Aurelia Butler

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    in Environment

    Liftoff: The Climate Project at MIT takes flight

    The leaders of The Climate Project at MIT met with community members at a campus forum on Monday, helping to kick off the Institute’s major new effort to accelerate and scale up climate change solutions.“The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in her opening remarks. “It’s designed to focus the Institute’s talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.”The event, “Climate Project at MIT: Launching the Missions,” drew a capacity crowd to MIT’s Samberg Center.While the Climate Project has a number of facets, a central component of the effort consists of its six “missions,” broad areas where MIT researchers will seek to identify gaps in the global climate response that MIT can help fill, and then launch and execute research and innovation projects aimed at those areas. Each mission is led by campus faculty, and Monday’s event represented the first public conversation between the mission directors and the larger campus community.“Today’s event is an important milestone,” said Richard Lester, MIT’s interim vice president for climate and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, who led the Climate Project’s formation. He praised Kornbluth’s sustained focus on climate change as a leading priority for MIT.“The reason we’re all here is because of her leadership and vision for MIT,” Lester said. “We’re also here because the MIT community — our faculty, our staff, our students — has made it abundantly clear that it wants to do more, much more, to help solve this great problem.”The mission directors themselves emphasized the need for deep community involvement in the project — and that the Climate Project is designed to facilitate researcher-driven enterprise across campus.“There’s a tremendous amount of urgency,” said Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, director of the Decarbonizing Energy and Industry mission, during an onstage discussion. “We all need to do everything we can, and roll up our sleeves and get it done.” Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, has been a professor of materials science and engineering at the Institute since 2014.“What’s exciting about this is the chance of MIT really meeting its potential,” said Jesse Kroll, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans. Kroll is the Peter de Florez Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory.MIT, Kroll noted, features “so much amazing work going on in all these different aspects of the problem. Science, engineering, social science … we put it all together and there is huge potential, a huge opportunity for us to make a difference.”MIT has pledged an initial $75 million to the Climate Project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management for a complementary effort, the MIT Climate Policy Center. However, the Institute is anticipating that it will also build new connections with outside partners, whose role in implementing and scaling Climate Project solutions will be critical.Monday’s event included a keynote talk from Brian Deese, currently the MIT Innovation and Climate Impact Fellow and the former director of the White House National Economic Council in the Biden administration.“The magnitude of the risks associated with climate change are extraordinary,” Deese said. However, he added, “these are solvable issues. In fact, the energy transition globally will be the greatest economic opportunity in human history. … It has the potential to actually lift people out of poverty, it has the potential to drive international cooperation, it has the potential to drive innovation and improve lives — if we get this right.”Deese’s remarks centered on a call for the U.S. to develop a current-day climate equivalent of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. initiative to provide aid to Western Europe after World War II. He also suggested three characteristics of successful climate projects, noting that many would be interdisciplinary in nature and would “engage with policy early in the design process” to become feasible.In addition to those features, Deese said, people need to “start and end with very high ambition” when working on climate solutions. He added: “The good thing about MIT and our community is that we, you, have done this before. We’ve got examples where MIT has taken something that seemed completely improbable and made it possible, and I believe that part of what is required of this collective effort is to keep that kind of audacious thinking at the top of our mind.” The MIT mission directors all participated in an onstage discussion moderated by Somini Sengupta, the international climate reporter on the climate team of The New York Times. Sengupta asked the group about a wide range of topics, from their roles and motivations to the political constraints on global climate progress, and more.Andrew Babbin, co-director of the mission for Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans, defined part of the task of the MIT missions as “identifying where those gaps of knowledge are and filling them rapidly,” something he believes is “largely not doable in the conventional way,” based on small-scale research projects. Instead, suggested Babbin, who is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, the collective input of research and innovation communities could help zero in on undervalued approaches to climate action.Some innovative concepts, the mission directors noted, can be tried out on the MIT campus, in an effort to demonstrate how a more sustainable infrastructure and systems can operate at scale.“That is absolutely crucial,” said Christoph Reinhart, director of the Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities mission, expressing the need to have the campus reach net-zero emissions. Reinhart is the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning.In response to queries from Sengupta, the mission directors affirmed that the Climate Project needs to develop solutions that can work in different societies around the world, while acknowledging that there are many political hurdles to worldwide climate action.“Any kind of quality engaged projects that we’ve done with communities, it’s taken years to build trust. … How you scale that without compromising is the challenge I’m faced with,” said Miho Mazereeuw, director of the Empowering Frontline Communities mission, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab.“I think we will impact different communities in different parts of the world in different ways,” said Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, adding that it would be important to “work with local communities [and] engage stakeholders, and at the same time, use local brains to solve the problem.” The mission he directs, Wild Cards, is centered on identifying unconventional solutions that are high risk and also high reward.Any climate program “has to be politically feasible, it has to be in separate nations’ self-interest,” said Christopher Knittel, mission director for Inventing New Policy Approaches. In an ever-shifting political world, he added, that means people must “think about not just the policy but the resiliency of the policy.” Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor and professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, and associate dean for Climate and Sustainability.In all, MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers who, along with their students and staff, are already working on climate issues.Kornbluth, for her part, referred to MIT’s first-year students while discussing the larger motivations for taking concerted action to address the challenges of climate change. It might be easy for younger people to despair over the world’s climate trajectory, she noted, but the best response to that includes seeking new avenues for climate progress.“I understand their anxiety and concern,” Kornbluth said. “But I have no doubt at all that together, we can make a difference. I believe that we have a special obligation to the new students and their entire generation to do everything we can to create a positive change. The most powerful antidote to defeat and despair is collection action.” More

