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    Imaging technique removes the effect of water in underwater scenes

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    The ocean is teeming with life. But unless you get up close, much of the marine world can easily remain unseen. That’s because water itself can act as an effective cloak: Light that shines through the ocean can bend, scatter, and quickly fade as it travels through the dense medium of water and reflects off the persistent haze of ocean particles. This makes it extremely challenging to capture the true color of objects in the ocean without imaging them at close range.Now a team from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed an image-analysis tool that cuts through the ocean’s optical effects and generates images of underwater environments that look as if the water had been drained away, revealing an ocean scene’s true colors. The team paired the color-correcting tool with a computational model that converts images of a scene into a three-dimensional underwater “world,” that can then be explored virtually.The researchers have dubbed the new tool “SeaSplat,” in reference to both its underwater application and a method known as 3D gaussian splatting (3DGS), which takes images of a scene and stitches them together to generate a complete, three-dimensional representation that can be viewed in detail, from any perspective.“With SeaSplat, it can model explicitly what the water is doing, and as a result it can in some ways remove the water, and produces better 3D models of an underwater scene,” says MIT graduate student Daniel Yang.The researchers applied SeaSplat to images of the sea floor taken by divers and underwater vehicles, in various locations including the U.S. Virgin Islands. The method generated 3D “worlds” from the images that were truer and more vivid and varied in color, compared to previous methods.The team says SeaSplat could help marine biologists monitor the health of certain ocean communities. For instance, as an underwater robot explores and takes pictures of a coral reef, SeaSplat would simultaneously process the images and render a true-color, 3D representation, that scientists could then virtually “fly” through, at their own pace and path, to inspect the underwater scene, for instance for signs of coral bleaching.“Bleaching looks white from close up, but could appear blue and hazy from far away, and you might not be able to detect it,” says Yogesh Girdhar, an associate scientist at WHOI. “Coral bleaching, and different coral species, could be easier to detect with SeaSplat imagery, to get the true colors in the ocean.”Girdhar and Yang will present a paper detailing SeaSplat at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Their study co-author is John Leonard, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.Aquatic opticsIn the ocean, the color and clarity of objects is distorted by the effects of light traveling through water. In recent years, researchers have developed color-correcting tools that aim to reproduce the true colors in the ocean. These efforts involved adapting tools that were developed originally for environments out of water, for instance to reveal the true color of features in foggy conditions. One recent work accurately reproduces true colors in the ocean, with an algorithm named “Sea-Thru,” though this method requires a huge amount of computational power, which makes its use in producing 3D scene models challenging.In parallel, others have made advances in 3D gaussian splatting, with tools that seamlessly stitch images of a scene together, and intelligently fill in any gaps to create a whole, 3D version of the scene. These 3D worlds enable “novel view synthesis,” meaning that someone can view the generated 3D scene, not just from the perspective of the original images, but from any angle and distance.But 3DGS has only successfully been applied to environments out of water. Efforts to adapt 3D reconstruction to underwater imagery have been hampered, mainly by two optical underwater effects: backscatter and attenuation. Backscatter occurs when light reflects off of tiny particles in the ocean, creating a veil-like haze. Attenuation is the phenomenon by which light of certain wavelengths attenuates, or fades with distance. In the ocean, for instance, red objects appear to fade more than blue objects when viewed from farther away.Out of water, the color of objects appears more or less the same regardless of the angle or distance from which they are viewed. In water, however, color can quickly change and fade depending on one’s perspective. When 3DGS methods attempt to stitch underwater images into a cohesive 3D whole, they are unable to resolve objects due to aquatic backscatter and attenuation effects that distort the color of objects at different angles.“One dream of underwater robotic vision that we have is: Imagine if you could remove all the water in the ocean. What would you see?” Leonard says.A model swimIn their new work, Yang and his colleagues developed a color-correcting algorithm that accounts for the optical effects of backscatter and attenuation. The algorithm determines the degree to which every pixel in an image must have been distorted by backscatter and attenuation effects, and then essentially takes away those aquatic effects, and computes what the pixel’s true color must be.Yang then worked the color-correcting algorithm into a 3D gaussian splatting model to create SeaSplat, which can quickly analyze underwater images of a scene and generate a true-color, 3D virtual version of the same scene that can be explored in detail from any angle and distance.The team applied SeaSplat to multiple underwater scenes, including images taken in the Red Sea, in the Carribean off the coast of Curaçao, and the Pacific Ocean, near Panama. These images, which the team took from a pre-existing dataset, represent a range of ocean locations and water conditions. They also tested SeaSplat on images taken by a remote-controlled underwater robot in the U.S. Virgin Islands.From the images of each ocean scene, SeaSplat generated a true-color 3D world that the researchers were able to virtually explore, for instance zooming in and out of a scene and viewing certain features from different perspectives. Even when viewing from different angles and distances, they found objects in every scene retained their true color, rather than fading as they would if viewed through the actual ocean.