Plants and other photosynthetic organisms use a wide variety of pigments to absorb different wavelengths of light. MIT researchers have now developed a theoretical model to predict the spectrum of light absorbed by aggregates of these pigments, based on their structure. The model could help guide scientists in designing new types of solar cells made of organic materials that efficiently capture light and funnel the light-induced excitation, ...

Chemical reactions that release oxygen in the presence of a catalyst, known as oxygen-evolution reactions, are a crucial part of chemical energy storage processes, including water splitting, electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction, and ammonia production. The kinetics of this type of reaction are generally slow, but compounds called metal oxides can have catalytic activities that vary over several orders of magnitude, with some exhibiting the hi...

Atom interferometry is the most sensitive known technique for measuring gravitational forces and inertial forces such as acceleration and rotation. It’s a mainstay of scientific research and is being commercialised as a means of location-tracking in environments where GPS is unavailable. It’s also extremely sensitive to electric fields and has been used to make minute measurements of elements’ fundamental electrical properties.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a computational model of a neural circuit in the brain, which could shed light on the biological role of inhibitory neurons — neurons that keep other neurons from firing. The model describes a neural circuit consisting of an array of input neurons and an equivalent number of output neurons.

A team of researchers at MIT has designed one of the strongest lightweight materials known, by compressing and fusing flakes of graphene. The material, a sponge-like configuration with a density of just 5%, can have a strength 10 times that of steel. In its two-dimensional form, graphene is thought to be the strongest of all known materials. But researchers until now have had a hard time translating that two-dimensional strength into useful ...

The Psyche mission, a journey to a metal asteroid, has been selected for flight under NASA’s Discovery Program, a series of lower-cost, highly focused robotic space missions that are exploring the solar system. Psyche includes prominent roles for Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) professors Maria Zuber (leading the Gravity investigation), Richard Binzel (asteroid composition expert), and Benjamin Weiss...

MIT alumnus Josh Adler MBA ’13 is a matchmaker. In the mid-1990s, he launched and sold Amour.com, one of the first online matchmaking websites, which is still operating today. Two decades later, Adler is still matchmaking. But now, through his website Sourcewater, he’s helping people in the oil and gas industry connect online to make finding, transporting, and recycling water more cost effective.

  Traffic is bad news for the economy, as well as being a public health hazard. Transportation studies put the annual cost of congestion at $160bn, which includes 7 billion hours of time lost to sitting in traffic and an extra 3 billion gallons of fuel burned. 

On Dec. 11, 2014, a freight train of a storm steamed through much of California, deluging the San Francisco Bay Area with three inches of rain in just one hour. The storm was fueled by what meteorologists refer to as the “Pineapple Express” — an atmospheric river of moisture that is whipped up over the Pacific’s tropical waters and swept north with the jet stream. By evening, record rainfall had set off mudslides, flo...

For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now.

As driverless cars merge into our transportation system in the coming years, some researchers believe autonomous vehicles may save fuel by trailing each other in large platoons. Like birds and fighter jets flying in formation, or bikers and race car drivers drafting in packs, vehicles experience less aerodynamic drag when they drive close together. But assembling a vehicle platoon to deliver packages between distribution centers, or to trans...

Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, are tiny machines fabricated using equipment and processes developed for the production of electronic chips and devices. They’ve found a wide variety of applications in today’s consumer electronics, but their moving parts can wear out over time as a result of friction. A new approach developed by researchers at MIT could offer a new way of making movable parts with no solid connections bet...

In the not so distant future, first responders to a disaster zone may include four-legged, dog-like robots that can bound through a fire or pick their way through a minefield, rising up on their hind legs to turn a hot door handle or punch through a wall. Such robo-rescuers may be ready to deploy in the next five to 10 years, says Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

  Distributed energy resources — relatively small-scale power technologies such as solar, wind, energy storage, and power electronics and control devices — are being deployed rapidly in the global shift toward a low-carbon energy future.

Materials exposed to a high-radiation environment such as the inside of a nuclear reactor vessel can gradually degrade and weaken. An analytical method developed by researchers in the Department of Chemistry at MIT and applied by members of MIT’s Mesoscale Nuclear Materials Laboratory could change that, potentially allowing for continuous monitoring of these materials without the need to remove them from their radiation environment.

  The theme for this year’s student projects in the mechanical engineering class called Product Engineering Processes was “rough, tough, and messy,” but the student teams’ product ideas were much more pleasant and positive than that may sound: All eight were designed to be life-saving or health-enhancing, or at least lots of fun.

Using LED lights flickering at a specific frequency, MIT researchers have shown that they can substantially reduce the beta amyloid plaques seen in Alzheimer’s disease, in the visual cortex of mice. This treatment appears to work by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, which the researchers discovered help the brain suppress beta amyloid production and invigorate cells responsible for destroying the plaques.

  Engineers at MIT have invented a fast, precise printing process that may make such electronic surfaces an inexpensive reality. In a paper published in Science Advances, the researchers report that they have fabricated a stamp made from forests of carbon nanotubes that is able to print electronic inks onto rigid and flexible surfaces.

Speech recognition systems, such as those that convert speech to text on cellphones, are generally the result of machine learning. A computer pores through thousands or even millions of audio files and their transcriptions, and learns which acoustic features correspond to which typed words. But transcribing recordings is costly, time-consuming work, which has limited speech recognition to a small subset of languages spoken in wealthy nations...

This fall’s Federal Aviation Administration regulations have made drone flight easier than ever for both companies and consumers. But what if the drones out on the market aren’t exactly what you want? A new system from MIT’s CSAIL is the first to allow users to design, simulate, and build their own custom drone. Users can change the size, shape, and structure of their drone based on the specific needs they have for payload,...