For immigrants, the path to citizenship in many countries is filled with hurdles: finding a job, learning the language, passing exams. But for some people, the biggest obstacle of all may be one they cannot ...
Jan 30, 2013
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Moore's law—the well-known doubling of computer chips' computational power every 18 months or so—has been paced by a similarly steady increase in the storage capacity of disk drives. In 1980, a hard drive ...
Jan 23, 2013
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Living cells are surrounded by a membrane that tightly regulates what gets in and out of the cell. This barrier is necessary for cells to control their internal environment, but it makes it more difficult ...
Jan 23, 2013
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Microbiologists who study wild marine microbes, as opposed to the lab-grown variety, face enormous challenges in getting a clear picture of the daily activities of their subjects. But a team of scientists ...
Jan 22, 2013
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In early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at MIT proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional co ...
Jan 18, 2013
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If you're reading this, odds are you've already used running water in your home today. But you're in a minority: Globally, at least a billion people have no nearby source of water, while of the remaining ...
Jan 14, 2013
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An MIT researcher has developed a technique that provides a new way of manipulating heat, allowing it to be controlled much as light waves can be manipulated by lenses and mirrors.
Jan 11, 2013
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MIT engineers have created a new polymer film that can generate electricity by drawing on a ubiquitous source: water vapor.
Jan 10, 2013
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If you want to create a moving light source, you have a few possibilities. One is to mount a light emitter in some kind of mechanical housing—the approach used in, say, theatrical spotlights, which stagehands ...
Jan 09, 2013
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When you get a cut, blood starts to flow from the wound. But very quickly, complex biochemical processes spring into action, creating a scaffolding of molecules to block the hole, and then building up an ...
Jan 09, 2013
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Ad hoc networks—communication networks set up on the fly by mobile sensors—pose problems that ordinary office networks don't. Ad hoc networks are usually decentralized, meaning that no one node knows ...
Jan 09, 2013
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Many industrial plants depend on water vapor condensing on metal plates: In power plants, the resulting water is then returned to a boiler to be vaporized again; in desalination plants, it yields a supply of clean water. ...
Jan 03, 2013
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Researchers at MIT, the Broad Institute and Rockefeller University have developed a new technique for precisely altering the genomes of living cells by adding or deleting genes. The researchers say the technology ...
Jan 03, 2013
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Almost all computer chips use two types of transistors: one called p-type, for positive, and one called n-type, for negative. Improving the performance of the chip as a whole requires parallel improvements ...
Jan 02, 2013
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