Within the animal kingdom, mussels are masters of underwater adhesion. The marine molluscs cluster atop rocks and along the bottoms of ships, and hold fast against the ocean’s waves thanks to a gluey plaque they secrete through their foot. These tenacious adhesive structures have prompted scientists in recent years to design similar bioinspired, waterproof adhesives. […]
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“Intelligent, caring, inspiring, and full-of-wisdom,” one student described Kenneth Oye. Another lauded that “We are beyond lucky to have such a caring, supportive, empathetic and compassionate leader” in Maria Yang. Professors Maria Yang and Kenneth Oye are two of the 2023-25 Committed to Caring cohort, acknowledged for encouraging their students; advocating for meaningful, interesting research; […]
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The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has received substantial support for its striking new headquarters on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A major gift from Sebastian Man ’79, SM ’80 will be recognized with the naming of a key space in the building, enriching the academic and research activities of the MIT Schwarzman […]
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When the late professor emeritus Woodie Flowers SM ’68, MEng ’71, PhD ’73 was a student at MIT, most of his classes involved paper-and-pencil exercises with predetermined solutions. Flowers had an affinity for making things, and for making them work. When he transitioned from student to teacher, he chose to carry this approach into his […]
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Across a career’s worth of pioneering product designs, Doug Field’s work has shaped the experience of anyone who’s ever used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway, or driven a Tesla Model 3. But his newest project is his most ambitious yet: reinventing the Ford automobile, one of the past century’s most iconic pieces of technology. […]
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Eleven MIT faculty, including nine from the School of Engineering and two from the School of Science, were awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). More than 15 additional MIT alumni were also honored. Established in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, the PECASE is awarded to scientists and engineers “who show […]
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When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons. Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. […]
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Imagine a boombox that tracks your every move and suggests music to match your personal dance style. That’s the idea behind “Be the Beat,” one of several projects from MIT course 4.043/4.044 (Interaction Intelligence), taught by Marcelo Coelho in the Department of Architecture, that were presented at the 38th annual NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) […]
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Materials like car tires, human tissues, and spider webs are diverse in composition, but all contain networks of interconnected strands. A long-standing question about the durability of these materials asks: What is the energy required to fracture these diverse networks? A recently published paper by MIT researchers offers new insights. “Our findings reveal a simple, […]
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Faith Brooks, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, has had a clear dream since the age of 4: to become a pilot. “At around 8 years old, my neighbor knew I wanted to fly and showed me pictures of her dad landing a jet on an aircraft carrier, and I was immediately captivated,” says Brooks. […]
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Three MIT students — Yutao Gong, Brandon Man, and Andrii Zahorodnii — have been awarded 2025 Schwarzman Scholarships and will join the program’s 10th cohort to pursue a master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The MIT students were selected from a pool of over 5,000 applicants. This year’s class of […]
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Used in everything from soda cans and foil wrap to circuit boards and rocket boosters, aluminum is the second-most-produced metal in the world after steel. By the end of this decade, demand is projected to drive up aluminum production by 40 percent worldwide. This steep rise will magnify aluminum’s environmental impacts, including any pollutants that […]
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When the Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) initiative launched in February 2024 as a pilot program for Ukrainian researchers, its architects expressed hope that GMAF would eventually expand to include visiting scholars from other troubled areas of the globe. That time arrived this fall, when MIT launched GMAF-Palestine, a two-year pilot that will select up to […]
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Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if artificial intelligence could help? MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously […]
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On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible was about an hour-and-a-half into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it lost contact with its support ship. This cease in communication set off a frantic search for the tourist submersible and five passengers onboard, located about two miles […]
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The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out. Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack multiple surfaces of transistors and semiconducting […]
Read MoreOn an otherwise dark and rainy Monday night, attendees packed Kresge Auditorium for a lively and colorful celebration of student product designs, as part of the final presentations for MIT’s popular class 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes). With “Balance!” as its theme, the vibrant show attracted hundreds of attendees along with thousands more who tuned in […]
Read MoreMetabolic imaging is a noninvasive method that enables clinicians and scientists to study living cells using laser light, which can help them assess disease progression and treatment responses. But light scatters when it shines into biological tissue, limiting how deep it can penetrate and hampering the resolution of captured images. Now, MIT researchers have developed […]
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Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. […]
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Gastric balloons — silicone balloons filled with air or saline and placed in the stomach — can help people lose weight by making them feel too full to overeat. However, this effect eventually can wear off as the stomach becomes used to the sensation of fullness. To overcome that limitation, MIT engineers have designed a […]
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The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as […]
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Filter feeders are everywhere in the animal world, from tiny crustaceans and certain types of coral and krill, to various molluscs, barnacles, and even massive basking sharks and baleen whales. Now, MIT engineers have found that one filter feeder has evolved to sift food in ways that could improve the design of industrial water filters. […]
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Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of home electronics and are powering an electric revolution in transportation. But they are not suitable for every application. A key drawback is their flammability and toxicity, which make large-scale lithium-ion energy storage a bad fit in densely populated city centers and near metal processing or chemical manufacturing plants. Now […]
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Acoustic metamaterials — architected materials that have tailored geometries designed to control the propagation of acoustic or elastic waves through a medium — have been studied extensively through computational and theoretical methods. Physical realizations of these materials to date have been restricted to large sizes and low frequencies. “The multifunctionality of metamaterials — being simultaneously […]
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Inspired by the way that squids use jets to propel themselves through the ocean and shoot ink clouds, researchers from MIT and Novo Nordisk have developed an ingestible capsule that releases a burst of drugs directly into the wall of the stomach or other organs of the digestive tract. This capsule could offer an alternative […]
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Reducing methane emissions is a top priority in the fight against climate change because of its propensity to trap heat in the atmosphere: Methane’s warming effects are 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year timescale. And yet, as the main component of natural gas, methane is also a valuable fuel and a precursor […]
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Yiming Chen ’24, Wilhem Hector, Anushka Nair, and David Oluigbo have been selected as 2025 Rhodes Scholars and will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. In addition to MIT’s two U.S. Rhodes winners, Oluigbo and Nair, two affiliates were awarded international Rhodes Scholarships: Chen for Rhodes’ China constituency and […]
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As the world struggles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are seeking practical, economical ways to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into useful products, such as transportation fuels, chemical feedstocks, or even building materials. But so far, such attempts have struggled to reach economic viability. New research by engineers at MIT could lead to […]
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There’s no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system. Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of […]
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As a major contributor to global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the transportation sector has immense potential to advance decarbonization. However, a zero-emissions global supply chain requires re-imagining reliance on a heavy-duty trucking industry that emits 810,000 tons of CO2, or 6 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and consumes 29 billion gallons of diesel […]
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As Earth’s temperature rises, agricultural practices will need to adapt. Droughts will likely become more frequent, and some land may no longer be arable. On top of that is the challenge of feeding an ever-growing population without expanding the production of fertilizer and other agrochemicals, which have a large carbon footprint that is contributing to […]
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