“Once it generates a 3D model, a scientist can just ‘swim’ through the model as though they are scuba-diving, and look at things in high detail, with real color,” Yang says.For now, the method requires hefty computing resources in the form of a desktop computer that would be too bulky to carry aboard an underwater robot. Still, SeaSplat could work for tethered operations, where a vehicle, tied to a ship, can explore and take images that can be sent up to a ship’s computer.“This is the first approach that can very quickly build high-quality 3D models with accurate colors, underwater, and it can create them and render them fast,” Girdhar says. “That will help to quantify biodiversity, and assess the health of coral reef and other marine communities.”This work was supported, in part, by the Investment in Science Fund at WHOI, and by the U.S. National Science Foundation. More

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      How J-WAFS Solutions grants bring research to market

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      For the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), 2025 marks a decade of translating groundbreaking research into tangible solutions for global challenges. Few examples illustrate that mission better than NONA Technologies. With support from a J-WAFS Solutions grant, MIT electrical engineering and biological engineering Professor Jongyoon Han and his team developed a portable desalination device that transforms seawater into clean drinking water without filters or high-pressure pumps. The device stands apart from traditional systems because conventional desalination technologies, like reverse osmosis, are energy-intensive, prone to fouling, and typically deployed at large, centralized plants. In contrast, the device developed in Han’s lab employs ion concentration polarization technology to remove salts and particles from seawater, producing potable water that exceeds World Health Organization standards. It is compact, solar-powered, and operable at the push of a button — making it an ideal solution for off-grid and disaster-stricken areas.This research laid the foundation for spinning out NONA Technologies along with co-founders Junghyo Yoon PhD ’21 from Han’s lab and Bruce Crawford MBA ’22, to commercialize the technology and address pressing water-scarcity issues worldwide. “This is really the culmination of a 10-year journey that I and my group have been on,” said Han in an earlier MIT News article. “We worked for years on the physics behind individual desalination processes, but pushing all those advances into a box, building a system, and demonstrating it in the ocean … that was a really meaningful and rewarding experience for me.” You can watch this video showcasing the device in action.Moving breakthrough research out of the lab and into the world is a well-known challenge. While traditional “seed” grants typically support early-stage research at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1-2, few funding sources exist to help academic teams navigate to the next phase of technology development. The J-WAFS Solutions Program is strategically designed to address this critical gap by supporting technologies in the high-risk, early-commercialization phase that is often neglected by traditional research, corporate, and venture funding. By supporting technologies at TRLs 3-5, the program increases the likelihood that promising innovations will survive beyond the university setting, advancing sufficiently to attract follow-on funding.Equally important, the program gives academic researchers the time, resources, and flexibility to de-risk their technology, explore customer need and potential real-world applications, and determine whether and how they want to pursue commercialization. For faculty-led teams like Han’s, the J-WAFS Solutions Program provided the critical financial runway and entrepreneurial guidance needed to refine the technology, test assumptions about market fit, and lay the foundation for a startup team. While still in the MIT innovation ecosystem, Nona secured over $200,000 in non-dilutive funding through competitions and accelerators, including the prestigious MIT delta v Educational Accelerator. These early wins laid the groundwork for further investment and technical advancement.Since spinning out of MIT, NONA has made major strides in both technology development and business viability. What started as a device capable of producing just over half-a-liter of clean drinking water per hour has evolved into a system that now delivers 10 times that capacity, at 5 liters per hour. The company successfully raised a $3.5 million seed round to advance its portable desalination device, and entered into a collaboration with the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, where it co-developed early prototypes and began generating revenue while validating the technology. Most recently, NONA was awarded two SBIR Phase I grants totaling $575,000, one from the National Science Foundation and another from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.Now operating out of Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, NONA has