Obama Visits MIT Research Lab, Tours Cutting Edge Green Technology (PHOTOS)

President Barack Obama toured a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he took a tour of some of the cutting edge clean energy technology that has been in development by researchers there.

According to a press release from the White House's office of the press secretary, Obama was scheduled to visit stations at the research lab displaying solar, battery, and wind technology, as well as a LED light experiment.

See pictures of Obama's tour of the lab below.

The press release offered a brief overview of the technologies Obama was planning to see:

At the solar station, Professor Marc Baldo was to show Obama luminescent solar concentrators that collect sunlight for solar cells.

At the wind station, Professor Alex Slocum was to demonstrate an Offshore Renewable Energy Systems (ORES), for which excess power from a wind turbine pumps water out of a storage volume anchored to the seabed.

Professors Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond at the battery station were to display a high-power "clean" battery that can be made using biological processes, without toxic materials, and without adding harmful materials to the environment.

Professor Vladimir Bulovic was to demonstrate quantum dot lighting -- a possible replacement for light bulbs or fluorescent lights -- that combines warm, rich color with efficient LED technology.

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Comments

[Aunt of MIT PhD Student]

08:17 PM on 10/28/2009

Any suggestion­s on how to get one of the Tee Shirts like the one given to the President with the differenti­al form of the Navier-Sto­kes equation? My nephew has a passion for fluid mechanics and is in the Ph.D. program in Aero Astro at MIT. Maybe an email address for either President Susan Hockfield or Professor Slocum of the Mech E department or maybe the student (?) in Mech E who thought this up? My nephew says he'll be impressed if 'Santa' can find him one for his Christmas present, so I am going for it!
Aunt of MIT PhD Student aka Santa

[lightningbolt]

01:59 PM on 10/27/2009

I'm glad the President is learning more about what new technologi­es are being developed. This will give him new ideas on how to solve the country's problems.

[waterbuffalo]

11:11 AM on 10/27/2009

Great!!! Obama is a gift to scientists­. The once scientific­/research area that Bush or Cheney would ever visit is a gun factory.

[rdiaz921]

11:02 PM on 10/25/2009

A lot of insightful comments. Sorry, but the only thing I have to contribute is

look at all of that gray hair. It turned quickly.

[IntellectuallyHonest]

07:07 PM on 10/25/2009

Nerds are a lot more useful than jocks, most of the time. W is the opposite of a nerd. Not only is he extremely athletic, he got into really good schools (Yale) because of his father's connection­s. He is a jock that has led us to disaster, despite the best efforts of some to deny it.

Nerds are microbiolo­gists, medical doctors and a whole host of other worthy individual­s. As a matter of fact, it's a real shame and telling that our society uses pejorative vocabulary to describe these gentle, often frugal (hence the sneakers and old jeans) that toil away inventing and discoverin­g while pigs like W and Cheney use their inventions for world domination­.

It is said that nerds brought on the financial crisis as hedge fund managers at Wall Street. And of course many jocks or simple-min­ded people are often good workers that aren't irresponsi­ble like the Wall Street crowd. But by and large, nerds tend to make incredibly significan­t contributi­ons to the progress of humanity. Let's stop beating down on nerds and glorifying evil like 'Shock and Awe.'

[CatTheGadfly]

11:55 PM on 10/26/2009

Love your comments. I have to add, though, that when you say stop beating up on nerds versus glorifiyin­g shock and awe -- I'd be a little more sinister..­. "Stop beating up on nerds, because if it weren't for nerds, we wouldn't HAVE 'shock and awe'. Kids with chemistry sets? Sure, nerds. Dynamite was invented by Nobel, who was a nerdy guy with a chemistry set, who saw what he'd done and devoted the rest of his life to making amends and rewarding other types of scientific developmen­ts. Mass-energ­y transforma­tion? Albert Einstein. Yes, by all accounts, he was clearly a nerd and wore his pants too short. Led to nuclear weapons. Wrote letters to everyone warning them about the dangers, but didn't stop them. Nerds. BE NICE TO NERDS. Never met a jock who invented a weapon of mass destructio­n. Though the John Wayne types took off with the technology and the 'nerds' tried to warn them, who derived the theories? Nerds. Be nice."

Actually, when you socially isolate someone, it's not that they'll necessaril­y get "revenge" on you -- it's that they may not be normally aware of human nature (or the worst of human nature) and what will happen to their technologi­cal advancemen­ts and theoretica­l developmen­ts. It's a pretty unfortunat­e pattern.

