Environment

Tree growth rings and ice cores illuminate the climatic conditions of times gone by. When combined with historical records and documents, climate data can also shed light on important events in human history — including the activities of nomadic groups such as the ancient Türks and Mongols.
“Climate data actually can tell us quite a lot about the history of nomadic empires,” said Nicola Di Cosmo, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and an expert on China and Inner Asian peoples and environmental history during a recent lecture in which he used a series of case studies to illustrate the links between climate history and nomadic empires. Such nomadic empires, Di Cosmo says, were “important historical protagonists” in shaping world events.
At the virtual event, Di Cosmo joined MIT associate professors David McGee, an expert on paleoclimate records, and Manduhai Buyandelger, a specialist in Mongolian anthropology.
“This is a really rich area of research,” said McGee. “Collaborations are the way forward — where you have experts who can read the complexity of the paleoclimate record and experts who can read the complexity of the human record.”
In the grassland steppes of Inner Asia, climate has a major impact on plant growth. Pastoral economies, which depend on grazing livestock like horse and sheep, are affected in turn. “The pastoral economy and the ecology of the steppe region is so sensitive — so vulnerable, also — to sudden climatic variability,” said Di Cosmo. A period of sudden drought or heavy snowfall can lead to major livestock die-offs.
A cold spell in the early seventh century hit the Eastern Türk empire, in the steppes of what is now Mongolia and China. Data from tree rings and ice cores show a brief period of unusually cool temperatures and heavy snowfall — the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Volcanic eruptions push gases and small particles into the stratosphere, where they can deflect incoming solar rays and cause lower temperatures. In this case, historical documents indicate subsequent famine, increased taxation, political unrest, and a weakened military among the Eastern Türks — and the empire ultimately collapsed in 630 A.D.
But climate anomalies can also be beneficial. Recent tree ring data from 13th century Mongolia reveal that the normally warm, dry conditions were punctuated by a 15-year period that was unusually wet. This period coincides with the rise of Chinggis Khan’s Mongol empire. Di Cosmo and his colleagues came up with the idea that the empire’s success could partly be due to favorable climatic conditions during these wet years: with more plant growth, the fledgling Mongol empire could raise more horses, expand its army, and stage a flurry of intense military activity outside of Mongolia.
“A previous theory maintained that the Mongols were pushed out of Mongolia because of worsening climate conditions — in fact, because of drought,” said Di Cosmo. “We actually turned around that kind of thinking and conclude, based on new climate data, something quite different.”
Climate data can also shed light on particular, perplexing events. Why did the Mongols suddenly begin losing battles in 1242, after sweeping successfully across eastern Hungary only months before? Combining tree ring data with historical reports suggests the key lies in the weather. Dry, warm conditions in 1241 were favorable for the Mongol invasion of eastern Hungary — and an extremely cold, wet winter enabled them to cross the frozen Danube into western Hungary. But springtime thaws likely led to flooding and marshy conditions that made mounted warfare a liability.
“Di Cosmo demonstrates how new paleoclimate data helps to answer old or existing questions that have puzzled historians for a long time,” said Buyandelger.
Another puzzle is the Uyghur empire, which was “very different from other steppe empires,” said Di Cosmo. It grew less dependent on military power, perhaps due to limited resources, and developed a diversified economy that relied more on trade and agriculture rather than pastoralism or war. Di Cosmo’s work indicates that a 60-year drought around the start of the ninth century may have prompted this empire to develop in unusual ways.
Di Cosmo and his colleagues are currently focused on the 1257 eruption of the volcano Samalas, in Indonesia. This massive eruption — the largest release of volcanic gases in the past 2,000 years — triggered cool, wet conditions as far away as Europe. Di Cosmo’s team thinks these conditions might have hindered the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260, and are using climate data to investigate.
One challenge of examining human history through a lens of paleoclimatology is that high-resolution climate data can be hard to obtain. But these nomadic empires coincided with clear data. “The tree ring records that Di Cosmo is working with are really the highest quality in terms of dating and spatially explicit information and calibration with modern data,” said McGee.
