Tag: MIT

Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so sturdy? | MIT News

Laurent

The historic Romans were being masters of engineering, setting up large networks of roadways, aqueducts, ports, and huge structures, whose continues to be have survived for two millennia. A lot of of these buildings had been designed with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s greatest unreinforced concrete dome and was focused in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some historical Roman aqueducts nevertheless supply h2o to Rome nowadays. Meanwhile, quite a few modern-day concrete buildings have crumbled just after a number of a long time.

Scientists have spent decades attempting to figure out the magic formula of this ultradurable historical construction substance, notably in structures that endured in particular severe situations, this sort of as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or all those constructed in seismically energetic destinations.

Now, a staff of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has produced progress in this discipline, finding historical concrete-producing tactics that integrated numerous essential self-healing functionalities. The findings are printed today in the journal Science Developments, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, previous doctoral student Linda Seymour ’14, PhD ’21, and four other folks.

For a lot of a long time, researchers have assumed that the crucial to the historical concrete’s longevity was based mostly on one particular ingredient: pozzolanic material these kinds of as volcanic ash from the place of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This certain variety of ash was even transported all across the broad Roman empire to be utilized in building, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Underneath closer examination, these historic samples also incorporate compact, unique, millimeter-scale brilliant white mineral capabilities, which have been extensive acknowledged as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, normally referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another crucial ingredient of the historic concrete blend. “Ever because I very first began performing with ancient Roman concrete, I have constantly been fascinated by these attributes,” states Masic. “These are not discovered in modern

… Read More... Read More

MIT wins earth finals of the 45th Global Collegiate Programming Contest | MIT Information

Laurent

On Nov. 10, MIT’s crew of pupil coders built historical past by profitable the globe’s oldest, greatest, and most prestigious programming contest — the environment finals of the Global Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the 45th environment finals drew a live viewers of more than 1,600 viewers to the tense 12-challenge opposition, which showcased 420 contestants symbolizing 140 universities across 45 nations.

The very first ICPC Earth Finals was held in 1977, and the 2nd (in 1978) was gained by MIT — followed by numerous, numerous yrs of near misses for the group from Cambridge. Workforce college sponsor Martin Rinard, professor of pc science and engineering in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Personal computer Science (EECS) suggests that the staff has come close to profitable various instances considering that he took about leadership of the staff in 1997. That involves five gold medals, 5 silver medals, 3 bronze medals and two second-location finishes. But he considers this general performance significantly special.

Profitable the championship resulted from the perform of quite a few, together with Senior Administrative Assistant Mary McDavitt, who dealt with the daunting logistics concerned in sending a crew of undergraduates midway all-around the planet, as properly as scholar coaches Ce Jin and Yinzhan Xu, both equally PhD college students in EECS, who helped select the best staff to represent MIT. That staff is composed of Xiao Mao ’21 MEng ’22, who has degrees in each laptop or computer science and engineering and in mathematics Jerry Mao, a senior in pc science and engineering and Mingyang Deng, a junior in laptop or computer science and engineering. (Deng also recently competed in and gained the 2022 North American Championships of the ICPC, clinching eligibility to attend the 46th once-a-year ICPC Planet Finals subsequent 12 months.)

In this job interview, conducted via e-mail for the duration of and immediately after the flight back again from Bangladesh, the trio mirror on their historic victory.

Q: Initial off, congratulations! Convey to us how you got in the mental house to compete. What kinds of practices, rituals, and preparing

… Read More... Read More

Hunting outside of “technology for technology’s sake” | MIT News

Laurent

Austen Roberson’s preferred class at MIT is 2.S007 (Design and style and Production I-Autonomous Machines), in which students style and design, establish, and plan a absolutely autonomous robot to attain duties laid out on a themed match board.

“The ideal issue about that course is everybody experienced a various thought,” says Roberson. “We all had the exact same sport board and the exact recommendations provided to us, but the robots that arrived out of people’s minds were so different.”

The video game board was Mars-themed, with a design shuttle that could be lifted to score factors. Roberson’s robot, nicknamed Tank Evans immediately after a character from the movie “Surf’s Up,” employed a clever technique to attain this undertaking. Alternatively of spinning the gears that would raise the complete mechanism, Roberson realized a claw gripper could wrap close to the outdoors of the shuttle and carry it manually.

“That was not the meant way,” suggests Roberson, but his exterior-of-the-box approach ending up successful him the levels of competition at the conclusion of the course, which was element of the New Engineering Instruction Transformation (NEET) application. “It was a actually excellent course for me. I get a whole lot of gratification out of setting up some thing with my fingers and then applying my programming and issue-resolving capabilities to make it go.”

Roberson, a senior, is majoring in aerospace engineering with a slight in computer science. As his winning robotic demonstrates, he thrives at the intersection of both equally fields. He references the Mars Curiosity Rover as the type of project that inspires him he even keeps a Lego product of Curiosity on his desk. 