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    3 Questions: The past, present, and future of sustainability science

    It was 1978, over a decade before the word “sustainable” would infiltrate environmental nomenclature, and Ronald Prinn, MIT professor of atmospheric science, had just founded the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE). Today, AGAGE provides real-time measurements for well over 50 environmentally harmful trace gases, enabling us to determine emissions at the country level, a key element in verifying national adherence to the Montreal Protocol and the Paris Accord. This, Prinn says, started him thinking about doing science that informed decision making.Much like global interest in sustainability, Prinn’s interest and involvement continued to grow into what would become three decades worth of achievements in sustainability science. The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change, respectively founded and co-founded by Prinn, have recently joined forces to create the MIT School of Science’s new Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), lead by former CGCS postdoc turned MIT professor, Noelle Selin.As he prepares to pass the torch, Prinn reflects on how far sustainability has come, and where it all began.Q: Tell us about the motivation for the MIT centers you helped to found around sustainability.A: In 1990 after I founded the Center for Global Change Science, I also co-founded the Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change with a very important partner, [Henry] “Jake” Jacoby. He’s now retired, but at that point he was a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, we determined that in order to answer questions related to what we now call sustainability of human activities, you need to combine the natural and social sciences involved in these processes. Based on this, we decided to make a joint program between the CGCS and a center that he directed, the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).It was called the “joint program” and was joint for two reasons — not only were two centers joining, but two disciplines were joining. It was not about simply doing the same science. It was about bringing a team of people together that could tackle these coupled issues of environment, human development and economy. We were the first group in the world to fully integrate these elements together.Q: What has been your most impactful contribution and what effect did it have on the greater public’s overall understanding?A: Our biggest contribution is the development, and more importantly, the application of the Integrated Global System Model [IGSM] framework, looking at human development in both developing countries and developed countries that had a significant impact on the way people thought about climate issues. With IGSM, we were able to look at the interactions among human and natural components, studying the feedbacks and impacts that climate change had on human systems; like how it would alter agriculture and other land activities, how it would alter things we derive from the ocean, and so on.Policies were being developed largely by economists or climate scientists working independently, and we started showing how the real answers and analysis required a coupling of all of these components. We showed, and I think convincingly, that what people used to study independently, must be coupled together, because the impacts of climate change and air pollution affected so many things.To address the value of policy, despite the uncertainty in climate projections, we ran multiple runs of the IGSM with and without policy, with different choices for uncertain IGSM variables. For public communication, around 2005, we introduced our signature Greenhouse Gamble interactive visualization tools; these have been renewed over time as science and policies evolved.Q: What can MIT provide now at this critical juncture in understanding climate change and its impact?A: We need to further push the boundaries of integrated global system modeling to ensure full sustainability of human activity and all of its beneficial dimensions, which is the exciting focus that the CS3 is designed to address. We need to focus on sustainability as a central core element and use it to not just analyze existing policies but to propose new ones. Sustainability is not just climate or air pollution, it’s got to do with human impacts in general. Human health is central to sustainability, and equally important to equity. We need to expand the capability for credibly assessing what the impact policies have not just on developed countries, but on developing countries, taking into account that many places around the world are at artisanal levels of their economies. They cannot be blamed for anything that is changing climate and causing air pollution and other detrimental things that are currently going on. They need our help. That’s what sustainability is in its full dimensions.Our capabilities are evolving toward a modeling system so detailed that we can find out detrimental things about policies even at local levels before investing in changing infrastructure. This is going to require collaboration among even more disciplines and creating a seamless connection between research and decision making; not just for policies enacted in the public sector, but also for decisions that are made in the private sector.  More

