More stories

  • in

    Letter regarding the first of six climate change symposia

    The following letter was sent to the MIT community by president L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, In keeping with MIT’s broad and intensive efforts outlined in our Plan for Action on Climate Change, last spring I wrote to let the community know that, this academic year, we will host six […] More

  • in

    What’s the best way to cut vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions?

    Policies to encourage reductions in greenhouse gas emissions tend to stress the need to switch as many vehicles as possible to electric power. But a new study by MIT and the Ford Motor Company finds that depending on the location, in some cases an equivalent or even bigger reduction in emissions could be achieved by […] More

  • in

    Artificial intelligence could help data centers run far more efficiently

    A novel system developed by MIT researchers automatically “learns” how to schedule data-processing operations across thousands of servers — a task traditionally reserved for imprecise, human-designed algorithms. Doing so could help today’s power-hungry data centers run far more efficiently. Data centers can contain tens of thousands of servers, which constantly run data-processing tasks from developers […] More

  • in

    Using Wall Street secrets to reduce the cost of cloud infrastructure

    Stock market investors often rely on financial risk theories that help them maximize returns while minimizing financial loss due to market fluctuations. These theories help investors maintain a balanced portfolio to ensure they’ll never lose more money than they’re willing to part with at any given time. Inspired by those theories, MIT researchers in collaboration […] More

  • in

    Removing carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust

    Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants is widely considered an essential component of any climate change mitigation plan. Many research efforts focus on developing and deploying carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) systems to keep CO2 emissions from power plants out of the atmosphere. But separating the captured CO2 and converting it back into a gas […] More

  • in

    A vision of nuclear energy buoyed by molten salt

    Years before he set foot on the MIT campus, Kieran P. Dolan participated in studies conducted at MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (NRL). As an undergraduate student majoring in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Dolan worked on components and sensors for MIT Reactor (MITR)-based experiments integral to designing fluoride-salt-cooled high-temperature nuclear reactors, […] More

  • in

    Enriching solid-state batteries

    Researchers at MIT have come up with a new pulsed laser deposition technique to make thinner lithium electrolytes using less heat, promising faster charging and potentially higher-voltage solid-state lithium ion batteries. Key to the new technique for processing the solid-state battery electrolyte is alternating layers of the active electrolyte lithium garnet component (chemical formula, Li6.25Al0.25La3Zr2O12, […] More

  • in

    Pathways to a low-carbon China

    Fulfilling the ultimate goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change — keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, if not 1.5 C — will be impossible without dramatic action from the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China. Toward that end, China began in 2017 developing an emissions trading scheme (ETS), a […] More