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Anyone who's ever opened a bottle of antibiotics or other medication and lamented the fact that they had to swallow a massive horse pill has also wished pills were smaller. Chemical engineers at MIT have found a way to load more drug into a tablet, which could mean smaller and easier to swallow pills in the future. The scientists say that about 60 percent of the drugs on the market have hydrophobic molecules as their active ingredients.

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Tiny carbon nanotubes that can generate energy simply through bobbing in a special liquid could one day be a breakthrough power source for micro-robotics or even smaller devices, researchers at MIT say. The approach could also provide a new and far more efficient source of electricity for electrochemistry, tapping power from the environment to make chemical conversions that rely less on traditional power sources.

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Typically when we talk about autonomous vehicles, we're talking about autonomous cars. However, there are other types of autonomous vehicles, including autonomous aircraft and autonomous boats. Amsterdam is famous for many things, one of them is its canal system and the water taxis that take people all around the city.

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Researchers at MIT have created the first fiber that has digital capabilities. The fiber can sense, store, analyze, and infer activity and be sewn into his shirt. MIT professor Yoel Fink says the digital fiber has expanded the possibilities for fabrics to uncover hidden patterns in the human body that could potentially be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection.

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Researchers at MIT have developed a new slender robotic finger designed to sense buried items. The tech uses tactile sensing to identify objects underground, and researchers believe it could one day be used to help disarm landmines and inspect buried cables. Researchers say identifying buried items in granular material like sand is very difficult.

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Researchers at MIT have discovered that ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons known as CFCs stay in the atmosphere for less time than previously estimated. CFCs were phased out globally in 2010, and the research suggests they should be in the atmosphere in much lower concentrations than recent measurements suggest. The study suggests that new and illegal production of CFCs has likely occurred in recent years.

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Electronic devices like computers and smartphones are continually getting thinner and smaller. One of the challenges to thinner and smaller devices in the future is reducing the size of the internal components and hardware, and MIT has announced a new advance that might enable 2D transistors for smaller microchip components. Researchers on the project believe this breakthrough could help continue the progress in the microchip market, allowing Moore's Law to continue.

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There are some activities of daily living that many of us take for granted, such as being able to untangle and brush our hair. For people with disabilities or limited motion, the simple act of brushing the hair is often something that requires someone else to help. Researchers at MIT have created a robot that's able to help with untangling and brushing hair.

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Typically when you purchase something like a case for your phone, the color or image on it is static and can't be changed. When you want a different color or a different image, you have to buy a new case. MIT has developed a system that uses light and special light-activated dye to create programmable matter.

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Researchers at MIT have built a new nanoscale flashlight on a chip that they believe could someday result in cell phones that can be used as sensors capable of detecting viruses and other incredibly small objects. The approach used by the researchers to design the nano flashlight on a chip might also be used to create a variety of other micro flashlights with different beam characteristics to create devices for a variety of applications. Scientists say they can make a wide spotlight versus a beam of light focused on a single point depending on the need.

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Ride-sharing is something that many use for convenience and to help reduce traffic on the roads. Services like Uber and others have been touted as being more environmentally friendly than using a taxi or a private vehicle. Recently, researchers at the Future Urban Mobility Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT, and Tongji University conducted a study to find out if ride-sharing was better for the environment and traffic.

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While lots of people out there don't want anything to do with walking through a spiderweb or the arachnids themselves, at some point, most of us have probably stood back and admired the complexity of a spiderweb. Spiders can weave strands of silk into incredibly intricate 3D webs serving as both the home for the spider and hunting grounds for prey. Scientists at MIT have translated the structure of a spiderweb into music.

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