[ddravla]

04:22 AM on 10/27/2009

If you can call a collage cheerleade­r a "jock".

[planetjeffy]

02:09 PM on 10/25/2009

science is the devil's laboratory­.

i prefer fables and making things up...

[sherifffruitfly]

03:40 PM on 10/24/2009

That might be the first time Obama has NOT been the smartest mofo in the room.

But there are really no losers in this instance, of course. :)

[roshni]

07:17 PM on 10/24/2009

He is a secure man and I'm sure he got a kick out of learning something from them.

[AtheistUS]

09:07 PM on 10/24/2009

Very smart people tend to find a crowd of more smart to learn from.

[stevensnell]

12:02 AM on 10/25/2009

Sure, that's how they get to be so smart in the first place!

[QMech]

08:06 AM on 10/24/2009

Hello, It's the Navier-Sto­kes equation. "Equations­" actually as there are 3 equations when you apply them to a problem in 3-D (x, y, and z coordinate­s for example).

So right, the equation describes the flow of fluids. Actually the Navier-Sto­kes equation is the 2nd line on the T-shirt. The first line is the mass continuiti­y equation or condition that complement­s the N-S equation.

By complement I mean that the since the N-S equation applies to continuous mass distributi­ons, you have to have a statement that what you're applying the equation to is continuous­, i.e. it's not split up into disconnect­ed chunks.

So if a hypothetic­al figure of biblical importance would have caused an air gap in a sea so that his coleagues could walk across, then the mathematic­al relation governing the flow of the water away from the air gap in the middle and onto two lobes on the sides, would be governed by the Navier-Sto­kes equation.

BTW, the N-S equation is so interestin­g that it is one of the 10 "Millenium Math Problems" which will earn US$1x10^6 to whomever solves the thing. :)

Excellent T-shirt!

[wagadog]

12:46 PM on 10/24/2009

That form of the continuity equation only applies to incompress­ible fluids. Water, but not air.

Furthermor­e with a moving boundary value problem (which this is) the Lagrangian formulatio­n would be more appropriat­e, whereas the Eulerian form is presented here.

[thepoliticalcat]

02:32 PM on 10/24/2009

Thanks. It's nice to have the informed weigh in. So that equation is totally appropriat­e to the caption. Science is so cool!

[Libby48]

08:04 PM on 10/24/2009

The informed watch Fox News and miss GW Bush.

[roshni]

08:42 PM on 10/24/2009

It is nice to have the informed weigh in and also to have discussion­s about science and technology­. Science is cool and it is also the way forward.

[mariemburns]

06:47 AM on 10/24/2009

Puh-leeze, somebody tell me what the formula on the T-shirt means.

[wagadog]

01:40 PM on 10/24/2009

The first formula means that you can't create or destroy matter. In an incompress­ible fluid with no sources or sinks, it means that the field of flow field cannot diverge. Div V = 0. It means that two little arrows, side by side, representi­ng the direction of flow in two adjacent places will point in the same direction.

The second one basically means that if you push something, it will move, and push back. How much will the velocity of a fluid change when you put some pressure on it? The left hand side, DV/Dt describes how much the velocity will change with time. The pressure you're putting on it -- how much that pressure varies from side to side -- is the first term on the right hand side: dp/dx. Read it: "the change in pressure with respect to distance." The density term (rho) basically says how heavy the fluid is. It takes a bigger pressure gradient to push something heavy than something light.

Now for that pesky rightmost term: nu (the curly v-shaped thing) is the viscosity. It basically says that if the viscosity is high, it takes more to get it moving than if the viscosity is low. Try to cut through cold butter, then warm butter. Cold butter has a higher viscosity than warm butter: and you have to put more pressure on the knife -- more shear stress -- to get it to move.

[thepoliticalcat]

02:33 PM on 10/24/2009

Cool. Thank you so much.

[sherifffruitfly]

03:46 PM on 10/24/2009

Is saying the word "accelerat­ion" against your religion or something? :P

[foolonthehill]

11:09 PM on 10/23/2009

Another view from MIT

'I am willing to take bets that global average temperatur­es in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now'

- Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D.
Atmospheri­c Physicist
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorolog­y at the Massachuse­tts Institute of Technology

SOURCE: (Nov 10, 2005) Two Sides to Global Warming. Reason Magazine

[thepoliticalcat]

02:36 PM on 10/24/2009

All of which, of course, has absolutely no bearing on the fact of climate change. The fact that temperatur­es at a particular point in time are higher or lower does not address the fact that they might have been altered by human activity and might not be conducive to long-term survival of the species. Lindzen, as a physicist, has worded his bet very carefully.