In systems where tree ring records are not available, there are alternatives. One project at MIT — led by Gabriela Serrato Marks PhD ‘20, a research specialist in McGee’s lab — is using stalagmites to help uncover the climatic context of past societal changes in Mexico. Ice cores and lake sediments provide more options for uncovering past climate conditions, and modeling can also be an important tool.
“One of the ways that paleoclimatologists are moving forward is by running climate models,” said McGee. “The models can help to fill in the gaps where we don’t have data and to understand things that the data can’t tell us, about wind patterns or about seasonality, for example.”
Meanwhile, present-day Mongolia is experiencing devastating droughts and winter weather as a result of global climate change. “Merging new climate data with the historical understanding of a place helps to put in perspective the catastrophic scale of climate change today,” said Buyandelger. “For instance, the heavy snowfalls in Mongolia in recent decades are the harshest in known history.”
In seeking solutions, we may be able to learn from past societies that adapted to poor climatic conditions. “Modern societies are much more complex than past societies, and so we have to factor in questions of industrialization and pollution and so forth,” said Di Cosmo. “But one of the things that history can do is help us understand better how societies in the past adapted or showed resilience.”
The virtual lecture was hosted by MIT Anthropology and co-sponsored by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and MIT History. More

Whitehead Institute and MIT named 2020 Organizational Winners in the fourth annual International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories International Laboratory Freezer Challenge. More

As part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, Professor Tanja Bosak helps determine the best samples to bring home for clues about life 4 billion years ago. More

Extreme heat events — like those seen in California in 2020 — are expected to worsen over the century due to climate change and urban heat islands (UHIs). Cities will likely experience the brunt of those effects.
To help cities mitigate UHI and extreme heat, MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub postdoc Hessam AzariJafari is studying one of the most abundant urban surfaces: pavements. He has found that it’s possible to significantly lower urban air temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions by altering pavement surface reflectivity. However, as he explains below, the effects of reflective pavements can depend heavily on where they are implemented.
Q: What are reflective pavements and how do they impact climate change?
A: Reflective pavements are a paving strategy that can help solve the problem of urban heat islands. The so-called “cool pavement” strategy is currently practiced in a few cities, such as Los Angeles, by implementing reflective coatings and/or brighter-color materials in the pavement mixtures. These properties allow more sunlight to be reflected from a pavement’s surface, and less to be absorbed by its mass. As a result, reflective pavements can lower urban temperatures when the ambient temperature is lower than the pavement surface temperature. In Los Angeles, for instance, we found that reflective pavements would reduce the occurrence of heat waves by around 40 percent over 20 years.
In addition to altering air temperatures, pavements also influence climate change. By reflecting light into building envelopes, they can alter heating and cooling demands and their associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the surrounding neighborhoods. Moreover, by sending a larger amount of solar irradiation to the sky, they can alter the Earth’s energy balance. This process, known as a radiative forcing, creates a cooling effect that can help counteract climate change.
Q: How do the effects of reflective pavements vary by context?
A: The effectiveness of reflective pavement strategies in reducing climate change impact depends on several factors. One major factor is geographical context. The local climate condition, including real-time temperature, cloud factors, and relative humidity, plays an important role in the intensity of radiative forcing, as well as changes to building energy demand (BED) due to heating and cooling.
Within urban areas, the neighborhood morphology, such as building density and canyon aspect ratio [ratio of building heights to the adjacent pavement width], can considerably change the BED effect of reflective pavements. Building configuration characteristics, such as the ratio of the surface area to volume, the insulation system, and the heating and cooling technology also affect the intensity of BED change.
The efficiency and sustainability of the local grid play a part as well. For example, generating one kilowatt-hour of electricity in Phoenix emits 85 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than in Boston. That’s because a small proportion of the electricity generation is from low-GHG sources in Arizona. Therefore, increases in building energy demand in Phoenix can have a larger climate change impact.
Q: Many aspects of a pavement contribute to its life-cycle environmental footprint. Where does surface reflectivity fit into that total footprint?
A: Surface reflectivity is just one part of a pavement’s cumulative life-cycle emissions. Additional impacts include pavement construction and repairs, the extra fuel consumption of vehicles induced by pavement properties, and the end-of-life landfilling or recycling.
