DMSE News

Finding local fertilizer alternatives

February 12, 2019

Professor Antoine Allanore and his research team have demonstrated a new method of fertilizer production can better suit the needs of farms in Africa and around the globe.  

A new way to provide cooling without power

December 5, 2018

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.  

A new concept for thermal energy storage

November 30, 2018

More than half of all the energy used to power mechanical, chemical, and other processes is expelled into the environment as heat. Power plants, car engines, and industrial processes, for example, produce vast amounts of heat but use a relatively small fraction of it to actually do work. And…  

What happens when materials take tiny hits

November 29, 2018

When tiny particles strike a metal surface at high speed — for example, as coatings being sprayed or as micrometeorites pummeling a space station — the moment of impact happens so fast that the details of process haven’t been clearly understood, until now. A team of researchers at MIT has…  

Extending the life of low-cost, compact, lightweight batteries

November 8, 2018

Metal-air batteries are one of the lightest and most compact types of batteries available, but they can have a major limitation: When not in use, they degrade quickly, as corrosion eats away at their metal electrodes. Now, MIT researchers have found a way to substantially reduce that corrosion,…  

Ellen Swallow Richards: A One-Woman Parade of Firsts

November 8, 2018

Chemist and engineer was MIT’s first female student and faculty member “I wish I were triplets,” Ellen Swallow said as a newly arrived but belated Vassar College undergraduate, dreaming at 25 of making up for lost time. By the time she died at 68 of heart disease in 1911, she had built a…  

A powerful new battery could give us electric planes that don’t pollute

October 30, 2018

Brightly colored molecular models line two walls of Yet-Ming Chiang’s office at MIT. Chiang, a materials science professor and serial battery entrepreneur, has spent much of his career studying how slightly different arrangements of those sticks and spheres add up to radically different outcomes…  

New Microfluidics Devices

October 29, 2018

Microfluidics devices are tiny systems with microscopic channels that can be used for chemical or biomedical testing and research. In a potentially game-changing advance, MIT researchers have now incorporated microfluidics systems into individual fibers, making it possible to process much larger…  

Longer lasting storage needs cheaper chemistries

October 25, 2018

Energy storage is often mentioned as one of the remedies for California's duck curve problem, but the economics do not always work out. The technology is essential to a clean energy future, but it will be important to develop lower cost batteries with longer durations, according to…  

Helping blood cells regenerate after radiation therapy

October 24, 2018

Patients with blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma are often treated by irradiating their bone marrow to destroy the diseased cells. After the treatment, patients are vulnerable to infection and fatigue until new blood cells grow back. MIT researchers have now devised a way to…  

BBC Interviews Yoel Fink

October 24, 2018

Making clothes that can communicate Is the age of tech fibre really upon us? Professor Yoel Fink from MIT says his team is on the verge of developing true tech clothes that will be able to warn us that a car is approaching. They have been able to weave diodes into fabrics, without losing…  

2018 Materials Day Winners

October 23, 2018

MIT Materials Day Poster Session winners are [left to right] graduate students Vera Schroeder, Rachel C. Kurchin, Gerald J. Wang and Philipp Simons, and Postdoctoral Associate Mikhail Y. Shalaginov. Sixty students and postdocs presented their posters in La Sala de Puerto on Wednesday, Oct. 10,…  

Controllable Spintronics

October 16, 2018

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…