Suppose you have 10 taxis in Manhattan. What portion of the borough’s streets do they cover in a typical day? Before we answer that, let’s examine why it would be useful to know this fact. Cities have a lot of things that need measuring: air pollution, weather, traffic patterns, road quality, and more. Some of […]
New Approach Could Boost Energy Capacity of Lithium Batteries
Researchers around the globe have been on a quest for batteries that pack a punch but are smaller and lighter than today’s versions, potentially enabling electric cars to travel further or portable electronics to run for longer without recharging. Now, researchers at MIT and in China say they’ve made a major advance in this area, […]
“Sun in a Box” Would Store Renewable Energy for the Grid
MIT engineers have come up with a conceptual design for a system to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, and deliver that energy back into an electric grid on demand. The system may be designed to power a small city not just when the sun is up or the wind is high, […]
Device Could Provide Refrigeration for Off-Grid Locations
MIT researchers have devised a new way of providing cooling on a hot sunny day, using inexpensive materials and requiring no fossil fuel-generated power. The passive system, which could be used to supplement other cooling systems to preserve food and medications in hot, off-grid locations, is essentially a high-tech version of a parasol. The system […]
Innovative Approach to Controlling Magnetism Opens Route to Ultra-Low-Power Microchips
A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now. Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National […]
Model Paves Way for Faster, More Efficient Translations of More Languages
MIT researchers have developed a novel “unsupervised” language translation model — meaning it runs without the need for human annotations and guidance — that could lead to faster, more efficient computer-based translations of far more languages. Translation systems from Google, Facebook, and Amazon require training models to look for patterns in millions of documents — such as […]
Study Opens Route To Flexible Electronics Made From Exotic Materials
The vast majority of computing devices today are made from silicon, the second most abundant element on Earth, after oxygen. Silicon can be found in various forms in rocks, clay, sand, and soil. And while it is not the best semiconducting material that exists on the planet, it is by far the most readily available. […]
Model Helps Robots Navigate More Like Humans Do
When moving through a crowd to reach some end goal, humans can usually navigate the space safely without thinking too much. They can learn from the behavior of others and note any obstacles to avoid. Robots, on the other hand, struggle with such navigational concepts. MIT researchers have now devised a way to help robots […]
Robot Can Pick Up Any Object After Inspecting It
Humans have long been masters of dexterity, a skill that can largely be credited to the help of our eyes. Robots, meanwhile, are still catching up. Certainly there’s been some progress: for decades robots in controlled environments like assembly lines have been able to pick up the same object over and over again. More recently, […]
Cell-Sized Robots Can Sense Their Environment
Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids. Colloids, which insoluble […]