Just as with pavement reflectivity, these impacts can also vary by context. For example, in urban neighborhoods, the BED effect of pavements is more pronounced because there are hundreds of thousands of apartment units located in the city whose energy demands will be altered by the surface reflectivity of pavements. Since pavements in those dense urban areas also service a relatively low volume of traffic, the contribution of their reflectivity to their total life-cycle impact is more significant as well. However, on highways, which see significantly greater levels of traffic, the surface roughness and structural properties of a pavement contribute to a greater proportion of that pavement’s life-cycle emissions by influencing the fuel consumption of vehicles. Therefore, it is important to consider all elements of a life cycle when municipalities and transportation authorities decide on the environmentally preferred option. More

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the cleanest-burning of all the fossil fuels, but when emitted into the atmosphere it is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. By some estimates, seafloor methane contained in frozen formations along the continental margins may equal or exceed the total amount of coal, oil, and gas in all other reservoirs worldwide. Yet, the way methane escapes from these deep formations is poorly understood.
In particular, scientists have been faced with a puzzle. Observations at sites around the world have shown vigorous columns of methane gas bubbling up from these formations in some places, yet the high pressure and low temperature of these deep-sea environments should create a solid frozen layer that would be expected to act as a kind of capstone, preventing gas from escaping. So how does the gas get out?
A new study helps explain how and why columns of the gas can stream out of these formations, known as methane hydrates. Using a combination of deep-sea observations, laboratory experiments, and computer modeling, researchers have found phenomena that explain and predict the way the gas breaks free from the icy grip of a frozen mix of water and methane. The findings are reported today in the journal PNAS, in a paper by Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu SM ’15, PhD ’17, now at the University of California at Berkeley; Professor Ruben Juanes at MIT; and five others in Switzerland, Spain, New Mexico, and California.
Surprisingly, not only does the frozen hydrate formation fail to prevent methane gas from escaping into the ocean column, but in some cases it actually facilitates that escape.
Early on, Fu saw photos and videos showing plumes of methane, taken from a NOAA research ship in the Gulf of Mexico, revealing the process of bubble formation right at the seafloor. It was clear that the bubbles themselves often formed with a frozen crust around them, and would float upward with their icy shells like tiny helium balloons.
Later, Fu used sonar to detect similar bubble plumes from a research ship off the coast of Virginia. “This cruise alone detected thousands of these plumes,” says Fu, who led the research project while a graduate student and postdoc at MIT. “We could follow these methane bubbles encrusted by hydrate shells into the water column,” she says. “That’s when we first knew that hydrate forming on these gas interfaces can be a very common occurrence.”
But exactly what was going on beneath the seafloor to trigger the release of these bubbles remained unknown. Through a series of lab experiments and simulations, the mechanisms at work gradually became apparent.
Seismic studies of the subsurface of the seafloor in these vent regions show a series of relatively narrow conduits, or chimneys, through which the gas escapes. But the presence of chunks of gas hydrate from these same formations made it clear that the solid hydrate and the gaseous methane could co-exist, Fu explains. To simulate the conditions in the lab, the researchers used a small two-dimensional setup, sandwiching a gas bubble in a layer of water between two plates of glass under high pressure.
As a gas tries to rise through the seafloor, Fu says, if it’s forming a hydrate layer when it hits the cold seawater, that should block its progress: “It’s running into a wall. So how would that wall not be preventing it from continuous migration?” Using the microfluidic experiments, they found a previously unknown phenomenon at work, which they dubbed crustal fingering.
If the gas bubble starts to expand, “what we saw is that the expansion of the gas was able to create enough pressure to essentially rupture the hydrate shell. And it’s almost like it’s hatching out of its own shell,” Fu says. But instead of each rupture freezing back over with the reforming hydrate, the hydrate formation takes place along the sides of the rising bubble, creating a kind of tube around the bubble as it moves upward. “It’s almost like the gas bubble is able to chisel out its own path, and that path is walled by the hydrate solid,” she says. This phenomenon they observed at small scale in the lab, their analysis suggests, is also what would also happen at much larger scale in the seafloor.
That observation, she said, “was really the first time we’ve been aware of a phenomenon like this that could explain how hydrate formation will not inhibit gas flow, but rather in this case, it would facilitate it,” by providing a conduit and directing the flow. Without that focusing, the flow of gas would be much more diffuse and spread out.