grown to a dedicated team of five and is preparing to launch its nona5 product later this year, with a wait list of over 1,000 customers. It is also kicking off its first industrial pilot, marking a key step toward commercial scale-up. “Starting a business as a postdoc was challenging, especially with limited funding and industry knowledge,” says Yoon, who currently serves as CTO of NONA. “J-WAFS gave me the financial freedom to pursue my venture, and the mentorship pushed me to hit key milestones. Thanks to J-WAFS, I successfully transitioned from an academic researcher to an entrepreneur in the water industry.”NONA is one of several J-WAFS-funded technologies that have moved from the lab to market, part of a growing portfolio of water and food solutions advancing through MIT’s innovation pipeline. As J-WAFS marks a decade of catalyzing innovation in water and food, NONA exemplifies what is possible when mission-driven research is paired with targeted early-stage support and mentorship.To learn more or get involved in supporting startups through the J-WAFS Solutions Program, please contact jwafs@mit.edu. More

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      Startup helps farmers grow plant-based feed and fertilizer using wastewater

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      Farmers today face a number of challenges, from supply chain stability to nutrient and waste management. But hanging over everything is the need to maintain profitability amid changing markets and increased uncertainty.Fyto, founded by former MIT staff member Jason Prapas, is offering a highly automated cultivation system to address several of farmers’ biggest problems at once.At the heart of Fyto’s system is Lemna, a genus of small aquatic plants otherwise known as duckweed. Most people have probably seen thick green mats of Lemna lying on top of ponds and swamps. But Lemna is also rich in protein and capable of doubling in biomass every two days. Fyto has built an automated cropping system that uses nitrogen-rich wastewater from dairy farms to grow Lemna in shallow pools on otherwise less productive farmland. On top of the pools, the company has built what it believes are the largest agricultural robots in the world, which monitor plant health and harvest the Lemna sustainably. The Lemna can then be used on farms as a high-protein cattle feed or fertilizer supplement.Fyto’s systems are designed to rely on minimal land, water, and labor while creating a more sustainable, profitable food system.“We developed from scratch a robotic system that takes the guesswork out of farming this crop,” says Prapas, who previously led the translational research program of MIT’s Tata Center. “It looks at the crop on a daily basis, takes inventory to know how many plants there are, how much should be harvested to have healthy growth the next day, can detect if the color is slightly off or there are nutrient deficiencies, and can suggest different interventions based on all that data.”From kiddie pools to cow farmsPrapas’ first job out of college was with an MIT spinout called Green Fuel that harvested algae to make biofuel. He went back to school for a master’s and then a PhD in mechanical engineering, but he continued working with startups. Following his PhD at Colorado State University, he co-founded Factor[e] Ventures to fund and incubate startups focused on improving energy access in emerging markets.Through that work, Prapas was introduced to MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design.“We were really interested in the new technologies being developed at the MIT Tata Center, and in funding new startups taking on some of these global climate challenges in emerging markets,” Prapas recalls. “The Tata Center was interested in making sure these technologies get put into practice rather than patented and put on a shelf somewhere. It was a good synergy.”One of the people Prapas got to know was Rob Stoner, the founding director of the Tata Center, who encouraged Prapas to get more directly involved with commercializing new technologies. In 2017, Prapas joined the Tata Center as the translational research director. During that time, Prapas worked with MIT students, faculty, and staff to test their inventions in the real world. Much of that work involved innovations in agriculture.“Farming is a fact of life for a lot of folks around the world — both subsistence farming but also producing food for the community and beyond,” Prapas says. “That has huge implications for water usage, electricity consumption, labor. For years, I’d been thinking about how we make farming a more attractive endeavor for people: How do we make it less back-breaking, more efficient, and more economical?”Between his work at MIT and Factor[e], Prapas visited hundreds of farms around the world, where he started to think about the lack of good choices for farming inputs like animal feed and fertilizers. The problem represented a business opportunity.Fyto began with kiddie pools. Prapas started growing aquatic plants in his backyard, using them as a fertilizer source for vegetables. The experience taught him how difficult it would be to train people to grow and harvest Lemna at large scales on farms.“I realized we’d have to invent both the farming method — the agronomy — and the equipment and processes to grow it at scale cost effectively,” Prapas explains.Prapas started discussing his ideas with others around 2019.“The MIT and Boston ecosystems are great for pitching somewhat crazy ideas to willing audiences and seeing what sticks,” Prapas says. “There’s an intangible benefit of being at MIT, where you just can’t help but think of bold ideas and try putting them into practice.”Prapas, who left MIT to lead Fyto in 2019, partnered with Valerie Peng ’17, SM ’19, then a graduate student at MIT who became his first hire.