Research

In this image, the middle "explosion" is a cloud of hot electrons, inside graphene, that bounce off one another as they reach equilibrium and spread out. The red spheres are those electrons that are energetic enough to escape the hot cloud in less than 30 femtoseconds and generate an electric current. MIT researchers have developed a technique to access and control these ultrafast processes.

Physicists control electrons at femtosecond timescales

Results may help improve efficiency of solar cells, energy-harvesting devices.

January 22, 2016

Scientists tune polymer material’s transparency

Material may offer cheaper alternative to smart windows.

January 22, 2016

“We can, through engineering, convert this organism’s parasitic lifestyle into a more symbiotic relationship,” Jacquin Niles says about the malaria parasite.

Engineering foe into friend

Bose Grant awardee Jacquin Niles aims to repurpose the malaria parasite for drug delivery.

January 22, 2016

This GridForm model of a village in Bihar, India, shows the optimal layout of hardware for the load profiles of the community. Each building, color-coded by the cost (in Indian rupees) of supplying electricity to that structure, is wired to a central generation/storage node (solid lines), and the nodes are connected to each other (dotted lines).

Going off grid: Tata researchers tackle rural electrification

At MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design, researchers are exploring ways to extend electricity access to rural communities in India using microgrids.

January 21, 2016

Aerosols can lower surface temperatures either directly, by reflecting sunlight skyward, or indirectly, by increasing the reflectivity of clouds.

How aerosols drive the rain

Study finds human-made aerosols exert strong influence on the geography of precipitation.

January 21, 2016

MIT researchers scanned the brains of children who were not depressed but had a parent who had suffered from the disorder. Such children are three times more likely to become depressed later in life, usually between the ages of 15 and 30.

Diagnosing depression before it starts

Brain scans may identify children who are vulnerable to depression, before symptoms appear.

January 21, 2016

Governments usually provide subsidies based on overall adoption targets, such as the number of cars or solar panels they would like to see purchased over a period of time. But green technologies are often new products, and no one really knows how many consumers are waiting to buy them.

Sensible subsidies

Study: How should backing for clean technology be designed?

January 21, 2016

New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors

Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting.

January 21, 2016

This diagram shows how an electrical voltage can be used to modify the oxygen concentration, and therefore the phase and structure, of strontium cobaltites. Pumping oxygen in and out transforms the material from the brownmillerite form (left) to the perovskite form (right).

Switchable material could enable new memory chips

Small voltage can flip thin film between two crystal states — one metallic, one semiconducting.

January 20, 2016

In a forest simulation, algorithms segment space into “obstacle-free regions” and then link them together to find a single collision-free route.

Drones dodge obstacles

Motion-planning algorithms allow drones to do donuts, figure-eights in object-filled environments.

January 19, 2016

Missed opportunities

Health problems for children prevent families from moving to higher-income neighborhoods.

January 19, 2016

For both his master’s and his doctoral theses, Michael Watts (pictured) developed a photonic circuit that could align the polarizations of light traveling through an optical chip.

Local boy makes good

Michael Watts took two decades to make the 20-mile trip from suburban Hingham to tenure at MIT.

January 19, 2016

MIT neuroscientists discovered that the protein CPG2 connects the cytoskeleton (represented by the scaffold of the bridge) and the endocytic machinery (represented by the cars) during the reabsorption of glutamate receptors. Each "car" on the “bridge" carries a vesicle containing glutamate receptors.

How neurons lose their connections

Scientists identify protein that allows brain cells to dampen their sensitivity.

January 14, 2016

Engineers at MIT have developed a queuing model that may help air traffic controllers direct departures more efficiently, minimizing runway congestion.

Cutting down runway queues

Model that predicts time from gate departure to takeoff could cut airport congestion, fuel waste.

January 14, 2016

The atomic-force microscopy (AFM) image on the left demonstrates the physical binding between fibrinogen proteins and single walled carbon nanotubes. The right shows a trace of the AFM image with the fibrinogen in green and nanotubes in light blue.

Synthetic antibody detects proteins

New nanosensors recognize fibrinogen; may detect insulin, other biomarkers as well.

January 13, 2016

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Physicists control electrons at femtosecond timescales

Scientists tune polymer material’s transparency

Engineering foe into friend

Going off grid: Tata researchers tackle rural electrification

How aerosols drive the rain

Diagnosing depression before it starts

Sensible subsidies

New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors

Switchable material could enable new memory chips

Drones dodge obstacles

Missed opportunities

Local boy makes good

How neurons lose their connections

Cutting down runway queues

Synthetic antibody detects proteins

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Research