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    in Security

    New filtration material could remove long-lasting chemicals from water

    Water contamination by the chemicals used in today’s technology is a rapidly growing problem globally. A recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that 98 percent of people tested had detectable levels of PFAS, a family of particularly long-lasting compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” in their bloodstream.A new filtration material developed by researchers at MIT might provide a nature-based solution to this stubborn contamination issue. The material, based on natural silk and cellulose, can remove a wide variety of these persistent chemicals as well as heavy metals. And, its antimicrobial properties can help keep the filters from fouling.The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by MIT postdoc Yilin Zhang, professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, and four others from MIT.PFAS chemicals are present in a wide range of products, including cosmetics, food packaging, water-resistant clothing, firefighting foams, and antistick coating for cookware. A recent study identified 57,000 sites contaminated by these chemicals in the U.S. alone. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that PFAS remediation will cost $1.5 billion per year, in order to meet new regulations that call for limiting the compound to less than 7 parts per trillion in drinking water.Contamination by PFAS and similar compounds “is actually a very big deal, and current solutions may only partially resolve this problem very efficiently or economically,” Zhang says. “That’s why we came up with this protein and cellulose-based, fully natural solution,” he says.“We came to the project by chance,” Marelli notes. The initial technology that made the filtration material possible was developed by his group for a completely unrelated purpose — as a way to make a labelling system to counter the spread of counterfeit seeds, which are often of inferior quality. His team devised a way of processing silk proteins into uniform nanoscale crystals, or “nanofibrils,” through an environmentally benign, water-based drop-casting method at room temperature.Zhang suggested that their new nanofibrillar material might be effective at filtering contaminants, but initial attempts with the silk nanofibrils alone didn’t work. The team decided to try adding another material: cellulose, which is abundantly available and can be obtained from agricultural wood pulp waste. The researchers used a self-assembly method in which the silk fibroin protein is suspended in water and then templated into nanofibrils by inserting “seeds” of cellulose nanocrystals. This causes the previously disordered silk molecules to line up together along the seeds, forming the basis of a hybrid material with distinct new properties.By integrating cellulose into the silk-based fibrils that could be formed into a thin membrane, and then tuning the electrical charge of the cellulose, the researchers produced a material that was highly effective at removing contaminants in lab tests.

    By integrating cellulose into the silk-based fibrils that could be formed into a thin membrane, and then tuning the electrical charge of the cellulose, the researchers produced a material that was highly effective at removing contaminants in lab tests. Pictured is an example of the filter.

    Image: Courtesy of the researchers

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    The electrical charge of the cellulose, they found, also gave it strong antimicrobial properties. This is a significant advantage, since one of the primary causes of failure in filtration membranes is fouling by bacteria and fungi. The antimicrobial properties of this material should greatly reduce that fouling issue, the researchers say.“These materials can really compete with the current standard materials in water filtration when it comes to extracting metal ions and these emerging contaminants, and they can also outperform some of them currently,” Marelli says. In lab tests, the materials were able to extract orders of magnitude more of the contaminants from water than the currently used standard materials, activated carbon or granular activated carbon.While the new work serves as a proof of principle, Marelli says, the team plans to continue working on improving the material, especially in terms of durability and availability of source materials. While the silk proteins used can be available as a byproduct of the silk textile industry, if this material were to be scaled up to address the global needs for water filtration, the supply might be insufficient. Also, alternative protein materials may turn out to perform the same function at lower cost.Initially, the material would likely be used as a point-of-use filter, something that could be attached to a kitchen faucet, Zhang says. Eventually, it could be scaled up to provide filtration for municipal water supplies, but only after testing demonstrates that this would not pose any risk of introducing any contamination into the water supply. But one big advantage of the material, he says, is that both the silk and the cellulose constituents are considered food-grade substances, so any contamination is unlikely.“Most of the normal materials available today are focusing on one class of contaminants or solving single problems,” Zhang says. “I think we are among the first to address all of these simultaneously.”“What I love about this approach is that it is using only naturally grown materials like silk and cellulose to fight pollution,” says Hannes Schniepp, professor of applied science at the College of William and Mary, who was not associated with this work. “In competing approaches, synthetic materials are used — which usually require only more chemistry to fight some of the adverse outcomes that chemistry has produced. [This work] breaks this cycle! … If this can be mass-produced in an economically viable way, this could really have a major impact.”The research team included MIT postdocs Hui Sun and Meng Li, graduate student Maxwell Kalinowski, and recent graduate Yunteng Cao PhD ’22, now a postdoc at Yale University. The work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. More

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    Study reveals the benefits and downside of fasting

