MIT

Black holes, the regions in spacetime where gravity is so strong nothing can escape, have fascinated astronomers since the 18th Century, when they were first proposed.  Recently, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched for the…

While memristors were conceived in 1971 as the fourth fundamental two-terminal circuit element, they weren’t actually designed until 2008.  Now, MIT engineers have designed a "brain-on-a-chip," smaller than a piece of confetti, that is…

Lost at sea is a phrase that brings terror to most people’s minds. While we may fantasize about getting away from it all and sailing into the sunset, the ocean is a messy and turbulent space where winds and weather kick up waves in all…

Electric vehicles batteries that need to be retired because they can no longer provide reliable acceleration and range could still have a useful and profitable second life as backup storage for grid-scale solar photovoltaic installations. A…

While there are tried and true methods to ensure good crop yields and increasingly sophisticated agronomic methods to track plant growth, the ability to track what’s going on with crops in real time could potentially give farmers a real…

In the world of programming, it is important to get code running as fast as possible. That's why the field relies heavily on developers and compilers, programs that translate programming language into code that machines can read. They then…

While there’s really no such thing as standard reaction time, accident reconstructionists often use a standard number (around 1.5 seconds) as a basis to calculate fault when determining how a reasonably careful person drives. Safety…

“The blackest black” is a shade coveted by optical engineers seeking to create more effective blinders to reduce glare, astronomers looking for space telescopes that can more easily spot orbiting exoplanets, and artists looking to make…

Today’s robots are usually self-contained entities made of interdependent subcomponents, each with a specific function. If one part fails, the robot stops working. Even in robotic swarms, each robot is an independently functioning machine.…