“Farmers work so hard, and I have so much respect for what they do,” says Peng, who serves as Fyto’s head of engineering. “People talk about the political divide, but there’s a lot of alignment around using less, doing more with what you have, and making our food systems more resilient to drought, supply chain disruptions, and everything else. There’s more in common with everyone than you’d expect.”A new farming methodLemna can produce much more protein per acre than soy, another common source of protein on farms, but it requires a lot of nitrogen to grow. Fortunately, many types of farmers, especially large dairy farmers, have abundant nitrogen sources in the waste streams that come from washing out cow manure.“These waste streams are a big problem: In California it’s believed to be one of the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the agriculture sector despite the fact that hundreds of crops are grown in California,” Prapas says.For the last few years, Fyto has run its systems in pilots on farms, trialing the crop as feed and fertilizer before delivering to its customers. The systems Fyto has deployed so far are about 50 feet wide, but it is actively commissioning its newest version that’s 160 feet wide. Eventually, Fyto plans to sell the systems directly to farmers.Fyto is currently awaiting California’s approval for use in feed, but Lemna has already been approved in Europe. Fyto has also been granted a fertilizer license on its plant-based fertilizer, with promising early results in trials, and plans to sell new fertilizer products this year.Although Fyto is focused on dairy farms for its early deployments, it has also grown Lemna using manure from chicken, and Prapas notes that even people like cheese producers have a nitrogen waste problem that Fyto could solve.“Think of us like a polishing step you could put on the end of any system that has an organic waste stream,” Prapas says. “In that situation, we’re interested in growing our crops on it. We’ve had very few things that the plant can’t grow on. Globally, we see this as a new farming method, and that means it’s got a lot of potential applications.” More

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      MIT students advance solutions for water and food with the help of J-WAFS

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      For the past decade, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has been instrumental in promoting student engagement across the Institute to help solve the world’s most pressing water and food system challenges. As part of J-WAFS’ central mission of securing the world’s water and food supply, J-WAFS aims to cultivate the next generation of leaders in the water and food sectors by encouraging MIT student involvement through a variety of programs and mechanisms that provide research funding, mentorship, and other types of support.J-WAFS offers a range of opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students to engage in the advancement of water and food systems research. These include graduate student fellowships, travel grants for participation in conferences, funding for research projects in India, video competitions highlighting students’ water and food research, and support for student-led organizations and initiatives focused on critical areas in water and food.As J-WAFS enters its second decade, it continues to expose students across the Institute to experiential hands-on water and food research, career and other networking opportunities, and a platform to develop their innovative and collaborative solutions.Graduate student fellowshipsIn 2017, J-WAFS inaugurated two graduate student fellowships: the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship Program. The Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions is a doctoral fellowship for students pursuing research related to water for human need at MIT. The fellowship is made possible by Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Each year, up to two outstanding students are selected to receive fellowship support for one academic semester. Through it, J-WAFS seeks to support distinguished MIT students who are pursuing solutions to the pressing global water supply challenges of our time. The J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program, which offers companies the opportunity to collaborate with MIT on water and food research. A portion of each research affiliate’s fees supports this fellowship.Aditya Avinash Ghodgaonkar, a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), reflects on how receiving a J-WAFS graduate student fellowship positively impacted his research on the design of low-cost emitters for affordable, resilient drip irrigation for farmers: “My J-WAFS fellowship gave me the flexibility and financial support needed to explore new directions in the area of clog-resistant drip irrigation that had a higher risk element that might not have been feasible to manage on an industrially sponsored project,” Ghodgaonkar explains. Emitters, which control the volume and flow rate of water used during irrigation, often clog due to small particles like sand. Ghodgaonkar worked with Professor Amos Winter, and with farmers in resource-constrained communities in countries like Jordan and Morocco, to develop an emitter that is mechanically more resistant to clogging. Ghodgaonkar reports that their energy-efficient, compact, clog-resistant drip emitters are being commercialized by Toro and may be available for retail in the next few years. The opportunities and funding support Ghodgaonkar has received from J-WAFS contributed greatly to his entrepreneurial success and the advancement of the water and agricultural sectors.Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, a PhD student advised by Professor Robert Langer and Principal Research Scientist Ana Jaklenec of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was a 2022 J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellow. With the fellowship, Zhang was able to focus on her innovative research on a novel micronutrient delivery platform that fortifies food with essential vitamins and nutrients. “We intake micronutrients from basically all the healthy food that we eat; however, around the world there are about 2 billion people currently suffering from micronutrient deficiency because they do not have access to very healthy, very fresh food,” Zhang says. Her research involves the development of biodegradable polymers that can deliver these micronutrients in harsh environments in underserved regions of the world. “Vitamin A is not very stable, for example; we have vitamin A in different vegetables but when we cook them, the vitamin can easily degrade,” Zhang explains. However, when vitamin A is encapsulated in the microparticle platform, simulation of boiling and of the stomach environment shows that vitamin A was stabilized. “The meaningful factors behind this experiment are real,” says Zhang. The J-WAFS Fellowship helped position Zhang to win the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition for this work.J-WAFS grant for water and food projects in IndiaJ-WAFS India Grants are intended to further the work being pursued by MIT individuals as a part of their research, innovation, entrepreneurship, coursework, or related activities. Faculty, research staff, and undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to apply. The program aims to support projects that will benefit low-income communities in India, and facilitates travel and other expenses related to directly engaging with those communities.Gokul Sampath, a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Jonathan Bessette, a PhD student in MechE, initially met through J-WAFS-sponsored conference travel, and discovered their mutual interest in the problem of arsenic in water in India. Together, they developed a cross-disciplinary proposal that received a J-WAFS India Grant. Their project is studying how women in rural India make decisions about where they fetch water for their families, and how these decisions impact exposure to groundwater contaminants like naturally-occurring arsenic. Specifically, they are developing low-cost remote sensors to better understand water-fetching practices. The grant is enabling Sampath and Bessette to equip Indian households with sensor-enabled water collection devices (“smart buckets”) that will provide them data about fetching practices in arsenic-affected villages. By demonstrating the efficacy of a sensor-based approach, the team hopes to address a major data gap in international development. “It is due to programs like the Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab that I was able to obtain the support for interdisciplinary work on connecting water security, public health, and regional planning in India,” says Sampath.J-WAFS travel grants for water conferencesIn addition to funding graduate student research, J-WAFS also provides grants for graduate students to attend water conferences worldwide. Typically, students will only receive travel funding to attend conferences where they are presenting their research. However, the J-WAFS travel grants support learning, networking, and career exploration opportunities for exceptional MIT graduate students who are interested in a career in the water sector, whether in academia, nonprofits, government, or industry.Catherine Lu ’23, MNG ’24 was awarded a 2023 Travel Grant to attend the UNC Water and Health Conference in North Carolina. The conference serves as a curated space for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to convene and assess data, scrutinize scientific findings, and enhance new and existing strategies for expanding access to and provision of services for water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Lu, who studied civil and environmental engineering, worked with Professor Dara Entekhabi on modeling and predicting droughts in Africa using satellite Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data. As she evaluated her research trajectory and career options in the water sector, Lu found the conference to be informative and enlightening. “I was able to expand my knowledge on all the sectors and issues that are related to water and the implications they have on my research topic.” Furthermore, she notes: “I was really impressed by the diverse range of people that were able to attend the conference. The global perspective offered at the conference provided a valuable context for understanding the challenges and successes of different regions around the world — from WASH education in schools in Zimbabwe and India to rural water access disparities in the United States … Being able to engage with such passionate and dedicated people has motivated me to continue progress in this sector.” Following graduation, Lu secured a position as a water resources engineer at CDM Smith, an engineering and construction firm.Daniela Morales, a master’s student in city planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was a 2024 J-WAFS Travel Grant recipient who attended World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden. The annual global conference is organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute and convenes leading experts, decision-makers, and professionals in the water sector to actively engage in discussions and developments addressing critical water-related challenges. Morales’ research interests involve drinking water quality and access in rural and peri-urban areas affected by climate change impacts, the effects of municipal water shutoffs on marginalized communities, and