Ordered patterns of gold nanoparticles on a silicon base can be stimulated to produce collective electron waves known as plasmons that absorb only certain narrow bands of light, making them promising for a wide range of arrays and display technologies in medicine, industry, and science.

A new technique invented at MIT can precisely measure the growth of many individual cells simultaneously. The advance holds promise for fast drug tests, offers new insights into growth variation across single cells within larger populations, and helps track the dynamic growth of cells to changing environmental conditions.

A convection oven cooks more uniformly because a fan creates a steady flow of hot air around the food being cooked. The research group of Fikile R. Brushett, the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, is applying that principle to a new water-based battery design.

What’s the best way to measure human exposure to urban pollution? Typically, cities do so by studying air-quality levels in fixed places. New York City, for example, has an extensive monitoring network that measures air quality in 155 locations. But now a study led by MIT researchers, focused on New York City, suggests that using mobile-phone data to track people’s movement provides an even deeper picture of exposure to pollution...

  Cyborg beast, phoenix, talon — although these names seem fitting for superhero characters, they are actually names for devices that make people feel like superheroes. These devices are 3D-printed hands that are designed for people who live without all or part of their arms.

The MIT Energy Initiative has announced that GE will be joining MITEI as a Sustaining Member to fund advanced technology solutions to help transform global energy systems. GE will commit a total of $7.5m over a five-year period ($1.5m annually) and play an active role in MITEI’s research and project priorities.

Battery researchers have been focusing on lithium metal electrodes as leading contenders for improving the amount of energy that batteries can store without increasing their weight. But lithium in this metallic form has a problem that has stymied much of this research effort: As the batteries are being charged, finger-like lithium deposits form on the metal surface, which can hamper performance and even lead to short-circuits that damage or disab...

When farmers spray their fields with pesticides or other treatments, only 2% of the spray sticks to the plants. A significant portion of it typically bounces right off the plants, lands on the ground, and becomes part of the runoff that flows to streams and rivers — often causing serious pollution. But a team of MIT researchers aims to fix that.

How do you know your water is clean and safe to drink? Whether you live in Flint, Michigan, or a half a world away in northwest India, many families don’t have a good answer to this question. People use countless methods to clean their water — from purchasing filters and purification products, to boiling water on a stovetop, to relying on their local governments to guarantee tap water safety. 

In making decisions about infrastructure development and resource allocation, city planners rely on models of how people move through their cities, on foot, in cars, and on public transportation. Those models are largely based on surveys of residents’ travel habits. But conducting surveys and analysing their results is costly and time consuming: A city might go more than a decade between surveys. 

The cost of solar power is beginning to reach price parity with cheaper fossil fuel-based electricity in many parts of the world, yet the clean energy source still accounts for just slightly more than 1% of the world’s electricity mix. Solar, or photovoltaic (PV), cells, which convert sunlight into electrical energy, have a large role to play in boosting solar power generation globally.

There’s no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. One in 14 working-age Americans suffer from voice disorders that are often associated with abnormal vocal behaviours — some of which can cause damage to vocal cord tissue and lead to the formation of nodules or polyps that interfere with normal speech production.

For those of you who take sandcastle building very seriously, listen up: MIT engineers now say you can trust a very simple equation to calculate the force required to push a shovel — and any other “intruder”— through sand. The team also found that the same concept, known as the resistive force theory, can generate useful equations for cohesive materials like muds.

There are few things more frustrating than trying to use your phone on a crowded network. With phone usage growing faster than wireless spectrum, we’re all now fighting over smaller and smaller bits of bandwidth. Spectrum crunch is such a big problem that the White House is getting involved, recently announcing both a $400m research initiative and a $4m global competition devoted to the issue.

Engineers from MIT and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) are using light to print three-dimensional structures that “remember” their original shapes. Even after being stretched, twisted, and bent at extreme angles, the structures — from small coils and multimaterial flowers, to an inch-tall replica of the Eiffel tower — sprang back to their original forms within seconds of being heated to a certain tempe...

Biology is the world’s greatest manufacturing platform, according to MIT spinout Ginkgo Bioworks. The synthetic-biology startup is re-engineering yeast to act as tiny organic “factories” that produce chemicals for the flavour, fragrance, and food industries, with aims of making products more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than traditional methods.

The genome-editing system known as CRISPR allows scientists to delete or replace any target gene in a living cell. MIT researchers have now added an extra layer of control over when and where this gene editing occurs, by making the system responsive to light. With the system, gene editing takes place only when researchers shine ultraviolet light on the target cells.

The MIT researchers were trying to develop a new battery, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, thanks to an unexpected finding in their lab tests, what they discovered was a whole new way of producing the metal antimony — and potentially a new way of smelting other metals, as well.

Like all data networks, the networks that connect servers in giant server farms, or servers and workstations in large organisations, are prone to congestion. When network traffic is heavy, packets of data can get backed up at network routers or dropped altogether. Also like all data networks, big private networks have control algorithms for managing network traffic during periods of congestion.

A new device developed by researchers at MIT and a physician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center could greatly improve doctors’ ability to accurately diagnose ear infections. That could drastically reduce the estimated 2 million cases per year in the United States where such infections are incorrectly diagnosed and unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed. Such overprescriptions are considered a major cause of antibiotic resistance...