As the crust of hydrate forms, it slows down the formation of more hydrate because it forms a barrier between the gas and the seawater. The methane below the barrier can therefore persist in its unfrozen, gaseous form for a long time. The combination of these two phenomena — the focusing effect of the hydrate-walled channels and the segregation of the methane gas from the water by a hydrate layer — “goes a long way toward explaining why you can have some of this vigorous venting, thanks to the hydrate formation, rather than being prevented by it,” says Juanes.

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A better understanding of the process could help in predicting where and when such methane seeps will be found, and how changes in environmental conditions could affect the distribution and output of these seeps. While there have been suggestions that a warming climate could increase the rate of such venting, Fu says there is little evidence of that so far. She notes that temperatures at the depths where these formations occur — 600 meters (1,900 feet) deep or more — are expected to experience a smaller temperature increase than would be needed to trigger a widespread release of the frozen gas.
Some researchers have suggested that these vast undersea methane formations might someday be harnessed for energy production. Though there would be great technical hurdles to such use, Juanes says, these findings might help in assessing the possibilities.
“The problem of how gas can move through the hydrate stability zone, where we would expect the gas to be immobilized by being converted to hydrate, and instead escape at the seafloor, is still not fully understood,” says Hugh Daigle, an associate professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not associated with this research. “This work presents a probable new mechanism that could plausibly allow this process to occur, and nicely integrates previous laboratory observations with modeling at a larger scale.”
“In a practical sense, the work here takes a phenomenon at a small scale and allows us to use it in a model that only considers larger scales, and will be very useful for implementing in future work,” Daigle says.
The research team included Joaquin Jimenez-Martinez at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology; Than Phon Nguyen, William Carey and Hari Vinaswanathan at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Luis Cueto-Felgueroso at the Technical University of Madrid. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. More

The clothing rental service Armoire helps customers sustainably maintain a fresh ward-robe. More

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has established a new research and development division, the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division. The division will address emerging threats to both national security and humanity. Research and development will encompass advanced technologies and systems for improving chemical and biological defense, human health and performance, and global resilience to climate change, conflict, and disasters.
“We strongly believe that research and development in biology, biomedical systems, biological defense, and human systems is a critically important part of national and global security. The new division will focus on improving human conditions on many fronts,” says Eric Evans, Lincoln Laboratory director.
The new division unifies four research groups: Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Systems, Counter-Weapons of Mass Destruction Systems, Biological and Chemical Technologies, and Human Health and Performance Systems.
“We are in a historic moment in the country, and it is a historic moment for Lincoln Laboratory to create a new division. The nation and laboratory are faced with several growing security threats, and there is a pressing need to focus our research and development efforts to address these challenges,” says Edward Wack, who is head of the division.
The laboratory began its initial work in biotechnology in 1995, through several programs that leveraged expertise in sensors and signal processing for chemical and biological defense systems. Work has since grown to include prototyping systems for protecting high-value facilities and transportation systems, architecting integrated early-warning biodefense systems for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and applying artificial intelligence and synthetic biology technologies to accelerate the development of new drugs. In recent years, synthetic biology programs have expanded to include complex metabolic engineering for the production of novel materials and therapeutic molecules. 
“The ability to leverage the laboratory’s deep technical expertise to solve today’s challenges has long laid the foundation for the new division,” says Christina Rudzinski, who is an assistant head of the division and formerly led the Counter-Weapons of Mass Destruction Systems Group.
In recent years, the laboratory has also been growing its work for improving the health and performance of service members, veterans, and civilians. Laboratory researchers have applied decades of expertise in human language technology to understand disorders and injuries of the brain. Other programs have used physiological signals captured with wearable devices to detect heat strain, injury, and infection. The laboratory’s AI and robotics expertise has been leveraged to create prototypes of semi-autonomous medical interventions to help medics save lives on the battlefield and in disaster environments.
The laboratory’s transition to disaster response technology extends over the past decade. Its rich history developing sensors and decision-support software translated well to the area of emergency response, leading to the development in 2010 of an emergency communications platform now in use worldwide, and the deployment of its advanced laser detection and ranging imaging system to quickly assess earthquake damage in Haiti. In 2015, the HADR Systems Group was established to build on this work.
