Postdoctoral fellow Suhas Eswarappa Prameela speaks with Science Careers about how to develop and maintain successful relationships with advisors, mentors, and supervisors. “Faculty members are inundated with multiple administrative, teaching, and service activities, so being proactive, articulating your needs, and clearly communicating hurdles in the lab is key,” notes Prameela.
Landmark Bio, a cell and gene therapy manufacturing company co-founded by MIT and a number of other institutions, is focused on accelerating access to innovative therapies for patients, reports Rowan Walrath for Boston Business Journal. "Landmark's new facility includes laboratory space for research and early-stage drug development, as well as analytics tools,” writes Walrath.
MIT and a number of other local institutions have launched Landmark Bio, a cell and gene therapy manufacturing firm aimed at helping small startups develop experimental therapies that are reliable, consistent, and large enough to be used in clinical trials, reports Ryan Cross for The Boston Globe.
In an effort to combat the use of air conditioners, MIT researchers have developed a passive cooling system that relies on evaporation and radiation and requires no electricity, reports Camille Bond for EnergyWire. “With passive cooling, the advantage is that you can address the ever-increasing need for cooling with a very low carbon footprint,” explains postdoc Zhengmao Lu.
Prof. Emeritus Donald Sadoway and his colleagues have developed a safer and more cost-effective battery to store renewable energy, reports David Abel for The Boston Globe. The battery is “ethically sourced, cheap, effective and can’t catch fire,” says Sadoway.
In a letter to the editor, Professor Emeritus Donald R. Sadoway writes to The New York Times about the importance of developing new batteries that utilize readily available materials. “We need to attack it the old-fashioned American way: Invent our way out,” writes Sadoway. “This means devise a new battery chemistry that requires no cobalt, no nickel, no manganese and no lithium, but instead is made of substances that are earth-abundant and readily available here in North America.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new cost-effective battery design that relies on aluminum ion, reports Robert F. Service for Science. “The battery could be a blockbuster,” writes Service, “because aluminum is cheap; compared with lithium batteries, the cost of materials for these batteries would be 85% lower.”
MIT researchers have developed a new hardware that offers faster computation for artificial intelligence with less energy, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “The researchers’ processor uses ‘protonic programmable resistors’ arranged in an array to ‘learn’ skills” explains Wiggers.
Researchers at MIT have developed a battery that uses aluminum and sulfur, two inexpensive and abundant materials, reports Alex Knapp and Alan Ohnsman for Forbes. “The batteries could be used for a variety of applications,” write Knapp and Ohnsman.
MIT researchers have created a new battery using inexpensive and plentiful materials to store and provide power, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. “The study’s authors believe that the battery can be used to support existing green energy systems such as solar or wind power for times when the sun isn’t shining or the air is still,” writes Tran.
NBC News reporter Kimmy Yam notes that months after having all charges he faced under the “China Initiative” dismissed, Prof. Gang Chen and his colleagues have discovered a new material that can perform better than silicon. "The discovery could have far-reaching effects, as silicon is currently among the most widely used semiconductors, making up the foundation of modern technology from computer chips to smartphones," writes Yam.
Prof. Donald Sadoway and his colleagues have developed a battery that can charge to full capacity in less than one minute, store energy at similar densities to lithium-ion batteries and isn’t prone to catching on fire, reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “Although the battery operates at the comparatively high temperature of 110°C (230°F),” writes Wilkins, “it is resistant to fire because it uses an inorganic salt that can’t burn as its electrolyte, the material that allows charge to flow inside a battery.” Sadoway explains that “this is a totally new battery chemistry."
Researchers at MIT believe they have found a new semiconductor that's better than silicon, which could open the doors to potentially faster and smaller computer chips in the future, reports Rachel Cheung for Vice. “Cubic boron arsenide has significantly higher mobility to both electronics and their positively charged counterparts than silicon, the ubiquitous semiconductor used in electronics and computers,” explains Cheung.
Researchers at MIT and other institutions proved “that cubic boron arsenide performs better than silicon at conducting heat and electricity,” reports Nicholas Gordon for Fortune. “The new material may help designers overcome the natural limits of current models to make better, faster, and smaller chips,” writes Gordon.
Prof. Yoel Fink speaks with Washington Post reporter Pranshu Verma about the growing field of smart textiles and his work creating fabrics embedded with computational power. Fink and his colleagues “have created fibers with hundreds of silicon microchips to transmit digital signals — essential if clothes are to automatically track things like heart rate or foot swelling. These fibers are small enough to pass through a needle that can be sown into fabric and washed at least 10 times.”