Weâre going to need to mine a huge amount of metals like cobalt and lithium to electrify the worldâs automobiles. But things would be easier if car batteries didnât have to be so big.
To a large extent, automobile makers building the next generation of electric vehicles (EVs) are competing on range, putting big, powerful batteries into their cars so they can travel farther between charges. That means mining and refining more minerals to build those bigger cars, and thus a bigger impact on the landscape, and a larger environmental footprint. The reason for all that is that EV batteries donât charge very fast, so the assumption is that people will only buy cars that they can drive for a long time without the inconvenience of a long charging stop. But that paradigm might be about to change....
In recent decades, the search for high-performance thermal insulation for buildings has prompted manufacturers to turn to aerogels. Invented in the 1930s, these remarkable materials are translucent, ultraporous, lighter than a marshmallow, strong enough to support a brick, and an unparalleled barrier to heat flow, making them ideal for keeping heat inside on a cold winter day and outside when summer temperatures soar.
Five years ago, researchers led by Evelyn Wang, a professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor in Power Engineering, set out to add one more property to that list. They aimed to make a silica aerogel that was truly transparent.
âWe started out trying to realize an optically transparent, thermally insulating aerogel for solar thermal systems,â says Wang. Incorporated into a solar thermal collector, a slab of aerogel would allow sunshine to come in unimpeded but prevent heat from coming back out â a key problem in todayâs systems. And if the transparent aerogel were sufficiently clear, it could be incorporated into windows, where it would act as a good heat barrier but still allow occupants to see out....
The health care system today largely focuses on helping people after they have problems. When they do receive treatment, itâs based on what has worked best on average across a huge, diverse group of patients.
Health at Scale uses a new approach for making care recommendations based on new classes of machine-learning models that work even when only small amounts of data on individual patients, providers, and treatments are available.
The company is already working with health plans, insurers, and employers to match patients with doctors. Itâs also helping to identify people at rising risk of visiting the emergency department or being hospitalized in the future, and to predict the progression of chronic diseases. Recently, Health at Scale showed its models can identify people at risk of severe respiratory infections like influenza or pneumonia, or, potentially, Covid-19.
âFrom the beginning, we decided all of our predictions would be related to achieving better outcomes for patients,â says John Guttag, chief technology officer of Health at Scale and the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. âWeâre trying to predict what treatment or physician or intervention would lead to better outcomes for people.â...
A team of researchers from Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has demonstrated the ability to fine-tune the electronic properties of hybrid perovskite materials, which have drawn enormous interest as potential next-generation optoelectronic materials for devices such as solar cells and light sources. The materials are classified as âhybridâ because they contain inorganic components like metals as well as organic molecules with elements like carbon and nitrogen, organized into nanoscale layers. In the paper âTunable exciton binding energy in 2D hybrid layered perovskites through donorâacceptor interactions within the organic layer,â published July 6 in the journal Nature Chemistry, the researchers showed that by strategically varying the composition of the organic layers, they could tune the color of light absorbed by the perovskite and also the wavelength at which the material emitted light. Importantly, they accomplished this without substantially changing the inorganic component....
