Energy

Financial Times reporter Henry Sanderson spotlights Prof. Donald Sadoway’s work developing new battery chemistries that would allow batteries to store energy for longer than six hours.

Popular Mechanics reporter Kyro Mitchell spotlights how MIT researchers have created a new material, inspired by camel fur, that could be used to help insulate food and medical supplies. “Field tests on the new material show that it can provide cooling of more than seven degrees Celsius,” writes Mitchell. “It can also maintain that low temperature for five times longer than using hydrogel alone.”

Smithsonian reporter Corryn Wetzel spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new technology inspired by camel fur that could be used to keep food and medical supplies chilled. The researchers hope the new system could be applied to “lots of areas that require passive cooling—meaning no external energy needs to power the process. Possible applications include insulating food storage, medical supplies and buildings.”

MIT researchers have created a new material that mimics camel fur and could be used to help keep food and medical supplies cool without electricity, reports Layal Liverpool for New Scientist. “We achieve evaporation and insulation at the same time, extending the cooling period significantly,” explains Prof. Jeffrey Grossman.

Writing for The Hill, Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, explores the potential of fusion power. Greenwald examines how recent advances in high-temperature superconductors and recent investments in fusion technology from the private sector could “alter the landscape and offer the possibility of a dramatic speed-up in the development of this new energy source.”

MIT researchers have published a series of new papers demonstrating that the design for the SPARC compact nuclear fusion reactor “is both technically feasible and could produce 10 times the energy it consumes,” reports Dino Grandoni for The Washington Post.

Popular Mechanics reporter Caroline Delbert writes that new research by MIT scientists provides evidence that the compact nuclear fusion design they are developing should be feasible. Delbert writes that the researchers may be able to get the SPARC reactor online within 10 years by “improving materials and shrinking costs.”

UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that a series of papers by MIT researchers finds that the designs for the SPARC compact nuclear fusion experiment should be viable. “Engineers expect their SPARC reactor, or tokamak, to be much more powerful than previous experimental reactors,” writes Hays. 

In a series of new papers, MIT researchers provide evidence that plans to develop a next-generation compact nuclear fusion reactor called SPARC should be viable, reports Henry Fountain for The New York Times. The research “confirms that the design we’re working on is very likely to work,” says Martin Greenwald, deputy director for MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. 

Fast Company reporter Kristin Toussaint writes that a study by MIT researchers finds shutdowns and lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic led to clearer skies and increased solar output in Delhi. “I think we’ve been able to get a glimpse of how the world can look like if we actually have clean air,” says research scientist Ian Marius Peters.

Architects from MIT and Generate Technologies have designed Boston’s first cross-laminated timber (CLT) building, a “’revolutionary’ type of timber [that] promises to reduce emissions that cause climate change, create affordable housing and jumpstart a new job-producing, homegrown industry in New England,” reports Bruce Gellerman and Kathleen McNerney for WBUR.

A study by Prof. Jessika Trancik examines how cheap energy storage must be for the U.S. to rely on renewable energy, reports David Roberts for Vox. The research demonstrates how “a US energy grid run entirely on renewable energy (at least 95 percent of the time), leaning primarily on energy storage to provide grid flexibility, may be more realistic, and closer to hand, than conventional wisdom has it,” writes Roberts.

WCVB-TV’s Mike Wankum visits MIT to learn about the Solar Electric Vehicle Team. “We are trying to prove that we can move away from cars that rely on gasoline or diesel,” explains undergraduate Salem Ali, “and move towards more electric vehicles, and potentially even vehicles that you don’t have to plug in.”

John Yang reports for PBS NewsHour about technologies to harvest fog to secure the world’s water supply, including one system designed by Prof. Kripa Varanasi to collect water from power plant cooling towers. Varanasi and his team “discovered that zapping air rich in fog with a beam of electrically charged particles draws the droplets toward the mesh, dramatically increasing its ability to collect water,” says Yang.

In an article for The Washington Post, Prof. Kate Brown examines the impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Brown notes that the consequences of the accident reached further than initially thought, writing that “the fallout map shows that Chernobyl radioactivity drifted widely across Europe, usually in areas with higher altitudes and precipitation.”