When farmers spray their fields with pesticides or other treatments, only 2 percent of the spray sticks to the plants. A significant portion of it typically bounces right off the plants, lands on the ground, and becomes part of the runoff that flows to streams and rivers — often causing serious pollution. But a team…
Sun-Powered Desalination for Villages in India
Around the world, there is more salty groundwater than fresh, drinkable groundwater. For example, 60% of India is underlain by salty water — and much of that area is not served by an electric grid that could run conventional reverse-osmosis desalination plants. Now an analysis by MIT researchers shows that a different desalination technology called…
Learning How Things Fall Apart
Materials that are firmly bonded together with epoxy and other tough adhesives are ubiquitous in modern life — from crowns on teeth to modern composites used in construction. Yet it has proved remarkably difficult to study how these bonds fracture and fail, and how to make them more resistant to such failures. Now researchers at…
How Electrodes Charge & Discharge
Analysis probes reactions in porous battery electrodes for the first time. Massachusetts — The electrochemical reactions inside the porous electrodes of batteries and fuel cells have been described by theorists, but never measured directly. Now, a team at MIT has figured out a way to measure the fundamental charge transfer rate — finding some significant…