Perspectives
Why Advanced Materials are Drivers for the Future Economy — Q&A with Angela Belcher
Protecting Infrastructure with Smarter CPS
Saurabh Amin builds resiliency in essential infrastructure networks for transportation, energy and water distribution.
Security of IT networks is continually being improved to protect against malicious hackers. Yet when IT networks interface with infrastructures such as water and electric systems to provide monitoring and control capabilities, they often introduce new vulnerabilities that increase the risks of service disruptions.
Sun-Powered Desalination for Villages in India
Off-grid Indian communities with salty groundwater could get potable water through a proposed solar technique.
Around the world, there is more salty groundwater than fresh, drinkable groundwater. For example, 60 percent of India is underlain by salty water — and much of that area is not served by an electric grid that could run conventional reverse-osmosis desalination plants.
Running on Waste Heat
Gang Chen’s thermoelectric devices turn waste heat into electricity for vehicles and other machines.
It’s estimated that more than half of U.S. energy — from vehicles and heavy equipment, for instance — is wasted as heat. Mostly, this waste heat simply escapes into the air. But that’s beginning to change, thanks to thermoelectric innovators such as MIT’s Gang Chen.
Data-visualization tool identifies sources of aberrant results and recomputes visualizations without them.
In the age of Big Data, visualization tools are vital. With a single glance at a graphic display, a human being can recognize patterns that a computer might fail to find even after hours of analysis.
Categories
Innovative Companies Move Back to the City
Study: Investors Prefer Good Looking Men
That’s the upshot of a newly published study co-authored by MIT researchers, which shows that attractive men have disproportionate success in obtaining venture capital funding for startups, compared with women and with less physically appealing men.
tags
Is There a Skills Gap? It’s Less Clear-Cut Than You Think
'Hybrid' Nuclear Plants Could Make a Dent in Carbon Emissions
Many efforts to smooth out the variability of renewable energy sources — such as wind and solar power — have focused on batteries, which could fill gaps lasting hours or days. But MIT’s Charles Forsberg has come up with a much more ambitious idea: He proposes marrying a nuclear power plant with another energy system, which he argues could add up to much more than the sum of its parts.