A number of MIT spinouts and research projects – including the MOXIE instrument that successfully generated oxygen on Mars, a new solar-powered desalination system and MIT spinout SurgiBox – were featured on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023 list.
Insider reporter Katie Hawkinson explores how MIT researchers developed a new solar-powered desalination system that can remove the salt from seawater for less than the cost of U.S. tap water. Creating a device that relies on solar power, “eliminates a major financial barrier, especially for low-income countries experiencing water scarcity,” Hawkinson explains.
MIT researchers have developed a new desalination system that uses solar energy to convert seawater into drinkable water, reports Tony Ho Tran for the Daily Beast. The device could make it possible to, “make freshwater that’s even more affordable than the water coming from Americans’ kitchen faucets.”
The Hill reporter Sharon Udasin writes that MIT researchers have developed a new solar-powered desalination device that “could last several years and generate water at a rate and price that is less expensive than tap water.” The researchers estimated that “if their model was scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour,” writes Udasin.
MIT researchers have developed a new underwater system that could enable long-range and low-power underwater communication, reports Edd Gent for IEEE Spectrum. “The reason why this is really exciting is because now you start opening up many of the coastal monitoring applications,” says Prof. Fadel Adib. “It’s a turning point from this being a technology that is intellectually super interesting that we hope will work, to saying we know that this works and we have a path to deployment.”
Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with The Hill reporter Zack Budryk about how Hurricane Idalia will impact rural Florida. “The thing that makes [Idalia] a little bit unusual is that it hit a part of the Florida coastline which has experienced very few hurricane-level landfalls in the last hundred years,” says Emanuel.
Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with Jeff Martin at the Associated Press about the potential influence of the supermoon on Hurricane Idalia. “When the moon is full, the sun and the moon are pulling in the same direction, which has the effect of increasing tides above normal ranges” says Emanuel.
In an article he co-authored for Fortune, postdoctoral associate Matthew Hughes explains how extreme heat affects different kinds of machines. “In general, the electronics contained in devices like cellphones, personal computers and data centers consist of many kinds of materials that all respond differently to temperature changes,” they write. “So as the temperature increases, different kinds of materials deform differently, potentially leading to premature wear and failure."
Writing for The Hill, Andre Zollinger, senior policy manager at J-PAL Global, makes the case that “current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.”
MIT researchers have developed a new satellite observation technique that can gauge how fast rivers flowed on Mars billions of years ago and how fast they currently flow on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, reports Talia Lissauer for The Boston Globe. “We can use these other worlds to help us understand what keeps planetary climate stable, or in some cases, what allows planetary climate to change really drastically over time like on Mars,” says Prof. Taylor Perron.
Researchers from MIT have developed a new satellite observation technique that can help gauge the strength of ancient rivers on Mars and active liquid methane rivers on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, reports Jamie Carter for Forbes. “What’s exciting about Titan is that it’s active, and on Mars, it gives us a time machine, to take the rivers that are dead now and get a sense of what they were like when they were actively flowing,” says Prof. Taylor Perron. “With this technique, we have a method to make real predictions for a place where we won’t get more data for a long time.”
Using a new satellite observation technique, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have determined the flow of dried-up rivers on Mars and currently active liquid methane rivers on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. “Both kinds are of scientific interest because they could reveal the role rivers play in shaping the worlds’ environments,” reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo.
MIT researchers have developed a new compact, lightweight design for a 1-megawatt electrical motor that “could open the door to electrifying much larger aircraft,” reports Ed Gent for IEEE Spectrum. “The majority of CO2 is produced by twin and single-aisle aircraft which require large amounts of power and onboard energy, thus megawatt-class electrical machines are needed to power commercial airliners,” says Prof. Zoltán Spakovszky. “Realizing such machines at 1 MW is a key stepping stone to larger machines and power levels.”
MIT researchers have developed a low-cost air quality sensor that can be 3-D printed using open-source instructions and used by people around the world, reports Kristin Toussaint for Fast Company. “The reason we started this project was because we wanted to democratize environmental data,” explains research scientist Simone Mora. “We’re not just opening the data we’ve collected so far, but we hope to funnel a huge development in terms of sensors deployed in the streets, and in turn [make] the data collected available to everyone.”
Visiting scientist Judah Cohen speaks with Boston.com reporter Eli Curwin about how a combination of more accurate data collection, precise weather models, and accessible forecast predictions make it unlikely that Massachusetts residents would be surprised again by a storm like the infamous Blizzard of ‘78. “The satellites, the ships, the weather stations, weather balloons used to integrate and assimilate all that data are much better than they used to be,” says Cohen.