    Low-calorie diets and intermittent fasting have been shown to have numerous health benefits: They can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan, not only in humans but many other organisms.Many complex mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. Previous work from MIT has shown that one way fasting exerts its beneficial effects is by boosting the regenerative abilities of intestinal stem cells, which helps the intestine recover from injuries or inflammation.In a study of mice, MIT researchers have now identified the pathway that enables this enhanced regeneration, which is activated once the mice begin “refeeding” after the fast. They also found a downside to this regeneration: When cancerous mutations occurred during the regenerative period, the mice were more likely to develop early-stage intestinal tumors.“Having more stem cell activity is good for regeneration, but too much of a good thing over time can have less favorable consequences,” says Omer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the new study.Yilmaz adds that further studies are needed before forming any conclusion as to whether fasting has a similar effect in humans.“We still have a lot to learn, but it is interesting that being in either the state of fasting or refeeding when exposure to mutagen occurs can have a profound impact on the likelihood of developing a cancer in these well-defined mouse models,” he says.MIT postdocs Shinya Imada and Saleh Khawaled are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature.Driving regenerationFor several years, Yilmaz’s lab has been investigating how fasting and low-calorie diets affect intestinal health. In a 2018 study, his team reported that during a fast, intestinal stem cells begin to use lipids as an energy source, instead of carbohydrates. They also showed that fasting led to a significant boost in stem cells’ regenerative ability.However, unanswered questions remained: How does fasting trigger this boost in regenerative ability, and when does the regeneration begin?“Since that paper, we’ve really been focused on understanding what is it about fasting that drives regeneration,” Yilmaz says. “Is it fasting itself that’s driving regeneration, or eating after the fast?”In their new study, the researchers found that stem cell regeneration is suppressed during fasting but then surges during the refeeding period. The researchers followed three groups of mice — one that fasted for 24 hours, another one that fasted for 24 hours and then was allowed to eat whatever they wanted during a 24-hour refeeding period, and a control group that ate whatever they wanted throughout the experiment.The researchers analyzed intestinal stem cells’ ability to proliferate at different time points and found that the stem cells showed the highest levels of proliferation at the end of the 24-hour refeeding period. These cells were also more proliferative than intestinal stem cells from mice that had not fasted at all.“We think that fasting and refeeding represent two distinct states,” Imada says. “In the fasted state, the ability of cells to use lipids and fatty acids as an energy source enables them to survive when nutrients are low. And then it’s the postfast refeeding state that really drives the regeneration. When nutrients become available, these stem cells and progenitor cells activate programs that enable them to build cellular mass and repopulate the intestinal lining.”Further studies revealed that these cells activate a cellular signaling pathway known as mTOR, which is involved in cell growth and metabolism. One of mTOR’s roles is to regulate the translation of messenger RNA into protein, so when it’s activated, cells produce more protein. This protein synthesis is essential for stem cells to proliferate.The researchers showed that mTOR activation in these stem cells also led to production of large quantities of polyamines — small molecules that help cells to grow and divide.“In the refed state, you’ve got more proliferation, and you need to build cellular mass. That requires more protein, to build new cells, and those stem cells go on to build more differentiated cells or specialized intestinal cell types that line the intestine,” Khawaled says.Too much of a good thingThe researchers also found that when stem cells are in this highly regenerative state, they are more prone to become cancerous. Intestinal stem cells are among the most actively dividing cells in the body, as they help the lining of the intestine completely turn over every five to 10 days. Because they divide so frequently, these stem cells are the most common source of precancerous cells in the intestine.In this study, the researchers discovered that if they turned on a cancer-causing gene in the mice during the refeeding stage, they were much more likely to develop precancerous polyps than if the gene was turned on during the fasting state. Cancer-linked mutations that occurred during the refeeding state were also much more likely to produce polyps than mutations that occurred in mice that did not undergo the cycle of fasting and refeeding.“I want to emphasize that this was all done in mice, using very well-defined cancer mutations. In humans it’s going to be a much more complex state,” Yilmaz says. “But it does lead us to the following notion: Fasting is very healthy, but if you’re unlucky and you’re refeeding after a fasting, and you get exposed to a mutagen, like a charred steak or something, you might actually be increasing your chances of developing a lesion that can go on to give rise to cancer.”Yilmaz also noted that the regenerative benefits of fasting could be significant for people who undergo radiation treatment, which can damage the intestinal lining, or other types of intestinal injury. His lab is now studying whether polyamine supplements could help to stimulate this kind of regeneration, without the need to fast.“This fascinating study provides insights into the complex interplay between food consumption, stem cell biology, and cancer risk,” says Ophir Klein, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. “Their work lays a foundation for testing polyamines as compounds that may augment intestinal repair after injuries, and it suggests that careful consideration is needed when planning diet-based strategies for regeneration to avoid increasing cancer risk.”The research was funded, in part, by a Pew-Stewart Trust Scholar award, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, the Koch Institute-Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative. More

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    Creating connection with science communication

