By Zachary Shahan •
November 7, 2009
Total, a French oil company, recently agreed to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $4 million for a 5-year research project to develop stationary batteries that can more efficiently store solar energy.
More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.
Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?
By Timothy B. Hurst •
October 23, 2009
Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, U.S. President Barack Obama threw strong support behind clean energy and technology, touting America’s history of innovation and not shying away from problems.
By Susan Kraemer •
October 11, 2009
A team of students at MIT has just developed a temperature sensitive roof tile that turns black and absorbs heat in cold weather, and turns white, reflecting heat away when it’s hot.
In cold weather, the polymer stays dissolved and the black backing shows through, but exposed to heat, tiny droplets form and scatter the light back to produce a white appearance. The tiles reflected 80% of the sunlight falling on them when white, and only 30% when black.
The cooling needs would then be reduced 20%.
By Jerry James Stone •
October 5, 2009
Students from West Philadelphia High School have built a diesel-hybrid race car that goes from 0-60 in four seconds. While the car currently gets 60+ mpg, they hope to soon break 100 mpg.
Why? They are competing for $10 million in the Automotive X-Prize .
Called the Hybrid Attack, the car was built by kids from West Philly’s Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. And if that alone doesn’t make them cool, they are the only high school team competing out of 90 different teams from the U.S. and overseas.
By Susan Kraemer •
August 30, 2009
We’re all familiar with the vast solar thermal power stations in the desert that use mirrors to make steam to drive turbines. Giant solar thermal arrays are already making electricity in the desert in Spain and California. But what if we could have just one of these units in the backyard, just for our own use?
That’s what motivated a team of MIT students to find the way to make the cheapest solar power station out there. Mass produce it for the home user and market it under their own new start up RawSolar.
Sure, it melts steel. But even more practically for the home owner, it makes steam in a flash:
By Jerry James Stone •
August 24, 2009
Hand-built, eco-modified, and wood-powered cars raced across the Bay State this weekend driving 100 miles on just a single gallon of fuel. Aptly named the One Gallon Challenge, the event was part of a four-day long festival in Boston that celebrated clean technologies. Welcome to GreenFest 2009!
Frustrated with the price of filling up his Toyota, Jory Squibb built the Moonbeam. It has [...]
Panasonic Corporation just announced that it will sponsor Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT). The team will be competing in the upcoming Global Green Challenge (GCG) to be held in October of this year in Australia. As part of the sponsorship, Panasonic will provide the team with its a high-capacity (2.9 Ah) lithium-ion batteries.
The MIT SEVT student team will compete in the World Solar Challenge with a solar powered car using Panasonic lithium-ion batteries to store its solar generated power. Separately, Panasonic will provide the same high-capacity, lithium-ion batteries to a team from Japan’s Tokai University which is also competing in the same category.
MIT students are developing an electric car that could easily compete with petro-based vehicles.
Using a 2010 Mercury Milan hybrid and 7,905 lithium iron-phosphate batteries, the car fully charges in about 10 minutes. Whereas most EVs require overnight charging to reach full capacity, this is clearly a game changer.
By Moiz Kapadia •
July 24, 2009
Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have developed smart tags to be attached to individual pieces of your trash and send its location back in real time.
Where did that candy bar wrapper go after you tossed it in your trash bin? Did that juice container with a #1 recycling symbol make it to the recycling center? As soon as we throw something away, we lose our connection to it. We don’t stop to wonder where the trash goes - does it get burned, go to landfill, or get placed on a boat?
These questions and more will be answered by Trash Track, an information system designed to monitor the path your garbage takes when it leaves your bin. Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have developed smart tags to be attached to individual pieces of your trash and send its location back in real time. The mobile sensor is akin to a miniature cell phone, encased in a type of resin to ensure its durability throughout its journey. Since cell phone technology is ubiquitous and cheap, Trash Track should be able to capture the location of trash globally. The team is looking to expose the “removal chain” of trash.
Would you be so cavalier in throwing out a disposable razor if you knew how much it actually impacted your local environments? Would you think twice about purchasing a bottle of water if you knew how much it cost you to dispose of? That’s the question asked by the MIT SENSEable City lab these days. And they plan to see what effects one man’s trash actually has on the environment.
Inspired by the Green NYC Initiative which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100 percent by 2030 (currently, only about 30 percent of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling!), a group of MIT researchers have developed a program that uses special electronic tags in order to track different types of waste on their journey through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Its name? Trash Track. Trash Track will monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal while raising public awareness about the impacts the garbage can under the sink has on the environment.
