This Protein Purification video lesson is intended to give students some insight into the process and tools that scientists and engineers use to explore proteins. It is designed to extend the knowledge of students who are already somewhat sophisticated and who have a good understanding of basic biology. The question that motivates this lesson is, ''what makes two cell types different?'' and this question is posed in several ways. Such scientific reasoning raises the experimental question: how could you study just a subset of specialized proteins that distinguish one cell type from another? Two techniques useful in this regard are considered in the lesson.

Our modern world uses many different materials, often complexly constructed and difficult to recycle. Students investigate the elements in a smartphone and innovations in cement and steel. They also consider the challenge of communicating about large and complex numbers. This guide an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about materials."

This course provides an introduction to the study of environmental phenomena that exhibit both organized structure and wide variability—i.e., complexity. Through focused study of a variety of physical, biological, and chemical problems in conjunction with theoretical models, we learn a series of lessons with wide applicability to understanding the structure and organization of the natural world. Students also learn how to construct minimal mathematical, physical, and computational models that provide informative answers to precise questions.
This course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates. Beginning graduate students are encouraged to register for 12.586 (graduate version of 12.086). Students taking the graduate version complete different assignments.

This lesson teaches students how to make decisions in the face of uncertainty by using decision trees. It is aimed for high school kids with a minimal background in probability; the students only need to know how to calculate the probability of two uncorrelated events both occurring (ie flipping 2 heads in a row). Over the course of this lesson, students will learn about the role of uncertainty in decision making, how to make and use a decision tree, how to use limiting cases to develop an intuition, and how this applies to everyday life. The video portion is about fifteen minutes, and the whole lesson, including activities, should be completed in about forty-five minutes. Some of the activities call for students to work in pairs, but a larger group is also okay, especially for the discussion centered activities. The required materials for this lesson are envelopes, small prizes, and some things similar in size and shape to the prize.

This course covers differential, integral and vector calculus for functions of more than one variable. These mathematical tools and methods are used extensively in the physical sciences, engineering, economics and computer graphics.
The materials have been organized to support independent study. The website includes all of the materials you will need to understand the concepts covered in this subject. The materials in this course include:

Lecture Videos recorded on the MIT campus
Recitation Videos with problem-solving tips
Examples of solutions to sample problems
Problems for you to solve, with solutions
Exams with solutions
Interactive Java Applets (“Mathlets”) to reinforce key concepts

Content Development
Denis Auroux 
Arthur Mattuck 
Jeremy Orloff 
John Lewis
Heidi Burgiel 
Christine Breiner 
David Jordan 
Joel Lewis

This lesson will explore the connections between magnetism in natural materials and electromagnetism. The ultimate goal will be for students to form an understanding that the source of magnetism in natural materials is moving charges. It is helpful, but not required, for the students to have some work with electricity, and other distance forces (such as gravity or the electric force). The lesson will probably take two 50-minute periods to complete. Although the video footage is brief, the activities are in depth, inquiry-based, and can take time for the students to explore. The materials are not specifically prescribed, but can include things such as bar magnets, compasses, iron filings, wire, batteries, steel bolts, coils, straws, and hot glue. The activities include drawing the magnetic fields of bar magnets and electromagnets. The activities also include making a magnet from a drinking straw and iron filings.

In this video lesson, the concept of momentum applied to hard-body collisions is explained using a number of simple demonstrations, all of which can be repeated in the classroom. Understanding Newton's Laws is fundamental to all of physics, and this lesson introduces the vital concepts of momentum and energy, and their conservation. Only some preliminary ideas of algebra are used here, and all the concepts presented can be found in any high-school level physics book. In terms of materials required, getting hold of large steel balls may not be easy, but large ball bearings can be procured easily. On the basis of what students have learned in the video, teachers can easily generate a large number of questions that relate to one's daily experiences, or which pose new challenges: for example, in a collision between a heavy and light vehicle, why do those inside the lighter one suffer less injury?

This subject gives first-year students a unique opportunity to explore the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program while acquiring valuable problem-solving skills. It introduces students to the NEET Ways of Thinking, which are cognitive approaches for tackling complex challenges, valued by industry and for thriving in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Student teams will engage in challenge-based learning in interdisciplinary engineering education via the NEET program threads. Student teams will learn how to apply various Ways of Thinking for solving these challenges, including practical methods and tools which they can later use at MIT and beyond.

This seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. We’ll review these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and function as a workshop to develop student projects. Seminar participants will work together to explore frameworks, methods, and tools for understanding networked social movements in the digital media ecology. We will engage with social movement studies as a body of theoretical and empirical work, and learn about key concepts including: resource mobilization; political process; framing; New Social Movements; collective identity; tactical media; protest cycles; movement structure; and more. We’ll explore methods of social movement investigation, examine new data sources and tools for movement analysis, and grapple with recent innovations in social movement theory and research. Assignments include short blog posts, a book review, co-facilitation of a seminar discussion, and a final research project focused on social movement media practices in comparative perspective.

