innovation
How to use human energy to heat buildings
Capturing energy from clubbers could help power homes and buildings.
Physicists embark on a hunt for a long-sought quantum glow
Could we finally detect the elusive Unruh effect?
Solar + battery hybrids are poised for explosive growth
Meet the power plant of the future.
Companies are sucking carbon from the atmosphere using “direct air capture”
Here’s how it works.
A clock beats inside the heart of every atom
Every timekeeping device works via a version of a pendulum — even the atomic clocks that are accurate to nanoseconds.
How Big Data democracy and nanofabricators could overturn society
Today, we could use Big Data to radically reform democracy. Tomorrow, we could build nanofabricators and usher in an era of abundance. Is society ready?
Why some religious leaders denounced Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod
Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod saved countless lives, but some religious leaders denounced his invention.
How Njoya the Great put his African kingdom on the map
This representation of the Bamum kingdom is a rare example of early 20th-century indigenous African cartography.
Astronomy’s 10-year wish list: Big questions and bigger telescopes
An optical telescope with a massive 20-foot (6-meter) mirror has an eye-popping price tag of $11 billion.
Cloud seeding might not be as promising as drought-troubled states hope
On Nov. 13, 1946, a scientist dropped crushed dry ice from a plane into supercooled stratus clouds.
Can we resurrect the thylacine? Maybe, but it won’t help the global extinction crisis
Assume we can make new thylacines, mammoths, diprotodons, or sabre-tooth cats. Great. Now where do we put them?
How can we produce electronics sustainably? Extract rare-earth elements from waste
A new method of extracting rare-earth elements could put us on the track toward a circular economy.
15th century futurism: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous helicopter design finally takes flight
Da Vinci dreamed up a helicopter 400 years before they actually existed. Now, engineers have brought his design to life, but with a twist.
Mind of its own: Will “general AI” be like an alien invasion?
According to surveys, approximately half of artificial intelligence experts believe that general AI will emerge by 2060.
Robot morphs shape using material inspired by origami
Outfitted with wheels and rotors, the bot can morph from a land drone into a quadcopter in seconds.
A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs – taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts, too
Scientists looked for ways to trigger the “build whatever normally was here” signal for cells at the site of a wound.
Rare moments when history was accidentally captured on camera
For a long time, important events could only be visualized retroactively through paintings. Photography allowed us to capture history as — or sometimes even before — it happened.
More math, more money: How profit-seeking has sparked innovations in mathematics
Math offers good evidence that humans can solve any problem — as long as there’s money in it.
Why does experiencing “flow” feel so good? A communication scientist explains
Flow occurs when a task’s challenge is balanced with one’s skill.
Five of the most exciting telescope pictures of the universe
With a new telescope on the horizon, we reflect on the best pictures of space that came before.
The journey to a pig-heart transplant began over half a century ago
It started with a 22-year-old woman, named in papers only as Mrs McK.
MIT engineers test an idea for a new hovering rover
A levitating vehicle might someday explore the moon, asteroids, and other airless planetary surfaces.
Six big digital trends to watch in 2022
Hybrid working, robot fast food workers, and the rapid acceleration of NFTs are just the beginning.
How do fireworks work? A pyrotechnics chemist explains the science behind the brilliant colors and sounds
If you put very fine black powder powder in a confined space it explodes in a cloud of heat, gas and noise.
Machines that see the world more like humans do
A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.
Hypersonic flight: coast-to-coast in 30 minutes
One day, we could fly across the U.S. in half an hour. A state-of-the-art hypersonic flight testing facility at UTSA could help make that dream a reality.
A tiny new camera could soon enable X-ray movies
A recent study overviews the thinnest X-ray detector ever created.
The Singularity: When will we all become super-humans?
Are we really only a moment away from "The Singularity," a technological epoch that will usher in a new era in human evolution?
One giant leap for the mini cheetah
A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time.