Today, the group develops novel sensors, communication tools, and decision-support systems to aid national and global responses to disasters and humanitarian crises. Last year, the group launched its climate change initiative to develop new programs to monitor, predict, and address current and future climate change impacts.
Through these initiatives, the laboratory has come to view its work not only in the context of national security, but also global security.
“Pandemics and climate change can cause instability, and that instability can breed conflict,” says Wack. “It benefits the United States to have a stable world. To the degree that we can, mitigating future pandemics and reducing the impacts of climate change would improve global stability and national security.”
In anticipation of the growing importance of these global security issues, the laboratory has been significantly increasing program development, strategic hiring, and investment in biotechnology and human systems research over the past few years. Now, that strategic planning and investment in biotechnology research has come to fruition.
One of the division’s initial goals is to continue to build relationships with MIT partners, including the Department of Biological Engineering, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, as well as Harvard University and local hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital. These collaborators have helped bring the laboratory’s sensor technology and algorithms to clinical applications for Covid-19 diagnostics, lung and liver disorders, bone injury, and spinal surgical tools. “We can have a bigger impact by drawing on some of the great expertise on campus and in our Boston medical ecosystem,” says Wack. 
Another goal is to lead the nation in research surrounding the intersection of AI and biology. This research includes developing advanced AI algorithms for analyzing multimodal biological data, prototyping intelligent autonomous systems, and making AI-enabled biotechnology that is ethical and transparent.
“Because of our extensive experience supporting the DoD, the laboratory is in a unique position to translate this cutting-edge research, including that from the commercial sector, into a government and national security context,” says Bill Streilein, principal staff in the Biotechnology and Human System Division. “This means not only addressing typical AI application issues of data collection and curation, model selection and training, and human-machine teaming, but also issues related to traceability, explainability, and fairness.”
Leadership also sees this new division as an opportunity to continue to shape an innovative, diverse, and inclusive culture at the laboratory. They will be emphasizing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to solving the complex research challenges the division faces. 
“We want help from the rest of the laboratory,” says Jeffrey Palmer, an assistant head of the division who previously led the Human Health and Performance Systems Group. “I think there are many ways that we can help other divisions in their missions, and we absolutely need them for success in ours. These challenges are too big to face without applying the combined capabilities of the entire laboratory.”
The Biotechnology and Human Systems Division joins Lincoln Laboratory’s eight other divisions: Advanced Technology; Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology; Communication Systems; Cyber Security and Information Sciences; Engineering; Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control; ISR and Tactical Systems; and Space Systems and Technology. Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center. More

Thanh Nguyen is in the habit of breaking down barriers. Take languages, for instance: Nguyen, a third-year doctoral candidate in nuclear science and engineering (NSE), wanted “to connect with other people and cultures” for his work and social life, he says, so he learned Vietnamese, French, German, and Russian, and is now taking an MIT course in Mandarin. But this drive to push past obstacles really comes to the fore in his research, where Nguyen is trying to crack the secrets of a new and burgeoning branch of physics.
“My dissertation focuses on neutron scattering on topological semimetals, which were only experimentally discovered in 2015,” he says. “They have very special properties, but because they are so novel, there’s a lot that’s unknown, and neutrons offer a unique perspective to probe their properties at a new level of clarity.”
Topological materials don’t fit neatly into conventional categories of substances found in everyday life. They were first materialized in the 1980s, but only became practical in the mid-2000s with deepened understanding of topology, which concerns itself with geometric objects whose properties remain the same even when the objects undergo extreme deformation. Researchers experimentally discovered topological materials even more recently, using the tools of quantum physics.
Within this domain, topological semimetals, which share qualities of both metals and semiconductors, are of special interest to Nguyen. “They offer high levels of thermal and electric conductivity, and inherent robustness, which makes them very promising for applications in microelectronics, energy conversions, and quantum computing,” he says.
Intrigued by the possibilities that might emerge from such “unconventional physics,” Nguyen is pursuing two related but distinct areas of research: “On the one hand, I’m trying to identify and then synthesize new, robust topological semimetals, and on the other, I want to detect fundamental new physics with neutrons and further design new devices.”
