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When you pick up a balloon, the pressure to keep hold of it is different from what you would exert to grasp a jar. And now engineers at MIT and elsewhere have a way to precisely measure and map such...
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If you wanted to get pasta out of a pot of water, would you boil off the water, or use a strainer? While home cooks would choose the strainer, many industries continue to use energy-intensive thermal...
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As a not-so-distant future that includes space tourism and people living off-planet approaches, the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is designing and researching the activities humans will...
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In certain parts of the deep ocean, scattered across the seafloor, lie baseball-sized rocks layered with minerals accumulated over millions of years. A region of the central Pacific, called the...
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Since the Covid-19 pandemic began last year, face masks and other personal protective equipment have become essential for health care workers. Disposable N95 masks have been in especially high demand...
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MIT engineers and researchers in South Korea have developed a sweat-proof “electronic skin” — a conformable, sensor-embedded sticky patch that monitors a person’s health without malfunctioning or...
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A new study by engineers at MIT, Caltech, and ETH Zürich shows that “nanoarchitected” materials — materials designed from precisely patterned nanoscale structures — may be a promising route to...
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Filtration membranes are critical to a wide variety of industries around the world. Made of materials as varied as cellulose, graphene, and nylon, they serve as the barriers that turn seawater into...
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In work that could someday turn cell phones into sensors capable of detecting viruses and other minuscule objects, MIT researchers have built a powerful nanoscale flashlight on a chip.
Their approach...
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Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for determining the structure and behavior of a class of widely used soft materials known as weak colloidal gels, which are found in everything from...
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A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough. This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest...
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In a September 2020 essay in Nature Energy, three scientists posed several “grand challenges” — one of which was to find suitable materials for thermal energy storage devices that could be used in...
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Materials called perovskites are widely heralded as a likely replacement for silicon as the material of choice for solar cells, but their greatest drawback is their tendency to degrade relatively...
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Lithium-ion batteries have made possible the lightweight electronic devices whose portability we now take for granted, as well as the rapid expansion of electric vehicle production. But researchers...
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The interiors of nonflowering trees such as pine and ginkgo contain sapwood lined with straw-like conduits known as xylem, which draw water up through a tree’s trunk and branches. Xylem conduits are...
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In November, mechanical engineering PhD candidate Hyunwoo Yuk earned the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition hosted by the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. Yuk was named the graduate...
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At the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy, doctors and healthcare professionals were faced with harrowing decisions. Hospitals were running out of ventilators, forcing doctors to choose which...
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An air of uncertainty descended on MIT’s campus in early March. Whispers and rumors about campus closing down swirled in the hallways. Students convened en masse on Killian Court to dance, hug, and...
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MIT engineers have designed a Velcro-like food sensor, made from an array of silk microneedles, that pierces through plastic packaging to sample food for signs of spoilage and bacterial contamination...
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) recently announced the names of 76 scientists who have been selected for their 2020 Early Career Research Program. The list includes four faculty members from MIT...