever will: life underwater.
As part of Mission 31, a project led by Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of legendary...
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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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Last week, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, MIT researchers unveiled an oval-shaped submersible robot, a little smaller than a football, with a flattened panel on...
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In high school, Ernesto Ramirez had a routine he followed religiously: Every weeknight, he’d stay up late to watch David Letterman on TV, followed by the “Jeopardy!” game show. “Then I could finally...
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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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Speed and agility are hallmarks of the cheetah: The big predator is the fastest land animal on Earth, able to accelerate to 60 mph in just a few seconds. As it ramps up to top speed, a cheetah pumps...
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Ice bucket challenges are all the rage, raising awareness about ALS and the efforts to treat and cure the devastating neurodegenerative disease. On campus, President L. Rafael Reif and the mechanical...
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Where other mechanical engineering faculty come bearing specific innovative artifacts, Maria Yang offers conceptual strategies for innovation, regardless of the technology. For her, innovation first...
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Objects in space tend to spin — and spin in a way that’s totally different from the way they spin on earth. Understanding how objects are spinning, where their centers of mass are, and how their mass...
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Stefano Brizzolara, a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the newly established Innovative Ship Design Lab (i-Ship), led three Naval Construction and...