On a fast research track
Reaching these goals over the next few years might seem a tall order. But at MIT, Nguyen has seized every opportunity to master the specialized techniques required for conducting large-scale experiments with topological materials, and getting results. Guided by his advisor, Mingda Li, the Norman C Rasmussen Assistant Professor and director of the Quantum Matter Group within NSE, Nguyen was able to dive into significant research even before he set foot on campus.
“The summer, before I joined the group, Mingda sent me on a trip to Argonne National Laboratory for a very fun experiment that used synchrotron X-ray scattering to characterize topological materials,” recalls Nguyen. “Learning the techniques got me fascinated in the field, and I started to see my future.”
During his first two years of graduate school, he participated in four studies, serving as a lead author in three journal papers. In one notable project, described earlier this year in Physical Review Letters, Nguyen and fellow Quantum Matter Group researchers demonstrated, through experiments conducted at three national laboratories, unexpected phenomena involving the way electrons move through a topological semimetal, tantalum phosphide (TaP).
“These materials inherently withstand perturbations such as heat and disorders, and can conduct electricity with a level of robustness,” says Nguyen. “With robust properties like this, certain materials can conductivity electricity better than best metals, and in some circumstances superconductors — which is an improvement over current generation materials.”
This discovery opens the door to topological quantum computing. Current quantum computing systems, where the elemental units of calculation are qubits that perform superfast calculations, require superconducting materials that only function in extremely cold conditions. Fluctuations in heat can throw one of these systems out of whack.
“The properties inherent to materials such as TaP could form the basis of future qubits,” says Nguyen. He envisions synthesizing TaP and other topological semimetals — a process involving the delicate cultivation of these crystalline structures — and then characterizing their structural and excitational properties with the help of neutron and X-ray beam technology, which probe these materials at the atomic level. This would enable him to identify and deploy the right materials for specific applications.
“My goal is to create programmable artificial structured topological materials, which can directly be applied as a quantum computer,” says Nguyen. “With infinitely better heat management, these quantum computing systems and devices could prove to be incredibly energy efficient.”
Physics for the environment
Energy efficiency and its benefits have long concerned Nguyen. A native of Montreal, Quebec, with an aptitude for math and physics and a concern for climate change, he devoted his final year of high school to environmental studies. “I worked on a Montreal initiative to reduce heat islands in the city by creating more urban parks,” he says. “Climate change mattered to me, and I wanted to make an impact.”
At McGill University, he majored in physics. “I became fascinated by problems in the field, but I also felt I could eventually apply what I learned to fulfill my goals of protecting the environment,” he says.
In both classes and research, Nguyen immersed himself in different domains of physics. He worked for two years in a high-energy physics lab making detectors for neutrinos, part of a much larger collaboration seeking to verify the Standard Model. In the fall of his senior year at McGill, Nguyen’s interest gravitated toward condensed matter studies. “I really enjoyed the interplay between physics and chemistry in this area, and especially liked exploring questions in superconductivity, which seemed to have many important applications,” he says. That spring, seeking to add useful skills to his research repertoire, he worked at Ontario’s Chalk River Laboratories, where he learned to characterize materials using neutron spectroscopes and other tools.
These academic and practical experiences served to propel Nguyen toward his current course of graduate study. “Mingda Li proposed an interesting research plan, and although I didn’t know much about topological materials, I knew they had recently been discovered, and I was excited to enter the field,” he says.
Man with a plan
Nguyen has mapped out the remaining years of his doctoral program, and they will prove demanding. “Topological semimetals are difficult to work with,” he says. “We don’t yet know the optimal conditions for synthesizing them, and we need to make these crystals, which are micrometers in scale, in quantities large enough to permit testing.” 
With the right materials in hand, he hopes to develop “a qubit structure that isn’t so vulnerable to perturbations, quickly advancing the field of quantum computing so that calculations that now take years might require just minutes or seconds,” he says. “Vastly higher computational speeds could have enormous impacts on problems like climate, or health, or finance that have important ramifications for society.” If his research on topological materials “benefits the planet or improves how people live,” says Nguyen, “I would be totally happy.” More