    Before completing her undergraduate studies, Sophie Hartley, a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, had an epiphany that was years in the making.“The classes I took in my last undergraduate semester changed my career goals, but it started with my grandfather,” she says when asked about what led her to science writing. She’d been studying comparative human development at the University of Chicago, which Hartley describes as “a combination of psychology and anthropology,” when she took courses in environmental writing and digital science communications.“What if my life could be about learning more of life’s intricacies?” she thought.Hartley’s grandfather introduced her to photography when she was younger, which helped her develop an appreciation for the natural world. Each summer, they would explore tide pools, overgrown forests, and his sprawling backyard. He gave her a camera and encouraged her to take pictures of anything interesting.“Photography was a door into science journalism,” she notes. “It lets you capture the raw beauty of a moment and return to it later.”Lasting impact through storytellingHartley spent time in Wisconsin and Vermont while growing up. That’s when she noticed a divide between rural communities and urban spaces. She wants to tell stories about communities that are less likely to be covered, and “connect them to people in cities who might not otherwise understand what’s happening and why.”People have important roles to play in arresting climate change impacts, improving land management practices and policies, and taking better care of our natural resources, according to Hartley. Challenges related to conservation, land management, and farming affect us all, which is why she believes effective science writing is so important.“We’re way more connected than we believe or understand,” Hartley says. “Climate change is creating problems throughout the entire agricultural supply chain.”For her news writing course, Hartley wrote a story about how flooding in Vermont led to hay shortages, which impacted comestibles as diverse as goat cheese and beef. “When the hay can’t dry, it’s ruined,” she says. “That means cows and goats aren’t eating, which means they can’t produce our beef, milk, and cheese.”Ultimately, Hartley believes her work can build compassion for others while also educating people about how everything we do affects nature and one another.“The connective tissues between humans persist,” she said. “People who live in cities aren’t exempt from rural concerns.”Creating connections with science writingDuring her year-long study in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, Hartley is also busy producing reporting for major news outlets.Earlier this year, Hartley authored a piece for Ars Technica that explored ongoing efforts to develop technology aimed at preventing car collisions with kangaroos. As Hartley reported, given the unique and unpredictable behavior of kangaroos, vehicle animal detection systems have proven ineffective. That’s forced Australian communities to develop alternative solutions, such as virtual fencing, to keep kangaroos away from the roads.In June, Hartley co-produced a story for GBH News with Hannah Richter, a fellow student in the science writing program. They reported on how and why officials at a new Peabody power plant are backtracking on an earlier pledge to run the facility on clean fuels.The story was a collaboration between GBH News and the investigative journalism class in the science writing program. Hartley recalls wonderful experience working with Richter. “We were able to lean on each other’s strengths and learn from each other,” she says. “The piece took a long time to report and write, and it was helpful to have a friend and colleague to continuously motivate me when we would pick it back up after a while.”Co-reporting can also help evenly divide what can sometimes become a massive workload, particularly with deeply, well-researched pieces like the Peabody story. “When there is so much research to do, it’s helpful to have another person to divvy up the work,” she continued. “It felt like everything was stronger and better, from the writing to the fact-checking, because we had two eyes on it during the reporting process.”Hartley’s favorite piece in 2024 focused on beech leaf disease, a deadly pathogen devastating North American forests. Her story, which was later published in The Boston Globe Magazine, followed a team of four researchers racing to discover how the disease works. Beech leaf disease kills swiftly and en masse, leaving space for invasive species to thrive on forest floors. Her interest in land management and natural resources shines through in much of her work.Local news organizations are an endangered species as newsrooms across America shed staff and increasingly rely on aggregated news accounts from larger organizations. What can be lost, however, are opportunities to tell small-scale stories with potentially large-scale impacts. “Small and rural accountability stories are being told less and less,” Hartley notes. “I think it’s important that communities are aware of what is happening around them, especially if it impacts them.” More

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    Study: Rocks from Mars’ Jezero Crater, which likely predate life on Earth, contain signs of water

    In a new study appearing today in the journal AGU Advances, scientists at MIT and NASA report that seven rock samples collected along the “fan front” of Mars’ Jezero Crater contain minerals that are typically formed in water. The findings suggest that the rocks were originally deposited by water, or may have formed in the presence of water.The seven samples were collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover in 2022 during its exploration of the crater’s western slope, where some rocks were hypothesized to have formed in what is now a dried-up ancient lake. Members of the Perseverance science team, including MIT scientists, have studied the rover’s images and chemical analyses of the samples, and confirmed that the rocks indeed contain signs of water, and that the crater was likely once a watery, habitable environment.Whether the crater was actually inhabited is yet unknown. The team found that the presence of organic matter — the starting material for life — cannot be confirmed, at least based on the rover’s measurements. But judging from the rocks’ mineral content, scientists believe the samples are their best chance of finding signs of ancient Martian life once the rocks are returned to Earth for more detailed analysis.“These rocks confirm the presence, at least temporarily, of habitable environments on Mars,” says the study’s lead author, Tanja Bosak, professor of geobiology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “What we’ve found is that indeed there was a lot of water activity. For how long, we don’t know, but certainly for long enough to create these big sedimentary deposits.”What’s more, some of the collected samples may have originally been deposited in the ancient lake more than 3.5 billion years ago — before even the first signs of life on Earth.“These are the oldest rocks that may have been deposited by water, that we’ve ever laid hands or rover arms on,” says co-author Benjamin Weiss, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “That’s exciting, because it means these are the most promising rocks that may have preserved fossils, and signatures of life.”The study’s MIT co-authors include postdoc Eva Scheller, and research scientist Elias Mansbach, along with members of the Perseverance science team.At the front

    NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from two locations seen in this image of Mars’ Jezero Crater: “Wildcat Ridge” (lower left) and “Skinner Ridge” (upper right).

    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

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    The new rock samples were collected in 2022 as part of the rover’s Fan Front Campaign — an exploratory phase during which Perseverance traversed Jezero Crater’s western slope, where a fan-like region contains sedimentary, layered rocks. Scientists suspect that this “fan front” is an ancient delta that was created by sediment that flowed with a river and settled into a now bone-dry lakebed. If life existed on Mars, scientists believe that it could be preserved in the layers of sediment along the fan front.In the end, Perseverance collected seven samples from various locations along the fan front. The rover obtained each sample by drilling into the Martian bedrock and extracting a pencil-sized core, which it then sealed in a tube to one day be retrieved and returned to Earth for detailed analysis.

    Composed of multiple images from NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, this mosaic shows a rocky outcrop called “Wildcat Ridge,” where the rover extracted two rock cores and abraded a circular patch to investigate the rock’s composition.

    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

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    Prior to extracting the cores, the rover took images of the surrounding sediments at each of the seven locations. The science team then processed the imaging data to estimate a sediment’s average grain size and mineral composition. This analysis showed that all seven collected samples likely contain signs of water, suggesting that they were initially deposited by water.Specifically, Bosak and her colleagues found evidence of certain minerals in the sediments that are known to precipitate out of water.“We found lots of minerals like carbonates, which are what make reefs on Earth,” Bosak says. “And it’s really an ideal material that can preserve fossils of microbial life.”Interestingly, the researchers also identified sulfates in some samples that were collected at the base of the fan front. Sulfates are minerals that form in very salty water — another sign that water was present in the crater at one time — though very salty water, Bosak notes, “is not necessarily the best thing for life.” If the entire crater was once filled with very salty water, then it would be difficult for any form of life to thrive. But if only the bottom of the lake were briny, that could be an advantage, at least for preserving any signs of life that may have lived further up, in less salty layers, that eventually died and drifted down to the bottom.“However salty it was, if there were any organics present, it’s like pickling something in salt,” Bosak says. “If there was life that fell into the salty layer, it would be very well-preserved.”Fuzzy fingerprintsBut the team emphasizes that organic matter has not been confidently detected by the rover’s instruments. Organic matter can be signs of life, but can also be produced by certain geological processes that have nothing to do with living matter. Perseverance’s predecessor, the Curiosity rover, had detected organic matter throughout Mars’ Gale Crater, which scientists suspect may have come from asteroids that made impact with Mars in the past.And in a previous campaign, Perseverance detected what appeared to be organic molecules at multiple locations along Jezero Crater’s floor. These observations were taken by the rover’s Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, which uses ultraviolet light to scan the Martian surface. If organics are present, they can glow, similar to material under a blacklight. The wavelengths at which the material glows act as a sort of fingerprint for the kind of organic molecules that are present.In Perseverance’s previous exploration of the crater floor, SHERLOC appeared to pick up signs of organic molecules throughout the region, and later, at some locations along the fan front. But a careful analysis, led by MIT’s Eva Scheller, has found that while the particular wavelengths observed could be signs of organic matter, they could just as well be signatures of substances that have nothing to do with organic matter.“It turns out that cerium metals incorporated in minerals actually produce very similar signals as the organic matter,” Scheller says. “When investigated, the potential organic signals were strongly correlated with phosphate minerals, which always contain some cerium.”Scheller’s work shows that the rover’s measurements cannot be interpreted definitively as organic matter.“This is not bad news,” Bosak says. “It just tells us there is not very abundant organic matter. It’s still possible that it’s there. It’s just below the rover’s detection limit.”When the collected samples are finally sent back to Earth, Bosak says laboratory instruments will have more than enough sensitivity to detect any organic matter that might lie within.“On Earth, once we have microscopes with nanometer-scale resolution, and various types of instruments that we cannot staff on one rover, then we can actually attempt to look for life,” she says.This work was supported, in part, by NASA. More

