Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

In December, MIT Media Lab researchers caused a stir by releasing a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a plastic bottle. But the experimental setup that enabled that video was designed for a much different application: a camera that can see around corners.

A team of MIT researchers has developed a way of making a high-temperature version of a kind of materials called photonic crystals, using metals such as tungsten or tantalum.

Jeffrey Grossman says Cambridge has a better climate than California — for carrying out materials science research, that is. That’s why Grossman decided, two years ago, to make the move from the University of California at Berkeley to a position at MIT.

Thanks to a new online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties — whether it’s to build a better mousetrap or a better battery — will now be able to do so far more easily than ever before.

Research on the Alcator C-Mod experiment at MIT has made an unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated but important phenomena observed in tokamak plasmas: spontaneous plasma rotation and the global energy confinement of the plasma.

Researchers at MIT have succeeded in making a fine thread that functions as a diode, a device at the heart of modern electronics. This feat — made possible by a new approach to a type of fiber manufacturing known as fiber drawing — could open up possibilities for fabricating a wide variety of electronic and photonic devices within composite fibers, using a variety of materials.

The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change by Philip W. Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton.

If a new development from labs at MIT pans out as expected, someday the entire surface area of a building’s windows could be used to generate electricity — without interfering with the ability to see through them.

The students, alumni, and professors at MIT are a brainy -- and busy -- bunch. To mark the university's 150th year, we tracked a handful of smarty-pants with ties to the school. Infographic: MIT's 150th Birthday

MIT scientists have synthesized, for the first time, a crystal they believe to be a two-dimensional quantum spin liquid: a solid material whose atomic spins continue to have motion, even at absolute zero temperature.

An MIT professor recognized as a world leader and innovator in the field of experimental electromagnetic nuclear physics has been named the first recipient of the Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award by Jefferson Science Associates.