the relationship between regional water management and public health outcomes. When reflecting on her experience at the conference, Morales writes: “Being part of this event has given me so much motivation to continue my professional and academic journey in water management as it relates to public health and city planning … There was so much energy that was collectively generated in the conference, and so many new ideas that I was able to process around my own career interests and my role as a future planner in water management, that the last day of the conference felt less like an ending and more of the beginning of a new chapter. I am excited to take all the information I learned to work towards my own research, and continue to build relationships with all the new contacts I made.” Morales also notes that without the support of the J-WAFS grant, “I would not have had the opportunity to make it to Stockholm and participate in such a unique week of water wisdom.”Seed grants and Solutions grantsJ-WAFS offers seed grants for early-stage research and Solutions Grants for later-stage research that is ready to move from the lab to the commercial world. Proposals for both types of grants must be submitted and led by an MIT principal investigator, but graduate students, and sometimes undergraduates, are often supported by these grants.Arjav Shah, a PhD-MBA student in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management, is currently pursuing the commercialization of a water treatment technology that was first supported through a 2019 J-WAFS seed grant and then a 2022 J-WAFS Solutions Grant with Professor Patrick Doyle. The technology uses hydrogels to remove a broad range of micropollutants from water. The Solutions funding enables entrepreneurial students and postdocs to lay the groundwork to commercialize a technology by assessing use scenarios and exploring business needs with actual potential customers. “With J-WAFS’ support, we were not only able to scale up the technology, but also gain a deeper understanding of market needs and develop a strong business case,” says Shah. Shah and the Solutions team have discovered that the hydrogels could be used in several real-world contexts, ranging from large-scale industrial use to small-scale, portable, off-grid applications. “We are incredibly grateful to J-WAFS for their support, particularly in fostering industry connections and facilitating introductions to investors, potential customers, and experts,” Shah adds.Shah was also a 2023 J-WAFS Travel Grant awardee who attended Stockholm World Water Week that year. He says, “J-WAFS has played a pivotal role in both my academic journey at MIT and my entrepreneurial pursuits. J-WAFS support has helped me grow both as a scientist and an aspiring entrepreneur. The exposure and opportunities provided have allowed me to develop critical skills such as customer discovery, financial modeling, business development, fundraising, and storytelling — all essential for translating technology into real-world impact. These experiences provided invaluable insights into what it takes to bring a technology from the lab to market.”Shah is currently leading efforts to spin out a company to commercialize the hydrogel research. Since receiving J-WAFS support, the team has made major strides toward launching a startup company, including winning the Pillar VC Moonshot Prize, Cleantech Open National Grand Prize, MassCEC Catalyst Award, and participation in the NSF I-Corps National Program.J-WAFS student video competitionsJ-WAFS has hosted two video competitions: MIT Research for a Water Secure Future and MIT Research for a Food Secure Future, in honor of World Water Day and Word Food Day, respectively. In these competitions, students are tasked with creating original videos showcasing their innovative water and food research conducted at MIT. The opportunity is open to MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni.Following a review by a distinguished panel of judges, Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 won first place in the 2022 J-WAFS World Food Day Student Video Competition for his video focused on eliminating pesticide pollution and waste. Jayaprakash delved into the science behind AgZen-Cloak, a new generation of agricultural sprays that prevents pesticides from bouncing off of plants and seeping into the ground, thus causing harmful runoff. The J-WAFS competition provided Jayaprakash with a platform to highlight the universal, low-cost, and environmentally sustainable benefits of AgZen-Cloak. Jayaprakash worked on similar technology as a funded student on a J-WAFS Solutions grant with Professor Kripa Varanasi. The Solutions grant, in fact, helped Jayaprakash and Varanasi to launch AgZen, a company that deploys AgZen-Cloak and other products and technologies to control the interactions of droplets and sprays with crop surfaces. AgZen is currently helping farmers sustainably tend to their agricultural plots while also protecting the environment.  