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    in Environment

    Tracking emissions to help companies reduce their environmental footprint

    Amidst a global wave of corporate pledges to decarbonize or reach net-zero emissions, a system for verifying actual greenhouse gas reductions has never been more important. Context Labs, founded by former MIT Sloan Fellow and serial entrepreneur Dan Harple SM ’13, is rising to meet that challenge with an analytics platform that brings more transparency to emissions data.The company’s platform adds context to data from sources like equipment sensors and satellites, provides third-party verification, and records all that information on a blockchain. Context Labs also provides an interactive view of emissions across every aspect of a company’s operations, allowing leaders to pinpoint the dirtiest parts of their business.“There’s an old adage: Unless you measure something, you can’t change it,” says Harple, who is the firm’s CEO. “I think of what we’re doing as an AI-driven digital lens into what’s happening across organizations. Our goal is to help the planet get better, faster.”Context Labs is already working with some of the largest energy companies in the world — including EQT, Williams Companies, and Coterra Energy — to verify emissions reductions. A partnership with Microsoft, announced at last year’s COP28 United Nations climate summit, allows any organization on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to integrate their sensor data into Context Lab’s platform to get a granular view of their environmental impact.Harple says the progress enables more informed sustainability initiatives at scale. He also sees the work as a way to combat overly vague statements about sustainable practices that don’t lead to actual emissions reductions, or what’s known as “greenwashing.”“Just producing data isn’t good enough, and our customers realize that, because they know even if they have good intentions to reduce emissions, no one is going to believe them,” Harple says. “One way to think about our platform is as antigreenwashing insurance, because if you get attacked for your emissions, we unbundle the data like it’s in shrink-wrap and roll it back through time on the blockchain. You can click on it and see exactly where and how it was measured, monitored, timestamped, its serial number, everything. It’s really the gold standard of proof.”An unconventional master’sHarple came to MIT as a serial founder whose companies had pioneered several foundational internet technologies, including real-time video streaming technology still used in applications like Zoom and Netflix, as well as some of the core technology for the popular Chinese microblogging website Weibo.Harple’s introduction to MIT started with a paper he wrote for his venture capital contacts in the U.S. to make the case for investment in the Netherlands, where he was living with his family. The paper caught the attention of MIT Professor Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who suggested Harple come to MIT as a Sloan Fellow to further develop his ideas about what makes a strong innovation ecosystem.Having successfully founded and exited multiple companies, Harple was not a typical MIT student when he began the Sloan Fellows program in 2011. At one point, he held a summit at MIT for a group of leading Dutch entrepreneurs and government officials that included tours of major labs and a meeting with former MIT President L. Rafael Reif.“Everyone was super enamored with MIT, and that kicked off what became a course that I started at MIT called REAL, Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab,” Harple says. REAL was eventually absorbed by what is now REAP — the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, which has worked with communities around the world.Harple describes REAL as a framework vehicle to put his theories on supporting innovation into action. Over his time at MIT, which also included collaborating with the Media Lab, he systematized those theories into what he calls pentalytics, which is a way to measure and predict the resilience of innovation ecosystems.“My sense was MIT should be analytical and data-driven,” Harple says. “The thesis I wrote was a framework for AI-driven network graph analytics. So, you can model things using analytics, and you can use AI to do predictive analytics to see where the innovation ecosystem is going to thrive.”Once Harple’s pentalytics theory was established, he wanted to put it to the test with a company. His initial idea for Context Labs was to build a verification platform to combat fake news, deepfakes, and other misinformation on the internet. Around 2018, Harple met climate investor Jeremy Grantham, who he says helped him realize the most important data are about the planet. Harple began to believe that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions estimates for things like driving a car or operating an oil rig were just that — estimates — and left room for improvement.“Our approach was very MIT-ish,” Harple says. “We said, ‘Let’s, measure it and let’s monitor it, and then let’s contextualize that data so you can never go back and say they faked it. I think there’s a lot of fakery that’s happened, and that’s why the voluntary carbon markets cratered in the last year. Our view is they cratered because the data wasn’t empirical enough.”Context Labs’ solution starts with a technology platform it calls Immutably that continuously combines disparate data streams, encrypts that information, and records it on a blockchain. Immutably also verifies the information with one or more third parties. (Context Labs has partnered with the global accounting firm KPMG.)On top of Immutably, Context Labs has built applications, including a product called Decarbonization-as-a-Service (DaaS), which uses Immutably’s data to give companies a digital twin of their entire operations. Customers can use DaaS to explore the emissions of their assets and create a certificate of verified CO2-equivalent emissions, which can be used in carbon credit markets.Putting emissions data into contextContext Labs is working with oil and gas companies, utilities, data centers, and large industrial operators, some using the platform to analyze more than 3 billion data points each day. For instance, EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., uses Context Labs to verify its lower-emission products and create carbon credits. Other customers include the nonprofits Rocky Mountain Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund.“I often get asked how big the total addressable market is,” Harple says. “My view is it’s the largest market in history. Why? Because every country needs a decarbonization plan, along with instrumentation and a digital platform to execute, as does every company.”With its headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Context Labs is also serving as a test for Harple’s pentalytics theory for innovation ecosystems. It also has operations in Houston and Amsterdam.“This company is a living lab for pentalytics,” Harple says. “I believe Kendall Square 1.0 was factory buildings, Kendall Square 2.0 is biotech, and Kendall Square 3.0 will be climate tech.” More

