Repurposed beer yeast may offer a cost-effective way to remove lead from water
A filter made from yeast encapsulated in hydrogels can quickly absorb lead as water flows through it.
Center for Bits and Atoms
This 3D printer can figure out how to print with an unknown material
The advance could help make 3D printing more sustainable, enabling printing with renewable or recyclable materials that are difficult to characterize.
Artificial reef designed by MIT engineers could protect marine life, reduce storm damage
The sustainable and cost-saving structure could dissipate more than 95 percent of incoming wave energy using a small fraction of the material normally needed.
From MIT to Burning Man: The Living Knitwork Pavilion
An interactive architectural installation combined textile arts and engineering on a desert landscape.
MIT engineers use kirigami to make ultrastrong, lightweight structures
Produced with techniques borrowed from Japanese paper-cutting, the strong metal lattices are lighter than cork and have customizable mechanical properties.
How MIT’s fab labs scaled around the world
Now a global community of builders of all skill levels and backgrounds, the fab lab network grew from a single maker facility at MIT.
Tiny diamond rotor could improve protein studies
A new way of machining microscale rotors from diamond crystal can enable ultrasensitive NMR devices for probing proteins and other materials.
MIT community members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2023
Seven researchers, along with 14 additional MIT alumni, are honored for significant contributions to engineering research, practice, and education.
Engineers devise a modular system to produce efficient, scalable aquabots
The system’s simple repeating elements can assemble into swimming forms ranging from eel-like to wing-shaped.
A global lab for teaching and practicing synthetic biology
A pandemic-fueled transformation of the MIT course MAS.S64 (How to Grow (Almost) Anything) leads to next steps in democratizing synthetic biology.
Flocks of assembler robots show potential for making larger structures
Researchers make progress toward groups of robots that could build almost anything, including buildings, vehicles, and even bigger robots.
Nonabah Lane, Navajo educator and environmental sustainability specialist with numerous ties to MIT, dies at 46
Lane leaves a lasting legacy at the Institute and on tribal communities around the country.
Could used beer yeast be the solution to heavy metal contamination in water?
A study shows that yeast, an abundant waste product from breweries, can filter out even trace amounts of lead.
Volta Labs: Improving workflows for genetic applications
Udayan Umapathi SM ’17 and Will Langford SM ’14, PhD ’19 are co-founders of a Media Lab spinoff building a full-stack platform to enable automation for genomics and genetic engineering.
Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters
History unfolds as an interdisciplinary research team uses computational tools to examine the contents of “locked” letters.