Sitting still or going hunting: Which works better?
For the kinds of animals that are most familiar to us — ones that are big enough to see — it’s a no-brainer: Is it better to sit around and wait for food to come to you, or to move around and find it?...
View ArticleUndergraduate Winters presents winning poster at APS annual meeting
Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) junior Victoria Winters recently won one of three Undergraduate Poster Awards at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division...
View ArticleIt pays to cooperate
Many species exhibit cooperative survival strategies — for example, sharing food or alerting other individuals when a predator is nearby. However, there are almost always freeloaders in the population...
View ArticleNew metamaterial lens focuses radio waves
In many respects, metamaterials are supernatural. These manmade materials, with their intricately designed structures, bend electromagnetic waves in ways that are impossible for materials found in...
View ArticleFunneling the sun’s energy
The quest to harness a broader spectrum of sunlight’s energy to produce electricity has taken a radically new turn, with the proposal of a “solar energy funnel” that takes advantage of materials under...
View ArticleAll that is solid melts into air: Tomás Saraceno visits MIT
"It's 99.9 percent air," says artist Tomás Saraceno of his latest work, "On Space Time Foam." On Space Time Foam is a multi-layered habitat of diaphanous membranes suspended 24 meters above the ground,...
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Lead-proton collisions yield surprising results
Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the...
View ArticleProving quantum computers feasible
Quantum computers are devices — still largely theoretical — that could perform certain types of computations much faster than classical computers; one way they might do that is by exploiting “spin,” a...
View ArticleMaria Zuber appointed vice president for research
Maria T. Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, will become MIT’s next vice president for research, President L. Rafael Reif announced today. Zuber chaired MIT’s Department of Earth,...
View ArticleLindsey Anne Gilman: Better boiling for more efficient energy production
For Lindsey Anne Gilman SM ’12 playing with bubbles is serious work. Her PhD research project, launched this past summer, concerns ways of improving heat transfer for energy production utilizing...
View ArticleGRAIL reveals a battered lunar history
Beneath its heavily pockmarked surface, the moon’s interior bears remnants of the very early solar system. Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics has essentially erased any trace of the planet’s earliest...
View ArticleWhen the first stars blinked on
As far back in time as astronomers have been able to see, the universe has had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive...
View ArticlePhysics receives 2012 APS award for improving undergraduate physics education
The Committee on Education (COE) of the American Physical Society (APS) recently announced the recipients of the 2012 Award for Improving Undergraduate Physics Education, and MIT's Department of...
View ArticleMIT researchers discover a new kind of magnetism
Following up on earlier theoretical predictions, MIT researchers have now demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior, adding to the two previously known...
View ArticleHistorian/physicist David Kaiser wins Physics World’s 'Book of the Year Award'
"How the Hippies Saved Physics" by David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, has been named 2012 Book of the Year by Physics World magazine. Kaiser is the head of MIT's...
View ArticleImproving the accuracy of cancer diagnoses
Tiny calcium deposits can be a telltale sign of breast cancer. However, in the majority of cases these microcalcifications signal a benign condition. A new diagnostic procedure developed at MIT and...
View ArticleHow to treat heat like light
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.The approach relies...
View ArticleStoring data in individual molecules
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...
View ArticleA physicist and her neutrinos
Quarks, bosons, muons, electrons, neutrinos: This is the stuff the universe is made of, and these particles fascinate MIT senior Christie Chiu.A physics and math major from Bedford, Mass., Chiu...
View ArticleDuflo, Lander, Lewin to lead spring-semester MITx courses
MIT professors Esther Duflo, Eric Lander and Walter Lewin will lead three new MITx courses this spring, joining three existing MITx courses that will be offered again this semester. The new MITx...
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