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.
Researchers at MIT have developed a conceptual design for a system that can efficiently produce “solar thermochemical hydrogen,” reports Xinhua. “The system harnesses the Sun's heat to directly split water and generate hydrogen -- a clean fuel that can power long-distance trucks, ships, and planes, while in the process emitting no greenhouse gas emissions.”
Graduate student Kaylee Cunningham speaks with CBS Boston about her work using social media to help educate and inform the public about nuclear energy. Cunningham, who is known as Ms. Nuclear Energy on TikTok, recalls how as a child she was involved in musical theater, a talent she has now combined with her research interests as an engineer. She adds that she also hopes her platform inspires more women to pursue STEM careers. “You don't have to look like the stereotypical engineer,” Cunningham emphasizes.
WBUR reporter Daniel Ackerman spotlights Sublime Systems, an MIT startup working to develop “construction-ready, emissions-free cement.” Ackerman explains that: “Sublime’s new approach uses electricity instead of heat. That means the process can be powered with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. The method also prevents carbon dioxide from escaping the carbon-rich limestone during combustion.”
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. Jessika Trancik speaks with Boston Globe reporter Aruni Soni about her new study that finds reducing the cost of solar energy will be accelerated by improvements in soft tech. “We found that the soft technology involved in solar energy really has not changed and hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as the hardware,” says Trancik. “These soft costs, in many systems, can be 50 percent or even more of the total cost of solar electricity.”
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights WiTricity, an MIT spinoff that designs wireless charging systems. “WiTricity uses magnetic fields rather than cables to give batteries a boost,” explains Bray.
Researchers at MIT have developed a supercapacitor, an energy storage system, using cement, water and carbon, reports Macie Parker for The Boston Globe. “Energy storage is a global problem,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “If we want to curb the environmental footprint, we need to get serious and come up with innovative ideas to reach these goals.”
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 Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of the U.S. economy and the impact of “Bidenomics,” President Joe Biden’s economic philosophy.
Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.
Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete that can store energy, potentially enabling roads to be transformed into EV chargers and home foundations into sources of energy. “All of a sudden, you have a material which can not only carry load, but it can also store energy,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm.