In the Media

"But intrigued by the sheer complexity of concrete, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have been leveraging the tools of statistical physics, materials science, chemistry, and civil engineering to find ways to make the most widely used man-made material on earth more environmentally friendly."

"Researchers have found that the tiny, oxygen-dependent fungi can churn out some of their most basic building blocks using only trace amounts of the gas."

"Programs that build satellites from commonly available electronics are making satellite manufacture available to developing nations."

"If everybody aims to use cheap electricity, the slow time in the middle of the night becomes the high demand time. In the worst case, everybody's laptops start recharging, refrigerator compressors kick on, dishwashers start up and so on, at the exact same moment."

"It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps, when 36-year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website."

"With the United States government now shorn of its top credit rating by Standard & Poor's, experts are increasingly worried that the American economy is headed back into recession, while Europe appears vulnerable to another shock."

"NASA's space shuttle may be down for the count, but robotic planetary missions are up, up and away. Before the end of this year, three new solar system probes are due to launch."

"Recognizing written words is tough enough for people with dyslexia. But a new study suggests the disorder might also make it harder to recognize the voices of people as they speak."

"In the world of engineers and investors, there's something called the "elevator pitch." It's what you'd say if you ran into a rich investor in an elevator, and had only 60 seconds to sell your product. The concept is so common that MIT actually hosts a contest for the best elevator pitch."

"After surviving a Nazi concentration camp as a boy and fleeing communist rule in his native Czechoslovakia, Michael Gruenbaum remembers well the first job he got upon immigrating to the United States and becoming a student at MIT."

"Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says this is a compelling new theory of why the moon can have mountains, even if it doesn't have any volcanoes or colliding continents."

"Scientists have developed a mathematical model that predicts the maximum height trees can reach in particular environmental conditions."

"In this case, it’s the students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab, who’ve successfully programmed a PR2 to bake a cookie, starting with putting all the ingredients in a bowl, mixing them, putting them in a pan, then a toaster oven to bake."

"A robot that bakes cookies!"

"When Jolt detects that a program is stuck in a certain kind of infinite loop, it can force it to exit the loop and continue executing."