New material harvests energy from water vapor
MIT engineers have created a new polymer film that can generate electricity by drawing on a ubiquitous source: water vapor. The new material changes its shape after absorbing tiny amounts of evaporated...
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Engineering cells for more efficient biofuel production
In the search for renewable alternatives to gasoline, heavy alcohols such as isobutanol are promising candidates. Not only do they contain more energy than ethanol, but they are also more compatible...
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Planet Mercury may have harbored an ancient magma ocean
By analyzing Mercury’s rocky surface, scientists have been able to partially reconstruct the planet’s history over billions of years. Now, drawing upon the chemical composition of rock features on the...
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How human language could have evolved from birdsong
“The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language,” Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language,...
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Taking a new look at high- temperature super-conductors
While the phenomenon of superconductivity — in which some materials lose all resistance to electric currents at extremely low temperatures — has been known for more than a century, the temperature at...
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Math rocks: New way to solve ‘graph Laplacians’ has big implications
In the last decade, theoretical computer science has seen remarkable progress on the problem of solving graph Laplacians — the esoteric name for a calculation with hordes of familiar applications in...
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Researchers develop solar-to-fuel roadmap for ‘artificial leaf’
Bringing the concept of an “artificial leaf” closer to reality, a team of researchers at MIT has published a detailed analysis of all the factors that could limit the efficiency of such a system. The...
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New way to discover HIV vaccine targets
Decades of research and three large-scale clinical trials have so far failed to yield an effective HIV vaccine, in large part because the virus evolves so rapidly that it can evade any vaccine-induced...
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Nanowires can lift liquids as effectively as tubes
Imagine if you could drink a glass of water just by inserting a solid wire into it and sucking on it as though it were a soda straw. It turns out that if you were [...]
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Decoding ‘noisy’ language in daily life
Suppose you hear someone say, “The man gave the ice cream the child.” Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: “The man gave the ice cream [...]
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A step closer to artificial livers
Prometheus, the mythological figure who stole fire from the gods, was punished for this theft by being bound to a rock. Each day, an eagle swept down and fed on his liver, which then grew [...]
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Pneumonia found to harm DNA in lung cells
A bacterium that is the most common cause of pneumonia — a leading cause of death worldwide — can damage DNA in lung cells, a new study has shown. Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for...
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Recalling happier memories can reverse depression
MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can cure the symptoms of depression in mice by artificially reactivating happy memories that were formed before the onset of depression. The findings,...
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Better batteries, half price
An advanced manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries, developed by researchers at MIT and at a spinoff company called 24M, promises to significantly slash the cost of the most widely used type...
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‘Permanently wet’ surface coating slides into consumer space
The days of wasting condiments — and other products — that stick stubbornly to the sides of their bottles may be gone, thanks to MIT spinout LiquiGlide, which has licensed its nonstick coating to a...
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Uncovering the mechanism of our oldest anesthetic
Nitrous oxide, commonly known as “laughing gas,” has been used in anesthesiology practice since the 1800s, but the way it works to create altered states is not well understood. In a study published...
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3 Questions: Economies as computers, products as information
New book argues that economic development is a special case of the growth of information. Cesar Hidalgo, the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT...
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Origami robot climbs inclines, swims, and carries loads twice its weight
At the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation, MIT researchers presented a printable origami robot that folds itself up from a flat sheet of plastic when heated and measures about...
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Does this artificial intelligence think like a human?
In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict...
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Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on using data and science to forecast...
Note: This is the final article in a four-part interview series featuring the work of the 27 MIT Climate Grand Challenges finalist teams, which received a total of $2.7 million in startup funding to...
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