This capstone course is a group design project involving integration of nuclear physics, particle transport, control, heat transfer, safety, instrumentation, materials, environmental impact, and economic optimization. It provides opportunities to synthesize knowledge acquired in nuclear and non-nuclear subjects and apply this knowledge to practical problems of current interest in nuclear applications design. Each year, the class takes on a different design project; this year, the project is a power plant design that ties together the creation of emission-free electricity with carbon sequestration and fossil fuel displacement. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
This course is an elective subject in MIT’s undergraduate Energy Studies Minor. This Institute-wide program complements the deep expertise obtained in any major with a broad understanding of the interlinked realms of science, technology, and social sciences as they relate to energy and associated environmental challenges.

Class website: The Once & Future City
What is a city? What shapes it? How does its history influence future development? How do physical form and institutions vary from city to city and how are these differences significant? How are cities changing and what is their future? This course will explore these and other questions, with emphasis upon twentieth-century American cities. A major focus will be on the physical form of cities—from downtown and inner-city to suburb and edge city—and the processes that shape them.
These questions and more are explored through lectures, readings, workshops, field trips, and analysis of particular places, with the city itself as a primary text. In light of the 2016 centennial of MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge, the 2015 iteration of the course focused on MIT’s original campus in Boston’s Back Bay, and the university’s current neighborhood in Cambridge. Short field assignments, culminating in a final project, will provide students opportunities to use, develop, and refine new skills in “reading” the city.

The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

This is a course on the design and implementation of operating systems and their use as a foundation for systems programming. Topics covered include virtual memory; file systems; threads; context switches; kernels; interrupts; system calls; and interprocess communication, coordination, and interaction between software and hardware. A multi-processor operating system for RISC-V, xv6, is used to illustrate these topics. Individual laboratory assignments involve extending the xv6 operating system, for example to support sophisticated virtual memory features and networking.

In this video lesson, students will learn about linear programming (LP) and will solve an LP problem using the graphical method. Its focus is on the famous "Stigler's diet" problem posed by the 1982 Nobel Laureate in economics, George Stigler. Based on his problem, students will formulate their own diet problem and solve it using the graphical method. The prerequisites to this lesson are basic algebra and geometry. The materials needed for the in-class activities include graphing paper and pencil. This lesson can be completed in one class of approximately one hour. If the teacher would like to cover the simplex algorithm by George Dantzig as an alternative solution method, an additional whole class period is suggested.

This course introduces the structure, composition, and physical processes governing the terrestrial planets, including their formation and basic orbital properties. Topics include plate tectonics, earthquakes, seismic waves, rheology, impact cratering, gravity and magnetic fields, heat flux, thermal structure, mantle convection, deep interiors, planetary magnetism, and core dynamics. Suitable for majors and non-majors seeking general background in geophysics and planetary structure.

This learning video explores the mysterious physics behind boomerangs and other rapidly spinning objects. Students will get to make and throw their own boomerangs between video segments! A key idea presented is how torque causes the precession of angular momentum. One class period is required to complete this learning video, and the optimal prerequisites are a familiarity with forces, Newton's laws, vectors and time derivatives. Each student would need the following materials for boomerang construction: cardboard (roughly the size of a postcard), ruler, pencil/pen, scissors, protractor, and a stapler.

This video lesson explores Newton's Third Law of Motion through examination of several real world examples of this law in action, including that of a donkey cart - a site common in the streets of Pakistan. Students will understand that forces act on objects even if the objects appear to be static and that certain conditions - gravity in particular - affect how two objects interact. The time needed to complete this lesson is approximately 50-60 minutes, and students should be familiar with basic mechanics such as Newton's laws, levers, etc. The materials required are a couple of spring balances, a meter rule, tape, pencil, two desks, and some lab weights (few grams each). The types of in-class activities for between the video breaks include active discussions and participation by students in activities related to the Third Law.

This course is designed to give you the scientific understanding you need to answer questions like:

How much energy can we really get from wind?
How does a solar photovoltaic work?
What is an OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Converter) and how does it work?
What is the physics behind global warming?
What makes engines efficient?
How does a nuclear reactor work, and what are the realistic hazards?

The course is designed for MIT sophomores, juniors, and seniors who want to understand the fundamental laws and physical processes that govern the sources, extraction, transmission, storage, degradation, and end uses of energy.

The objective of this lesson is to illustrate how a common everyday experience (such as playing pool) can often provide a learning moment. In the example chosen, we use the game of pool to help explain some key concepts of physics. One of these concepts is the conservation of linear momentum since conservation laws play an extremely important role in many aspects of physics. The idea that a certain property of a system is maintained before and after something happens is quite central to many principles in physics and in the pool example, we concentrate on the conservation of linear momentum. The latter half of the video looks at angular momentum and friction, examining why certain objects roll, as opposed to slide. We do this by looking at how striking a ball with a cue stick at different locations produces different effects.