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    in Environment

    MIT School of Science launches Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy

    The MIT School of Science is launching a center to advance knowledge and computational capabilities in the field of sustainability science, and support decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society to achieve sustainable development goals. Aligned with the Climate Project at MIT, researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will develop and apply expertise from across the Institute to improve understanding of sustainability challenges, and thereby provide actionable knowledge and insight to inform strategies for improving human well-being for current and future generations.Noelle Selin, professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, will serve as the center’s inaugural faculty director. C. Adam Schlosser and Sergey Paltsev, senior research scientists at MIT, will serve as deputy directors, with Anne Slinn as executive director.Incorporating and succeeding both the Center for Global Change Science and Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change while adding new capabilities, the center aims to produce leading-edge research to help guide societal transitions toward a more sustainable future. Drawing on the long history of MIT’s efforts to address global change and its integrated environmental and human dimensions, the center is well-positioned to lead burgeoning global efforts to advance the field of sustainability science, which seeks to understand nature-society systems in their full complexity. This understanding is designed to be relevant and actionable for decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society in their efforts to develop viable pathways to improve quality of life for multiple stakeholders.“As critical challenges such as climate, health, energy, and food security increasingly affect people’s lives around the world, decision-makers need a better understanding of the earth in its full complexity — and that includes people, technologies, and institutions as well as environmental processes,” says Selin. “Better knowledge of these systems and how they interact can lead to more effective strategies that avoid unintended consequences and ensure an improved quality of life for all.”    Advancing knowledge, computational capability, and decision supportTo produce more precise and comprehensive knowledge of sustainability challenges and guide decision-makers to formulate more effective strategies, the center has set the following goals:Advance fundamental understanding of the complex interconnected physical and socio-economic systems that affect human well-being. As new policies and technologies are developed amid climate and other global changes, they interact with environmental processes and institutions in ways that can alter the earth’s critical life-support systems. Fundamental mechanisms that determine many of these systems’ behaviors, including those related to interacting climate, water, food, and socio-economic systems, remain largely unknown and poorly quantified. Better understanding can help society mitigate the risks of abrupt changes and “tipping points” in these systems.Develop, establish and disseminate new computational tools toward better understanding earth systems, including both environmental and human dimensions. The center’s work will integrate modeling and data analysis across disciplines in an era of increasing volumes of observational data. MIT multi-system models and data products will provide robust information to inform decision-making and shape the next generation of sustainability science and strategy.Produce actionable science that supports equity and justice within and across generations. The center’s research will be designed to inform action associated with measurable outcomes aligned with supporting human well-being across generations. This requires engaging a broad range of stakeholders, including not only nations and companies, but also nongovernmental organizations and communities that take action to promote sustainable development — with special attention to those who have historically borne the brunt of environmental injustice.“The center’s work will advance fundamental understanding in sustainability science, leverage leading-edge computing and data, and promote engagement and impact,” says Selin. “Our researchers will help lead scientists and strategists across the globe who share MIT’s commitment to mobilizing knowledge to inform action toward a more sustainable world.”Building a better world at MITBuilding on existing MIT capabilities in sustainability, science, and strategy, the center aims to: focus research, education, and outreach under a theme that reflects a comprehensive state of the field and international research directions, fostering a dynamic community of students, researchers, and faculty;raise the visibility of sustainability science at MIT, emphasizing links between science and action, in the context of existing Institute goals and other efforts on climate and sustainability, and in a way that reflects the vital contributions of a range of natural and social science disciplines to understanding human-environment systems; andre-emphasize MIT’s long-standing expertise in integrated systems modeling while leveraging the Institute’s concurrent leading-edge strengths in data and computing, establishing leadership that harnesses recent innovations, including those in machine learning and artificial intelligence, toward addressing the science challenges of global change and sustainability.“The Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will provide the necessary synergy for our MIT researchers to develop, deploy, and scale up serious solutions to climate change and other critical sustainability challenges,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “With Professor Selin at its helm, the center will also ensure that these solutions are created in concert with the people who are directly affected now and in the future.”The center builds on more than three decades of achievements by the Center for Global Change Science and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, both of which were directed or co-directed by professor of atmospheric science Ronald Prinn. More