Lithium-based battery could make use of greenhouse gas before it ever gets into the atmosphere

25-Sep-2018

A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously ...

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Expanded focus on digitalization and start-up companies

02-Nov-2017

At a conference marking the five-year anniversary of the North American Center for Research on Advanced Materials (NORA), the center’s members convened to discuss the outcomes of the research alliance to date as well as future areas of focus, including bioscience and catalysis research, ...

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29-Mar-2017

For the last few decades, microchip manufacturers have been on a quest to find ways to make the patterns of wires and components in their microchips ever smaller, in order to fit more of them onto a single chip and thus continue the relentless progress toward faster and more powerful computers. ...

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16-Mar-2017

New research offers insights into how crystal dislocations -- a common type of defect in materials -- can affect electrical and heat transport through crystals, at a microscopic, quantum mechanical level. Dislocations in crystals are places where the orderly three-dimensional structure of a ...

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22-Feb-2017

The Semiconductor Industry Association has estimated that at current rates of increase, computers’ energy requirements will exceed the world’s total power output by 2040. Using light rather than electricity to move data would dramatically reduce computer chips’ energy consumption, and the past 20 ...

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25-Jan-2017

Drugs that contain one or more fluorine atoms tend to be more stable, more powerful, and easier for the body to absorb. For those reasons, drug developers would like to be able to incorporate fluorine or a fluorine-containing unit known as trifluoromethyl into new experimental drugs, but this has ...

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10-Jan-2017

A team of researchers at MIT has designed one of the strongest lightweight materials known, by compressing and fusing flakes of graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon. The new material, a sponge-like configuration with a density of just 5 percent, can have a strength 10 times that of ...

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10-Jan-2017

Last summer, Michael Short was so determined to continue his as-yet unfunded radiation-damage experiments that he was willing to pay to use a nuclear reactor rather than delay his work. Luckily, he didn’t have to come up with the $40,000:In December, thanks to the National Science Foundation’s ...

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09-Jan-2017

Researchers have developed a microscope that can chemically identify individual micron-sized particles. The new approach could one day be used in airports or other high-security venues as a highly sensitive and low-cost way to rapidly screen people for microscopic amounts of potentially dangerous ...

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16-Dec-2016

Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, are tiny machines fabricated using equipment and processes developed for the production of electronic chips and devices. They've found a wide variety of applications in today's consumer electronics, but their moving parts can wear out over time as a result ...

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