Computer modeling

(Left to right): M. Nafi Toksöz, professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); Oral Buyukozturk, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); and Hao Sun, a postdoc in CEE. The Green Building, behind them, has 36 accelerometers that record vibrations and movements on selected floors, from the building’s foundation to its roof.

With new model, buildings may “sense” internal damage

System predicts how MIT’s tallest structure responds to vibrations, may help monitor stress over time.

October 18, 2016

To demonstrate Foundry, MIT researchers designed and fabricated skis with retro-reflective surfaces, a ping-pong paddle, a helmet, and even a bone that may someday be used for surgical planning.

Designing for 3-D printing

“Foundry” tool from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab lets you design a wide range of multi-material 3-D-printed objects.

October 11, 2016

“Science was always second-nature to me since I was a kid. I spent a lot of time just tinkering around, breaking stuff apart and building it back up,” says Benoit Forget, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Benoit Forget: Unraveling complexities of nuclear reactors

By making detailed simulations of reactor cores, the MIT engineer is helping to advance new designs.

October 3, 2016

This computational illustration shows a graphene network structure below a layer of water.

How to power up graphene implants without frying cells

New analysis finds way to safely conduct heat from graphene to biological tissues.

September 23, 2016

The photograph shows a square-shaped “intruder” plunging through various material, including coarse, salt-like grains (white) and fine sand (blueish green), as well as more viscous (green) and pasty (blue) materials.

Pushing through sand

Simple equation predicts force needed to push objects through granular and pasty materials.

August 29, 2016

“This place is remarkable,” Alfredo Alexander-Katz, the Walter Henry Gale Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says of MIT. “You can throw any crazy idea out there” and then pursue it.

Seeing nature through a molecular engineer’s eye

Alfredo Alexander-Katz probes systems in action, from clotting blood to walking molecules.

August 22, 2016

Simulations written in Simit, a new programming language, were dozens or even hundreds of times as fast as those written in existing simulation languages. But they required only one-tenth as much code as meticulously hand-optimized simulations that could achieve similar execution speeds.

User-friendly language for programming efficient simulations

New language can speed up computer simulations 200-fold or reduce the code they require by 90 percent.

August 10, 2016

“We don’t necessarily want [air traffic controllers] to spend the bandwidth on processing 40 pieces of information. Instead, we can tell them the three top choices,” says Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and a member of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Ready for takeoff

Hamsa Balakrishnan develops algorithms to reduce airport congestion.

July 15, 2016

Pictured on the left is a spleen; on the right are red blood cells. ““We have presented results showing that the spleen is the main organ that defines the shape of the circulating red blood cells” says Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

How the spleen filters blood

Computer model finds slits in the spleen impose a “physical fitness test” on red blood cells.

June 27, 2016

The researchers’ compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip.

Analog computing returns

New analog compiler could help enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms.

June 20, 2016

“It’s very inspiring to see how these [hair-like] structures occur in nature and how they can achieve different functions,” says Jifei Ou, a graduate student in media arts and sciences at MIT. “We’re just trying to think how can we fully utilize the potential of 3-D printing, and create new functional materials whose properties are easily tunable and controllable.” Pictured is an examp...

Need hair? Press “print”

With fur, brushes, and bristles, Media Lab’s technique opens new frontier in 3-D printing.

June 16, 2016

In this artist's rendering, the left image shows what Earth looked like more than 140 million years ago, when India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana. The right image shows Earth today.

India drift

MIT researchers explain mystery of India’s rapid move toward Eurasia 80 million years ago.

May 4, 2015

How to predict responses to disease

Computer model could help public health officials anticipate overreactions to disease outbreaks.

January 14, 2015

A team of MIT neuroscientists has found that some computer programs can identify the objects in these images just as well as the primate brain.

In one aspect of vision, computers catch up to primate brain

Newest computer neural networks can identify visual objects as well as the primate brain.

December 18, 2014

A screenshot of the researcher's quicksand experiment.

Motion-induced quicksand

MIT granular model explains unusual behavior in sand.

November 17, 2014

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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