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MIT Professor’s IoT Sensors Make Roads Safer

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Back in 2005, before smartphones were generally available, MIT Professor Hari Balakrishnan was so fed up with commuting delays in Boston that he built a mobile system to monitor road conditions. He interviewed for a faculty position at MIT and knew immediately it was where he wanted to work, he says. In the final year of his Ph.D.,

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MIT Looks Ahead to Hydrogen’s Aviation Future

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This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. John Hansman , an aeronautics and astronautics professor at MIT and director of the university’s International Center for Air Transportation. Right now, there are other ideas, but they may not work for all kinds of flights.

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MIT proof-of-concept demo of ionic wind propulsion for aircraft

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MIT researchers have demonstrated that an aircraft with a 5-meter wingspan can sustain steady-level flight using ionic-wind propulsion. The aircraft has no moving parts, does not depend on fossil fuels to fly, and is completely silent. The MIT team’s final design resembles a large, lightweight glider. —Xu et al.

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Two Oddball Ideas for a Megaqubit Quantum Computer

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Crucially, it could do it with little power loss, which is important, because at the coldest parts of the cryogenic chambers used for quantum computers, the refrigerator system can only remove a couple of watts of heat. Instead the MIT team designed a terahertz “backscatter” system.

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MIT autonomous boats can target and latch onto each other: dynamic roboat structures

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To further that vision, MIT researchers have given new capabilities to their fleet of robotic boats—which are being developed as part of an ongoing project—that lets them target and clasp onto each other, and keep trying if they fail. Moreover, the roboat notices if it has missed the connection, backs up, and tries again.

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MIT researchers propose subsea version of pumped hydro for renewable energy storage

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Researchers at MIT are proposing using a variation on pumped hydroelectric systems for storage of electricity produced by offshore wind farms. Hundreds of spheres could be deployed as part of a far-offshore installation of hundreds of floating wind turbines, the researchers say. MIT has filed for a patent on the system.

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MIT/Stanford team develops battery technology for the conversion of low-grade waste heat to power; TREC

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Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed new battery technology for the conversion of low-temperature waste heat into electricity in cases where temperature differences are less than 100 degrees Celsius. This is a clever idea, and low-grade waste heat is everywhere. It is a very promising technology.

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