In the 1950s and 60s, students of transportation focused on building infrastructure and applied lessons from the physical sciences to designing mobility. Mobility was facilely linked to the engines of economic growth and expanding GDP. In time, that perspective was replaced by a focus on transportation systems and networks. There was a newfound emphasis on environmental impacts, land use and intermodal freight. There was also a growing concern on unpriced externalities.
Today, Joseph Sussman explains, with many of those problems still unsolved, transportation has entered a new phase — a period of immense complexity or CLIOS, which stands for complex, large scale, interconnected, open and sociotechical, that is becoming the mantra of transportation engineers. While it is not as far-reaching as "chaos" to a physicist, it is an approach with far-reaching consequences for the transportation field.
From MIT World
This illustration shows a lead sulfide quantum dot array. Each quantum dot (the colored clusters) is 'passivated' by molecules that bind to its surface. Dots that are made up of unequal amounts of lead and sulfur tend to cause electrons (shown in red) to become highly localized, which can substantially lower the electrical transport of the device.Image: Donghun Kim and Jeffrey C. Grossman
Balance is key to making quantum-dot solar cells work
MIT team finds that the ratio of component atoms is vital to performance.
