Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Imec and MIT are joining up to research nanoelectronics-based solutions for minimally and non-invasive diagnostic devices for personalised medicine. The work will be conducted within a number of groups at MIT including the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE), Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). Healthcare remains one of the most significant global socio-economic ...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has teamed up with Massachusetts-based Draper to streamline the design of microbe-based electronic sensors. “Microbes have the potential to be developed as biological sensors that can collect vital information about the environments they naturally inhabit,” said Draper biotechnologist Chris Vaiana. “Our goal is to support DARPA in mapping the modular design of microbe-based ...

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) is spending Y6.5bn (~$41m) on a quantum computer from Massachusetts-based QuEra Computing. It will be installed alongside an Nvidia-based supercomputer called ABCI-Q. The aim is to “develop a hybrid quantum-classical computing platform, where quantum computing technology complements AIST’s ABCI-Q supercomputer with the goal of creating a platform for high-fidelity simulations ...

Engineers at MIT have found a way to get sub-mm resolution and deep penetration from a stick-on ultrasound patch that can be worn for at least two days and peels off at the end of monitoring without leaving residue. In a proof-of-concept, they demonstrated sub-mm resolution images in the first centimetres of tissue, allowing blood vessels to be monitored live, ...

Researchers at MIT have produced a prototype water purifier that can turn cloudy seawater into drinking water using ~20Wh/litre. Developed under electrical engineer Professor Jongyoon Han, the unit fits into a small suitcase, and relies on multiple stages of ‘ion concentration polarisation’ (ICP), followed by electrodialysis to reduce residual salt concentration. ICP, pioneered by Han’s group, applies an electrical field to ...

MIT has created a thermovoltaic demonstrator that can convert heat energy at between 1,900 and 2,400°C in to electricity energy with 40% efficiency – which is above that of a steam turbine. The technology is aimed at future grid-scale energy stores. Analagous to a multi-junction photovoltaic cell, MIT’s device has two stacked junctions, each picking up part of the incident ...

Flow batteries show promise for grid-scale storage as, like fuel cells, they decouple power output and energy storage when building a battery: the reactor is sized for power output and the surrounding tanks are sized for energy capacity. Given a low-cost working fluid and big tanks, they could store enormous amounts of energy. Seeking that low-cost fluid, MIT is proposing to ...

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has announced the winners of its Space University Research Initiative (SURI) funding programme. Newly-established, SURI is intended to be a first step in improving “the transition of critical concepts from academia into revolutionary new military technologies” for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. In March 2021, AFRL-funded awards of up to ...

This book sounds like a good, worthwhile read. It's from MIT Press and is called Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know.

Harvard and MIT researchers have teamed up to prototype a self-contained saliva-based diagnostic Covid test that can distinguish between variants in an hour and is “just as accurate as the PCR tests now used”, according to MIT. It is called ‘miSherlock’, for ‘minimally-instrumented Sherlock’, where Sherlock is a Crispr-based DNA/RNA test invented at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Two ...