Technology and the built world

Mechanical metamaterial logic

Mechanical metamaterial logic is the use of architected materials whose bistable unit cells snap between states to perform Boolean operations, store bits, and transmit signals mechanically.

Mechanical metamaterials with negative stiffness

Mechanical metamaterials with negative stiffness are architected materials whose effective stiffness is negative over part of their deformation range, assisting deformation; they require constraint by positive-stiffness components to remain stable.

Mechanical neural networks

A mechanical neural network is a metamaterial of tunable beams whose stiffness acts like neural-network weights; the concept was proposed in 2022 by UCLA researchers.

Mechanical pencil

A mechanical pencil, also called a propelling pencil or clutch pencil, is a pencil whose mechanism extends a graphite lead so the writing point never needs sharpening.

Mechanical qubit

A mechanical qubit is a quantum bit whose two states are the lowest energy levels of a vibrating mechanical resonator, first demonstrated at ETH Zurich in 2024.

Mechanical splice

A mechanical splice is a permanent or semi-permanent joint between two optical fibers, held in an alignment fixture with index-matching gel or adhesive instead of being fused.

Mechanical television

Mechanical television is a television system using a rotating disk with a spiral of holes to scan images, producing the first working TV in the mid-1920s.

Mechanical vapor recompression

Mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) is an energy-saving technique in which a compressor raises the pressure of secondary vapor so it can be reused as the heat source for evaporation.

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) is the construction-industry term for the engineering systems that make a building usable: air conditioning, power and lighting, and water supply and drainage.

Sep 29, 2026

Mechanically stabilized earth

Mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) is a geotechnical construction method that reinforces compacted soil with steel strips or geosynthetics to build retaining walls and bridge abutments.

Mechanism (engineering)

In mechanical engineering, a mechanism is an assembly of rigid links connected by joints that transmits motion and force; a mechanism put to work is called a machine.

Mechanistic interpretability

Mechanistic interpretability is AI research that seeks to reverse-engineer neural networks by identifying internal circuits, features, and neurons that causally drive model behavior, a leading AI safety method.

Sep 29, 2026

Mechanistic-empirical pavement design

Mechanistic-empirical pavement design is a pavement engineering method that computes stresses and strains in a trial road structure, then predicts distresses like rutting and cracking over time.

Mechanochromic materials

Mechanochromic materials are smart materials that change optical properties such as color or fluorescence under mechanical stimuli, used in sensing, displays, anti-counterfeiting, and smart windows.

MECHATROLINK

MECHATROLINK is an open, high-speed, deterministic field network for motion and I/O control, developed by Japan's Yaskawa Electric in the 1990s to connect controllers with servo drives and sensors.

Mechatronics

Mechatronics is an engineering field combining mechanical design, electronic control, and embedded software, coined in Japan in 1969 and applied in robots, hard drives, and automobiles.

Mechel

Mechel is a Russian vertically integrated mining and metals company producing coal, iron ore, coke, steel, and power, which grew from a Siberian coal-trading operation founded in the early 1990s.

Med-Gemini

Med-Gemini is a family of multimodal medical AI models from Google Research and Google DeepMind, fine-tuned from Gemini on de-identified medical data and introduced in May 2024.

Med-PaLM

Med-PaLM is a family of large language models from Google Research fine-tuned for medical question answering; in 2023 it was the first model to pass USMLE-style questions.

MEDA (Mars instrument)

MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) is a suite of environmental sensors on NASA's Perseverance rover that measures Martian weather and dust in Jezero Crater since 2021.

Oct 26, 2026

Medallion architecture

Medallion architecture, also called multi-hop architecture, is a data design pattern organizing lakehouse data into bronze (raw), silver (validated), and gold (enriched) layers; coined by Databricks in 2019 and now used across Databricks, Fabric, and Snowflake.