Why shaving dulls even the sharpest of razors
Human hair is 50 times softer than steel, yet it can chip away a razor’s edge, a new study shows.
Innovations in environmental training for the mining industry
MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and multinational mining company Vale bring sustainability education to young engineering professionals in Brazil.
Helping artisanal miners in Colombia face the Covid-19 crisis
MIT D-Lab and local community partners to deliver virtual trainings on making masks, hand sanitizer, vertical gardens, and portable chicken coops.
Mesoamerican copper smelting technology aided colonial weaponry
Spanish conquerors depended on indigenous expertise to keep up their munitions supplies, archaeologists have found.
Neural networks facilitate optimization in the search for new materials
Sorting through millions of possibilities, a search for battery materials delivered results in five weeks instead of 50 years.
Widening metal tolerance for hydrogels
MIT graduate student Seth Cazzell shows controlling pH enables reversible hydrogel formation in wider range of metal concentrations.
Workshop connects microscale mechanics to real-world alloy design
“Micromechanics informed alloy design: Overcoming scale-transition challenges” focuses on bridging scale gaps.
MIT researchers realize “ideal” kagome metal electronic structure
Newly synthesized compound of iron and tin atoms in 1-to-1 ratio displays unique behavior.
Finding novel materials for practical devices
MIT researchers use a new machine learning technique to rapidly evaluate new transition metal compounds to identify those that can perform specialized functions.
Ultra-Quantum Matter research gets $8 million boost
MIT’s Senthil Todadri and Xiao-Gang Wen will study highly entangled quantum matter in a collaboration supported by the Simons Foundation.
Observing hydrogen’s effects in metal
Microscopy technique could help researchers design safer reactor vessels or hydrogen storage tanks.
Surprising electronic disorder in a copper oxide-based ceramic
MIT researchers use resonant X-ray scattering measurements to reveal unexpected “Wigner glass” in desirable superconducting material.
Improving materials from the nanoscale up
At the Materials Day Symposium, researchers focus on tools that probe atomic structures in action to yield better designs for metals, solar cells, and polymers.
Chemists discover unexpected enzyme structure
Metal cluster in enzyme that breaks down carbon dioxide can switch between two different shapes.
A new way of extracting copper
Researchers develop an electrically-driven process to separate commercially important metals from sulfide minerals in one step without harmful byproducts.