“You seriously have to rely on that the hardware you’ve designed is up to the job, but you also have to trust your software similarly as significantly,” states Roberson, referring to the troubles of running a rover from thousands and thousands of miles away. “Is the robotic likely to go on to operate after we have place it into space? Each of those people factors have to occur with each other in this kind of a excellent

… Read More... Read More

A more simple path to superior laptop vision | MIT Information

Laurent

Before a machine-understanding design can entire a activity, this kind of as figuring out most cancers in healthcare pictures, the model must be educated. Education impression classification styles commonly consists of demonstrating the design hundreds of thousands of instance photographs collected into a large dataset.

However, applying real image info can raise useful and ethical worries: The visuals could operate afoul of copyright legislation, violate people’s privacy, or be biased towards a selected racial or ethnic group. To stay clear of these pitfalls, researchers can use picture era applications to make synthetic data for design training. But these approaches are restricted for the reason that skilled awareness is generally wanted to hand-design and style an picture generation software that can produce successful instruction info. 

Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and somewhere else took a distinct tactic. Rather of developing tailored graphic generation plans for a distinct education activity, they collected a dataset of 21,000 publicly out there programs from the online. Then they utilised this big selection of essential image generation programs to teach a personal computer eyesight design.

These programs develop various illustrations or photos that display screen straightforward shades and textures. The researchers did not curate or change the systems, which each comprised just a handful of lines of code.

The versions they properly trained with this substantial dataset of packages labeled illustrations or photos a lot more accurately than other synthetically qualified products. And, when their types underperformed those trained with actual knowledge, the researchers confirmed that escalating the selection of image courses in the dataset also increased product efficiency, revealing a route to attaining greater precision.

“It turns out that applying tons of programs that are uncurated is actually superior than making use of a small set of plans that people today want to manipulate. Knowledge are crucial, but we have proven that you can go very considerably without the need of serious information,” suggests Manel Baradad, an electrical engineering and pc science (EECS) graduate scholar doing work in the Laptop Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and guide author of the paper

… Read More... Read More

A new strategy for reduced-expense batteries | MIT Information

Laurent

As the planet builds out at any time much larger installations of wind and photo voltaic electric power units, the require is escalating quick for inexpensive, massive-scale backup devices to provide electrical power when the solar is down and the air is quiet. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are nonetheless too high priced for most such programs, and other solutions these types of as pumped hydro call for certain topography that is not often obtainable.

Now, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have formulated a new type of battery, built fully from ample and reasonably priced elements, that could aid to fill that hole.

The new battery architecture, which makes use of aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in in between, is explained currently in the journal Character, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, together with 15 some others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

“I preferred to invent one thing that was far better, substantially superior, than lithium-ion batteries for modest-scale stationary storage, and finally for automotive [uses],” points out Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry.

In addition to currently being high priced, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, building them less than great for transportation. So, Sadoway began learning the periodic table, looking for affordable, Earth-ample metals that may well be ready to substitute for lithium. The commercially dominant steel, iron, does not have the right electrochemical attributes for an successful battery, he suggests. But the next-most-plentiful metallic in the marketplace — and essentially the most plentiful metal on Earth — is aluminum. “So, I stated, effectively, let’s just make that a bookend. It is gonna be aluminum,” he says.

Then arrived choosing what to pair the aluminum with for the other electrode, and what form of electrolyte to place in involving to have ions back again and forth for the duration of charging and discharging. The most affordable of all the non-metals is sulfur, so that grew to become the 2nd electrode material. As for the electrolyte, “we ended up not

… Read More... Read More

Shielding maternal wellbeing in Rwanda | MIT News

Laurent

The globe is struggling with a maternal well being disaster. In accordance to the Entire world Health Firm, approximately 810 women of all ages die just about every working day owing to preventable results in relevant to being pregnant and childbirth. Two-thirds of these fatalities come about in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, one particular of the leading triggers of maternal mortality is infected Cesarean segment wounds.

An interdisciplinary team of medical doctors and researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Associates in Health and fitness (PIH) in Rwanda have proposed a solution to deal with this issue. They have produced a cellular wellness (mHealth) system that works by using synthetic intelligence and actual-time pc eyesight to forecast an infection in C-area wounds with approximately 90 per cent precision.

“Early detection of an infection is an important challenge globally, but in very low-useful resource spots this kind of as rural Rwanda, the challenge is even more dire due to a deficiency of qualified medical professionals and the large prevalence of bacterial bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics,” says Richard Ribon Fletcher ’89, SM ’97, PhD ’02, analysis scientist in mechanical engineering at MIT and technological innovation direct for the group. “Our strategy was to employ cellular telephones that could be employed by local community well being workers to visit new moms in their households and examine their wounds to detect an infection.”

This summer, the group, which is led by Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was awarded the $500,000 first-position prize in the NIH Technology Accelerator Problem for Maternal Health.

“The life of girls who provide by Cesarean part in the creating earth are compromised by both equally constrained entry to quality surgical procedure and postpartum treatment,” adds Fredrick Kateera, a team member from PIH. “Use of cellular wellbeing technologies for early identification, plausible accurate analysis of those with surgical web site infections inside these communities would be a scalable video game changer in optimizing women’s health and fitness.”

Training algorithms to detect an infection

The project’s inception was the consequence of various opportunity encounters. In 2017,

… Read More... Read More