At MIT, Professor Yet-Ming Chiang and his team of researchers are trying to reinvent the rechargeable battery for electric vehicles and and grid storage.

The new lightweight and inexpensive batteries would be half the weight and price of current batteries, and would make refueling as easy as filling a traditional tank with gas. No more waiting overnight for a charge.

The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. Flow-cell batteries have been around for awhile but they use a liquid fuel that is low in energy density and therefore too large and impractical for cars.

The semi-solid flow battery uses a fuel called "Cambridge Crude" designed at MIT, which is 10 times more energy dense than liquid flow-cell, making it compact and lightweight enough for cars.

These batteries are also well suited for large scale electricity storage because they be easily scaled up at

If someone tells you that you move like a robot it's not a compliment, unless you're doing the dance, just ask Al Gore. Robots have always been famous for making very rigid and stiff movements and there's a reason for that. While it's simple for a human to move their hand from the keyboard, pick up a cup of coffee, take a sip and put it back down, it's extremely difficult to come up with an equation for a robot to do the same thing.

The task of making a robot move more naturally may have scared away others in the past, but researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have attacked the dilemma head on. By combining two innovative Algorithms they have built a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates more efficient and human like paths for robot arms.

And what does all this mean? If robots are ever going to interact with humans it's critical that they're able to make

Up until now solar panels have fallen a little flat, literally. Whether they're on a house or an industrial solar field in the desert, solar panels have always been one shape: flat. But the world's not and there's no reason why our solar panels should be either.

Inspired by the way trees spread their leaves to capture sunlight, MIT Engineering Professor Jeffery Grossman wondered how efficient a three-dimensional shape covered in solar cells could be. It turns out that it has the potential to be quite efficient, even on an overcast, rainy day in Boston.

That's where we found Professor Grossman and his team, on the roof of their research lab at MIT with a desk covered in miniature 3D solar panels.

You might think doing a solar panel demonstration on an overcast day is pointless, but not so with 3D solar panels. Typically, grey skies are like kryptonite for solar power, but Professor Grossman found that 3D panels can actually pick up almost as much electricity on a cloudy day as it