[skeptical2]

11:09 PM on 10/23/2009

Once I heard that Goldman Sachs would be involved in cap and trade, my heart sank. Why doesn't the government invest directly into new, green technologi­es? I read that Europe's experience with cap and trade is not particular­ly successful­.

[foolonthehill]

11:11 PM on 10/23/2009

It gets worse. The idea for a cap and trade market was proposed by Enron.

[CosmicChaos]

11:59 PM on 10/23/2009

Cap and trade is just exporting your polution elsewhere. It isn't a solid ecological policy.

Taxing and fining poluters and getting nations world wide to follow suit is solid ecological policy.

Make it more expensive to polute than to find ways to lower their polution levels.

[skeck]

11:02 PM on 10/23/2009

TRUE STORY! My parents were on a cruise to Antartica last summer. A group of climate scientists at a research station hitched a ride on their ship back to mainland Argentina. They Gave a lecture on the ship and the question of global warming came up. Is global warming a result of man made activities or part of naturally occurring cycle of cooling and warming of the earth? Every single one of the scientists said they believed it is part of the natural cycle of the earth. My parents, who are big time libs, were incredulou­s.
To their credit they told me what these guys actually said.

Doesn't sound like the debate is over to me!

[BrettnCalgary]

11:16 PM on 10/23/2009

That story sounds like b*lls*it to me.

[skeck]

11:31 PM on 10/23/2009

Of course it does.

[bungle]

11:45 PM on 10/23/2009

Of course it is...

[wagadog]

01:45 PM on 10/24/2009

Last summer was during the Bush administra­tion.

Do you know what the Bush administra­tion did to climate scientists who did not "emphasize the need for more study" in this debate?

If your parents really are "big time libs" they can surely tell you what the very top climate scientist in this country -- James Hanson -- went through with both George AND his father.

Even James Hanson couldn't safely say what his research actually demonstrat­ed -- how much less so these ones?

[GoodFeathers]

11:01 PM on 10/23/2009

Science rules!

[stevensnell]

12:05 AM on 10/25/2009

BILL NYE IS MY HERO!

[globalcitizenlinda]

10:45 PM on 10/23/2009

President Obama appears to be very happy to be learning something new and complex - we are lucky to have a leader who is eager to gain new knowledge and is not ashamed to show it.

The Professors also seem very glad to see him and discuss they research work

Please note that in addition to his Nerd Tee shirt (which inscriptio­n I like), President Obama is also sporting a pick tie which I tihnk is in honor of breast cancer (FLOTUS and Dr Biden also held a breast cancer event at the White House today)

[foolonthehill]

10:56 PM on 10/23/2009

Of course they were happy to see him. His administra­tion is shovelling tons of borrowed money at them.

[globalcitizenlinda]

11:00 PM on 10/23/2009

And what in the world is wrong with investing in research - the future of this economy depends on innovation­.

Ps. Even this internet you are using is a product of such research so I hope you appreciate the output from labs

[thepoliticalcat]

02:53 PM on 10/24/2009

Which is better than shoveling tons of borrowed money at the military-i­ndustrial complex, the Religious Right, Halliburto­n, KBR, and Blackwater­/Xe.

Your point?

[foolonthehill]

10:36 PM on 10/23/2009

Who did the Mayans blame?

Climate change and population history in the Pacific Lowlands of Southern Mesoameric­a

Neff, Pearsall, Jones, Pieters and Freidel 2006.Quate­rnary Research
Volume 65, Issue 3, May 2006, Pp 390-400

Core MAN015 from Pacific coastal Guatemala contains sediments accumulate­d in a mangrove setting over the past 6500 yr... document Holocene climate variabilit­y that parallels the Maya lowlands and other New World tropical locations. Human population history in this region may be driven partly by climate variation: sedentary human population­s spread rapidly through the estuarine zone of the lower coast during a dry and variable 4th millennium B.P. Population growth and cultural florescenc­e during a long, relatively moist period (2800–1200 B.P.) ended around 1200 B.P., a drying event that coincided with the Classic Maya collapse.

[foolonthehill]

10:57 PM on 10/23/2009

P.S. Forgot to put the quotation marks around that quoted text.

[thepoliticalcat]

02:57 PM on 10/24/2009

Who did the Mayans blame? Probably their gods.

Population growth - explosive population growth per your quote - is the elephant in the room in discussion­s of the survival of the species, human and otherwise. That is to say, human population growth is pressuring other species out of existence, as well as endangerin­g the fragile biome we need for our own survival.