Mechanical engineering

Prof. Ariel Furst, and alumna Claire Beskin and Loewen Cavill were named the winners of the first annual MIT Female Founders Pitch, reports Stephanie MacConnell for Forbes. Furst’s company, Pharmor, has developed an inexpensive protective coating that allows microbes to be produced and transported in non-ideal conditions. Beskin’s company, Empallo, uses machine learning to unlock information on siloed patient data. And Cavill’s company, AuraBlue, has developed a wearable device that can predict hot flashes and enable a cooling pad to counteract the change in body temperature in menopausal women.

Researchers at MIT believe they have found a new semiconductor that's better than silicon, which could open the doors to potentially faster and smaller computer chips in the future, reports Rachel Cheung for Vice. “Cubic boron arsenide has significantly higher mobility to both electronics and their positively charged counterparts than silicon, the ubiquitous semiconductor used in electronics and computers,” explains Cheung.

Researchers at MIT and other institutions proved “that cubic boron arsenide performs better than silicon at conducting heat and electricity,” reports Nicholas Gordon for Fortune. “The new material may help designers overcome the natural limits of current models to make better, faster, and smaller chips,” writes Gordon.

Gradiant, an MIT startup founded by Anurag Bajpayee PhD ’12, S.M. ‘08 and Prakash Govindan PhD ’12, has developed an energy efficient system that purifies water by mimicking natural rainfall cycles, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “Nature has the advantage of having all the surface area of the oceans available freely and a free source of energy from the sun,” Govindan said. “We have to engineer this into a compact, highly efficient, and energy-efficient industrial device.”

STAT reporter Edward Chen spotlights how MIT researchers developed a new ultrasound adhesive that can stick to skin for up to 48 hours, allowing for continuous monitoring of internal organs. “It’s a very impressive new frontier about how we can use ultrasound imaging continuously to assess multiple organs, organ systems,” said Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “48 hours of continuous imaging, you’d have to lock somebody up in a hospital, put transducers on them. This is amazing, from that respect.”

MIT researchers have developed an adhesive ultrasound patch that can continuously image the inner workings of the body for up to 48 hours, reports Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. ““We believe we’ve opened a new era of wearable imaging,” says Prof. Xuanhe Zhao. “With a few patches on your body, you could see your internal organs.”

The MIT mini cheetah broke a speed record after learning to adapt to difficult terrain and upping its speed, reports Rienk De Beer for Popular Mechanics.

MIT engineers have created a bioadhesive ultrasound device that can be adhered to a patient’s skin and record high-res videos of internal organs for up to two days, reports Sophie Bushwick for Scientific American. “The beauty of this is, suddenly, you can adhere this ultrasound probe, this thin ultrasound speaker, to the body over 48 hours,” says Zhao. “This can potentially change the paradigm of medical imaging by empowering long-term continuous imaging, and it can change the paradigm of the field of wearable devices.”

Researchers at MIT, led by Prof. Xuanhe Zhao, have created a wearable ultrasound medical device, reports Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist. “The ultrasound stickers may provide a more flexible imaging option for hospitals to monitor patients without requiring human technicians to hold ultrasound probes, and they could be useful in situations where technicians are in short supply,” writes Hsu.

Prof. Xuanhe Zhao and his research team have developed a stick-on ultrasound patch that can scan a person’s insides as they go about their daily life, reports Ian Sample for The Guardian. “The wearable patch, which is the size of a postage stamp, can image blood vessels, the digestive system and internal organs for up to 48 hours, giving doctors a more detailed picture of a patient’s health than the snapshots provided by routine scans,” explains Sample.

Researchers from MIT have produced a miniature ultrasound device that sticks to the body, reports Maggie Chen for Wired. “By sticking the patch on different parts of the subject’s body, the researchers could get images of the stomach, muscles, blood vessels, lungs, and heart,” explains Chen.

MIT engineers have developed a medical ultrasound system that uses a patch the size of a postage stamp, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “The new MIT system would allow a doctor or technician to attach a patch directly over the area to be scanned,” explains Bray. “The patch is plugged into a device that captures the ultrasound signal, converts it to a viewable image and records it for future reference.”

Jennifer Rumsey MS ’98 has been named the first female CEO of Cummins Inc., a truck engines and power-generation equipment manufacturing company, reports Brooke Sutherland for Bloomberg. “Rumsey’s technical background is exactly what Cummins needs right now as the company pivots from its legacy as a maker of diesel engines and plots its role in the energy transition,” writes Sutherland.

MIT researchers have developed a new system that enabled the mini robotic cheetah to learn to run, reports John Koetsier for Forbes. ““Traditionally, the process that people have been using [to train robots] requires you to study the actual system and manually design models,” explains Prof. Pulkit Agrawal. “This process is good, it’s well established, but it’s not very scalable. “But we are removing the human from designing the specific behaviors.”

Researchers at MIT and the University of Waterloo have discovered two properties of accelerating matter that they believe could lead to the direct observation of the Unruh effect, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. “We’d like to build a dedicated experiment that can unambiguously detect the Unruh effect, and later provide a platform for studying various associated aspects,” says Prof. Vivishek Sudhir.