MetaFilter posts tagged with MIT and invention

Fixing the world on $2/day

lalochezia — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:50:28 -0800

Amy Smith and MIT's D-lab apply engineering principles to real-world problems that affect the world's poorest residents. She organizes an annual conference. Hear her talk at TED. Previously

Brilliant.

XQUZYPHYR — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 09:07:32 -0800

Clocky. An MIT student has designed an alarm clock with built-in wheels and motion sensors. Upon hitting the snooze button, Clocky will roll of your nighttable, bump around your room, and hide, forcing you to have to get up and look for him instead of hitting the button again.

Portable and off the grid

languagehat — Wed, 03 Dec 2003 13:02:30 -0800

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention. (NY Times, reg. req.) Amy Smith teaches MIT students about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering and helped start the IDEAS competition; she herself designed (among other things) a screenless hammer mill suited to third-world conditions and using "materials available to a blacksmith in Senegal."

Smith's entire life is like one of her inventions, portable and off the grid. At 41, she has no kids, no car, no retirement plan and no desire for a Ph.D. Her official title: instructor. ''I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Why would I spend six years to get a Ph.D. to be in the position I'm in now, but with a title after my name? M.I.T. loves that I'm doing this work. The support is there. So I don't worry.''...
Likewise, the inventors who most inspire her will never strike it rich. ''There are geniuses in Africa, but they're not getting the press,'' she says. She gushes about Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher who came up with the pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing more than a big terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water, Abba created a refrigerator -- the rig uses evaporation rather than electricity to keep vegetables cool. Innovations that target the poorest of the poor don't have to be complicated to make a big difference. The best solution is sometimes the most obvious.

A rare optimistic story for these downbeat times.

Teflon: The biggest accidental invention of the 20th Century.

Mack Twain — Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:46:50 -0800

Teflon: The biggest accidental invention of the 20th Century. I was wondering how if nothing sticks to Teflon, then how does it stick to the bottom of a frying pan? This search lead me to a really cool site, MIT's Inventor Archives. Organized alphabetically by inventors' last names and also by invention, it's a great jumping-off spot for research information and observing the interconnectivity that keeps research going.