by Anne Trafton
MIT will be home to two of 46 new multimillion-dollar Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), the White House announced this week.
The EFRCs, which will pursue advanced scientific research on energy, are being established by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations and private firms across the nation.
The EFRC program plans to provide $19 million to fund the Center for Excitonics at MIT, which will be directed by Marc A. Baldo, associate professor of electrical engineering and a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory for Electronics. The center aims to understand the transport of charge carriers in synthetic disordered systems, which hold promise as new materials for converting solar energy to electricity and for electrical energy storage.
Read more: DOE to Establish Two Energy Frontier Research Centers at MIT
by Anne Trafton
In a move aimed at broadening access to MIT's research and scholarship, faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.
by David Chandler
The goal of this research is to enable a multi-limbed robot to climb vertical rock using techniques similar to those developed by human climbers (Figure 1). The robot consists of a small number of articulated limbs. Only the limb end-points can make contact with the environment—a vertical surface with small, arbitrarily distributed features called holds (Figure 2). A path through this environment is a sequence of one-step climbing moves in which the robot brings a limb end-point to a new hold.