An MIT-China team that probed the potential for boosting efficiency at the nearly 500,000 boilers serving industrial plants around China has come up with some encouraging answers. If such changes were implemented at most or all the country's industrial power plants, it would save roughly 75 million tons of coal annually. It would also slash emissions of carbon dioxide, a key gas linked to the global warming threat, by over 100 million tons a year. Kenneth Oye, associate professor of political science, and his MIT co-workers collaborated on the project with a group from the Taiyun Institute of Technology. J nos B er, MIT professor emeritus of chemical engineering, served as senior engineer and consultant.
Radiation therapy calls for precise targeting to spare healthy tissues around a tumor.
When your radiation-producing instrument is a behemoth the size of a small room, that's a tall order. But an MIT group, working with counterparts from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, has attained a precision better than what it takes to thread a needle. The challenge facing Steven Dubowsky, professor of mechanical engineering, was positioning the structure that bears the patient. But the group developed a software program that can position the structure using only about 400 measurements, not the millions otherwise needed.