For the past 40 years, eye-tracking technology - which can determine where in a visual scene people are directing their gaze - has been widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research, but it’s required pricey hardware that has kept it from finding consumer applications.

Women who go to college intending to become engineers stay in the profession less often than men. Why is this? While multiple reasons have been offered in the past, a new study co-authored by an MIT sociologist develops a novel explanation: The negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing.

On December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC, scientists observed gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime - for the second time. The gravitational waves were detected by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.

  Researchers at MIT have developed a practical and physically-based way of treating the surface of materials called perovskite oxides, to make them more durable and improve their performance. These materials are promising candidates to serve as electrodes in energy-conversion devices such as fuel cells and electrolyzers.

  Terahertz radiation - the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and visible light - has promising applications in security and medical diagnostics, but such devices will require the development of compact, low-power, high-quality terahertz lasers.

Utility companies or others planning to install renewable energy systems such as solar and wind farms have to decide whether to include large-scale energy storage systems that can capture power when it’s available and release it on demand. This decision may be critical to the future growth of renewable energy.

When an airplane begins to move faster than the speed of sound, it creates a shockwave that produces a well-known "boom" of sound. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a similar process in a sheet of graphene, in which a flow of electric current can, under certain circumstances, exceed the speed of slowed-down light and produce a kind of optical "boom": an intense, focused beam of light.

By immersing glass particles in a fluid, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard University are exploring a new mechanism for modifying an optical device’s diffusivity, or the extent to which it scatters light. In its current form, the new diffuser could be used to calibrate a wide range of imaging systems, but the researchers believe that their mechanism could ultimately lead to holographic video screens or to tunable optical devi...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers enabled by the National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) program has developed a way to break fibers or sheets of material into many tiny, almost perfectly uniform segments or strips. The method can work on plastics, metals, glasses, and even natural materials such as silk or hair, producing sectioned particles ranging in size from nanoparticles to ones t...

Discovered just five years ago, topological semimetals are materials with unusual physical properties that could make them useful for future electronics. In the latest issue of Nature Physics, MIT researchers report a new theoretical characterisation of topological semimetals’ electrical properties that accurately describes all known topological semimetals and predicts several new ones.

Researchers can build complex, nanometre-scale structures of almost any shape and form, using strands of DNA. But these particles must be designed by hand, in a complex and laborious process. This has limited the technique, known as DNA origami, to just a small group of experts in the field. Now a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed an algorithm that can build these DNA nanoparticles automatically.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have developed a new algorithm that could help astronomers produce the first image of a black hole. The algorithm would stitch together data collected from radio telescopes scattered around the globe, under the auspices of an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope.

Symbolic execution is a powerful software-analysis tool that can be used to automatically locate and even repair programming bugs. Essentially, it traces out every path that a program’s execution might take. But it tends not to work well with applications written using today’s programming frameworks.

Gene transcription is the process by which DNA is copied and synthesised as messenger RNA (mRNA)—which delivers its genetic blueprints to the cell's protein-making machinery. Now researchers at MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have identified a hidden, ephemeral phenomenon in cells that may play a major role in jump-starting mRNA production and regulating gene transcription.

Researchers at MIT are seeking to redesign concrete by following nature's blueprints. In a paper published online in the journal Construction and Building Materials, the team contrasts cement paste with the structure and properties of natural materials such as bones, shells, and deep-sea sponges. As the researchers observed, these biological materials are exceptionally strong and durable, thanks in part to their precise assembly of...

An approach to the design of a liquid battery, using a passive, gravity-fed arrangement similar to an old-fashioned hourglass, could offer great advantages due to the system's low cost and the simplicity of its design and operation, says a team of MIT researchers who have made a demonstration version of the new battery. Liquid flow batteries are not a new concept, and some members of this research team unveiled an earlier concept three years ago.

A family of compounds known as perovskites, which can be made into thin films with many promising electronic and optical properties, has been a hot research topic in recent years. But although these materials could potentially be highly useful in applications such as solar cells, some limitations still hamper their efficiency and consistency. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere say they have made significant inroads toward understandi...

Terahertz spectroscopy, which uses the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light, is a promising security technology because it can extract the spectroscopic "fingerprints" of a wide range of materials, including chemicals used in explosives. But traditional terahertz spectroscopy requires a radiation source that's heavy and about the size of a large suitcase, and it takes 15 to 30 minutes to analyse a single sample,...

In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

A new and unexpected magnetic effect has taken researchers by surprise, and could open up a new pathway to advanced electronic devices and even robust quantum computer architecture. The finding is based on a family of materials called topological insulators (TIs) that has drawn much interest in recent years. The novel electronic properties of TIs might ultimately lead to new generations of electronic, spintronic, or quantum computing devices.