School of Engineering

CNN reporter Madeline Holcombe spotlights a new study by MIT researchers exploring why the cream on Oreo cookies always sticks to one side when twisted open. Graduate student Crystal Owens explains that she hopes the research will inspire people "to investigate other puzzles in the kitchen in scientific ways. The best scientific research, even at MIT, is driven by curiosity to understand the world around us, when someone sees something weird or unknown and takes the time to think 'I wonder why that happens like that?'"

Graduate student Crystal Owens speaks with Popular Science reporter Philip Kiefer about her work exploring why the cream filling of an Oreo cookie always sticks to one side. “It turns out there’s not really a trick to it,” Owens says. “Everything you try to do will get mostly a clean break.”

Graduate student Crystal Owens and her colleagues tested the possibility of separating the two wafers of an Oreo in a way that evenly splits the cream filling using a rheometer, an instrument that measures torque and viscosity of various substances, reports Becky Ferreira for Vice. “After twisting Oreos apart with the instruments, the team visually inspected the ratio of creme on each wafer and logged the findings. A number of variations on the experiment were also introduced, such as dipping the cookies in milk, changing the rotation rate of the rheometer, and testing different Oreo flavors and filling quantities,” writes Ferreira.

A team of researchers from MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory successfully reached a 30% jump in thermophotovoltaic (TPV) efficiency, reports Robert F. Service for Science. “[TPV] is a semiconductor structure that concerts photons emitted from a heat source to electricity, just as a solar cell transforms sunlight into power,” explains Service.

Nature Physics senior editor Silvia Milana spotlights “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus” a new book written by MIT News Deputy Editorial Director Maia Weinstock. “Carbon Queen does not only capture the journey into the personal and professional life of an outstanding figure in carbon science, it is a careful account of the evolution of societal attitudes towards women from the 1950s to today” writes Milana.

MIT announced five projects "targeting the world's toughest climate riddles" that were selected following a rigorous two-year competition, reports Benjamin Kail for Boston Business Journal. “Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says President L. Rafael Reif.

Prof. Peter Dedon discusses his research investigating how scientists can make new antibiotics by inserting “engineered genes into spots along the bacterial genome that optimize protein production,” writes Carrie Arnold for Scientific American. “There’s great potential there,” Dedon says. “There’s a whole new world of antibiotic targets.”

TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater spotlights new MIT robotics research, including a team of CSAIL researchers “working on a system that utilizes a robotic arm to help people get dressed.” Heater notes that the “issue is one of robotic vision — specifically finding a method to give the system a better view of the human arm it’s working to dress.”

Boston Magazine reporter Scott Kearnan spotlights Clover, a farm-fresh restaurant and food truck, created by Ayr Muir BS ’00, SM ’01. “Clover is so confident about its commitment to only using fresh-from-the-farm produce that, believe it or not, it doesn’t have a single freezer in its restaurants,” writes Kearnan.

The Boston Globe highlights Robert Buderi’s new book, “Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub.” Buderi features the Future Founders Initiative, an effort by Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia, President Emerita Susan Hockfield and Prof. Emerita Nancy Hopkins aimed at increasing female entrepreneurship. 

TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers spotlights MIT startup Amplemarket, a sales enablement company, co-founded by João Batalha ’13, Luis Batalha and Micael Oliveira. “We’ve leveraged our combination of technical backgrounds and applied it to one of the oldest trades: sales,” says J. Batalha.

Newsha Ghaeli ’17 - president and co-founder of Biobot, a public health research, data and analytics firms that has developed and promoted wastewater surveillance technology - speaks with Vox reporter Muizz Akhtar about how wastewater surveillance can be used to predict and prepare for future pandemics. “Our vision is that this is a permanent infrastructure layer on our sewer systems, so that it becomes one of the core kinds of pandemic preparedness in this country and disease surveillance globally,” says Ghaeli.

MIT startup ReadySet, co-founded by Alana Marzoev PhD ’18 and Jon Gjengset PhD ’20, provides database infrastructure to help developers build real-time applications, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Rather than rebuilding these same broken systems, developers need solutions that slot into their existing infrastructure and achieve limitless read scaling,” says Marzoev. “With ReadySet, we aim to make the process of globally caching… query results as streamlined and automated as caching images in a content delivery system.”

MIT researchers and two high school seniors have developed DualFair, a new technique for removing bias from a mortgage lending dataset, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “When a mortgage-lending AI was trained using DualFair and tested on real-world mortgage data from seven US states,” writes Bray, “the system was less likely to reject applications of otherwise qualified borrowers because of their race, sex, or ethnicity.”

The MIT AI Hardware Program seeks to bring together researchers from academia and industry to “examine each step of designing and manufacturing the hardware behind AI-powered technologies,” reports Emily Bamforth for EdScoop. “This program is about accelerating the development of new hardware to implement AI algorithms so we can do justice to the capabilities that computer scientists are developing,” explains Prof. Jesús del Alamo.