MIT // Current TV

1 Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Dead, 'Massive Manhunt' for Second

One suspect in this week's deadly Boston Marathon bombing was killed after a... more

Radical_Centrist
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Breaking News: Bombs go off near Boston, Police officer killed. One suspect shot. Developing story

All hell is breaking loose in Watertown,Mass. tonight as several bombs went off. A... more

BillCorcoran
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Shots fired at MIT. Reports that an officer is down. Students asked to stay inside.

Dogammit, people, settle down. Just settle down. ::sigh:: I knew it wasn't a... more

attilatheblond
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Self-Sculpting Robots Are Under Development At MIT

3 April 2012 Last updated at 18:46 Self-sculpting sand robots are under development... more

circlesquared
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Weekend Gallimaufry - An Aldous Huxley Lecture At M.I.T. - 1961

The second of five lectures from 1961 - "What A Piece Of Work Is Man?"

Gordonskene
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400 Chernobyls

MIT engineer warns of nuclear Armageddon, urges preventative measures? There are... more

covelogibbs
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John McCarthy, The Father of Artificial Intelligence, Has Died

Los Angeles Times... . John McCarthy dies at 84; the father of artificial... more

EthicalVegan
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1 year ago
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The Space Shuttle's Southland Legacy

Los Angeles Times... The space shuttle's Southland legacy The space... more

EthicalVegan
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6 comments

Newstalgia Reference Room - Paul A. Samuelson On The Economy In 1961. | Newstalgia

Called the Father Of Modern Economics - a Meet The Press Interview with Dr. Paul A.... more

Gordonskene
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Artificial leaf that harvests solar energy makes debut

An artificial leaf that can turn sunshine into electricity was showcased last week at... more

JanforGore
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2 years ago
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59 comments

MIT Lab Creates the World's First Feasible 'Artificial Leaf'

A practical artificial leaf that can turn sunlight and water into energy as... more

fredcharpentier
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Japan Reactor May Be Leaking Radioactive Material

Japan reactor core may be leaking radioactive material, official says By the CNN Wire... more

EthicalVegan
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2 years ago
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9 comments

Sundance Sci-Fi Entry Another Earth Snags Studio Deal

Mike Cahill hit pay dirt with his first feature film, Another Earth, a sci-fi story... more

bundlebear
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2 years ago
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1 comment

A Scientist, His Work, and a Climate Reckoning

The New York Times December 21, 2010 A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning... more

EthicalVegan
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2 years ago
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69 comments

Elections 2010 outcome:GOPers, Tea Partiers readying to further entrench, spread the williwas of Texas Red…….

It’s not as if GOPers need a reason to rob the poor to give to the rich nor that... more

robertruiz
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Researchers demonstrate portable, solar-powered water desalination system

About one in eight humans do not have access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. That's approximately 884 million people.

The repercussion of this reality are a daily reality in developing nations: an estimated 1.4 million children perish each year due to diarrhea brought on by waterborne bacteria. In spite of breathtaking advances in human technology, over 97 percent of the world's water is still undrinkable.

This full-scale rendering may represent the future of clean water for those who have none.

And while salty or impure water can be cleaned through existing water desalination technologies, the facilities needed are massive and consume vast amounts of energy. It's costly, too: purifying sea water can cost "over $1,000 per acre-foot," according to the US Geological Survey. Even worse, of the roughly 12,500 desalination plants operating as of 2002, their combined total output was equal to less than 1 percent of humanity's daily water consumption.

All of these factors combine to effectively place clean water out of reach for most of the world's poor.

Enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Field and Space Robotics Laboratory, which has developed and successfully tested a portable, solar-powered water desalination system that has the potential to save millions of lives the world over.

Under the guidance of Profs. Steven Dubowsky and Richard Wiesman, the group created a small, reverse-osmosis system that's capable of producing up to 80 gallons of clean water per day. A scaled-up version of the system could produce up to 1,000 gallons per day, according to David Gabriel, writing for the Environmental News Network.

One of the military's C-130 cargo planes could theoretically carry up to 24 of these systems, Gabriel noted. With 24,000 gallons of clean water per day, that's enough to sustain a population of approximately 10,000.

"The system is designed to be cost effective," he explained. "It is made from standard parts such as PVC pipe and basic electronic components. It can be assembled and operated by local people who do not need advanced technical training. The units can also operate efficiently in a wide range of weather conditions. They have built in computers with sensors that can change certain variables if it gets cloudy. For example, the computer can adjust power going to the pump or the position of the valves to ensure the system will always produce water."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/researchers-create-portable-solarpowered-water-desalination-system/About one in eight humans do not have access to clean drinking water, according to the... more

bundlebear
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2 years ago
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Researchers at MIT develop a way to funnel solar energy

Using carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms), MIT chemical engineers have found a way to concentrate solar energy 100 times more than a regular photovoltaic cell. Such nanotubes could form antennas that capture and focus light energy, potentially allowing much smaller and more powerful solar arrays.

"Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them," says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team.

Strano and his students describe their new carbon nanotube antenna, or "solar funnel," in the Sept. 12 online edition of the journal Nature Materials. Lead authors of the paper are postdoctoral associate Jae-Hee Han and graduate student Geraldine Paulus.

Their new antennas might also be useful for any other application that requires light to be concentrated, such as night-vision goggles or telescopes.

Solar panels generate electricity by converting photons (packets of light energy) into an electric current. Strano's nanotube antenna boosts the number of photons that can be captured and transforms the light into energy that can be funneled into a solar cell.

The antenna consists of a fibrous rope about 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) long and four micrometers thick, containing about 30 million carbon nanotubes. Strano's team built, for the first time, a fiber made of two layers of nanotubes with different electrical properties — specifically, different bandgaps.

In any material, electrons can exist at different energy levels. When a photon strikes the surface, it excites an electron to a higher energy level, which is specific to the material. The interaction between the energized electron and the hole it leaves behind is called an exciton, and the difference in energy levels between the hole and the electron is known as the bandgap.

The inner layer of the antenna contains nanotubes with a small bandgap, and nanotubes in the outer layer have a higher bandgap. That's important because excitons like to flow from high to low energy. In this case, that means the excitons in the outer layer flow to the inner layer, where they can exist in a lower (but still excited) energy state.

Therefore, when light energy strikes the material, all of the excitons flow to the center of the fiber, where they are concentrated. Strano and his team have not yet built a photovoltaic device using the antenna, but they plan to. In such a device, the antenna would concentrate photons before the photovoltaic cell converts them to an electrical current. This could be done by constructing the antenna around a core of semiconducting material.
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While the cost of carbon nanotubes was once prohibitive, it has been coming down in recent years as chemical companies build up their manufacturing capacity. "At some point in the near future, carbon nanotubes will likely be sold for pennies per pound, as polymers are sold," says Strano. "With this cost, the addition to a solar cell might be negligible compared to the fabrication and raw material cost of the cell itself, just as coatings and polymer components are small parts of the cost of a photovoltaic cell."

Strano's team is now working on ways to minimize the energy lost as excitons flow through the fiber, and on ways to generate more than one exciton per photon. The nanotube bundles described in the Nature Materials paper lose about 13 percent of the energy they absorb, but the team is working on new antennas that would lose only 1 percent.Using carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms), MIT chemical engineers have... more

JanforGore
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2 years ago
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38 comments

Do-It-Yourself Optometry

We live in a strange world that lets us do just about anything on a phone, and now MIT... more

whitespacecarpet
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2 years ago
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1 comment

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