In 2021, Hilary Johnson SM ’18, PhD ’22, won first place in the J-WAFS World Water Day video competition. Her video highlighted her work on a novel pump that uses adaptive hydraulics for improved pump efficiency. The pump was part of a sponsored research project with Xylem Inc., a J-WAFS Research Affiliate company, and Professor Alex Slocum of MechE. At the time, Johnson was a PhD student in Slocum’s lab. She was instrumental in the development of the pump by engineering the volute to expand and contract to meet changing system flow rates. Johnson went on to later become a 2021-22 J-WAFS Fellow, and is now a full-time mechanical engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.J-WAFS-supported student clubsJ-WAFS-supported student clubs provide members of the MIT student community the opportunity for networking and professional advancement through events focused on water and food systems topics.J-WAFS is a sponsor of the MIT Water Club, a student-led group that supports and promotes the engagement of the MIT community in water-sector-related activism, dissemination of information, and research innovation. The club allows students to spearhead the organization of conferences, lectures, outreach events, research showcases, and entrepreneurship competitions including the former MIT Water Innovation Prize and MIT Water Summit. J-WAFS not only sponsors the MIT Water Club financially, but offers mentorship and guidance to the leadership team.The MIT Food and Agriculture Club is also supported by J-WAFS. The club’s mission is to promote the engagement of the MIT community in food and agriculture-related topics. In doing so, the students lead initiatives to share the innovative technology and business solutions researchers are developing in food and agriculture systems. J-WAFS assists in the connection of passionate MIT students with those who are actively working in the food and agriculture industry beyond the Institute. From 2015 to 2022, J-WAFS also helped the club co-produce the Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize — a student business plan competition for food and agricultural startups.From 2023 onward, the MIT Water Club and the MIT Food and Ag Club have been joining forces to organize a combined prize competition: The MIT Water, Food and Agriculture (WFA) Innovation Prize. The WFA Innovation Prize is a business plan competition for student-led startups focused on any region or market. The teams present business plans involving a technology, product, service, or process that is aimed at solving a problem related to water, food, or agriculture. The competition encourages all approaches to innovation, from engineering and product design to policy and data analytics. The goal of the competition is to help emerging entrepreneurs translate research and ideas into businesses, access mentors and resources, and build networks in the water, food, and agriculture industries. J-WAFS offers financial and in-kind support, working with student leaders to plan, organize, and implement the stages of the competition through to the final pitch event. This year, J-WAFS is continuing to support the WFA team, which is led by Ali Decker, an MBA student at MIT Sloan, and Sam Jakshtis, a master’s student in MIT’s science in real estate development program. The final pitch event will take place on April 30 in the MIT Media Lab.“I’ve had the opportunity to work with Renee Robins, executive director of J-WAFS, on MIT’s Water, Food and Agriculture Innovation Prize for the past two years, and it has been both immensely valuable and a delight to have her support,” says Decker. “Renee has helped us in all areas of prize planning: brainstorming new ideas, thinking through startup finalist selection, connecting to potential sponsors and partners, and more. Above all, she supports us with passion and joy; each time we meet, I look forward to our discussion,” Decker adds.J-WAFS eventsThroughout the year, J-WAFS aims to offer events that will engage any in the MIT student community who are working in water or food systems. For example, on April 19, 2023, J-WAFS teamed up with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) to co-host an MIT student poster session for Earth Month. The theme of the poster session was “MIT research for a changing planet,” and it featured work from 11 MIT students with projects in water, food, energy, and the environment. The students, who represented a range of MIT departments, labs, and centers, were on hand to discuss their projects and engage with those attending the event. Attendees could vote for their favorite poster after being asked to consider which poster most clearly communicated the research problem and the potential solution. At the end of the night, votes were tallied and the winner of the “People’s Choice Award” for best poster was Elaine Liu ’24, an undergraduate in mathematics at the time of the event. Liu’s poster featured her work on managing failure cascades in systems with wind power.J-WAFS also hosts less-structured student networking events. For instance, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2024, J-WAFS hosted an ice cream social for student networking. The informal event was an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students from across the Institute to meet and mingle with like-minded peers working in, or interested in, water and food systems. Students were able to explain their current and future research, interests, and projects and ask questions while exchanging ideas, engaging with one another, and potentially forming collaborations, or at the very least sharing insights.Looking ahead to 10 more years of student impactOver the past decade, J-WAFS has demonstrated a strong commitment to empowering students in the water and food sectors, fostering an environment where they can confidently drive meaningful change and innovation. PhD student Jonathan Bessette sums up the J-WAFS community as a “one-of-a-kind community that enables essential research in water and food that otherwise would not be pursued. It’s this type of research that is not often the focus of major funding, yet has such a strong impact in sustainable development.”J-WAFS aims to provide students with the support and tools they need to conduct authentic and meaningful water and food-related research that will benefit communities around the world. This support, coupled with an MIT education, enables students to become leaders in sustainable water and food systems. As the second decade of J-WAFS programming begins, the J-WAFS team remains committed to fostering student collaboration across the Institute, driving innovative solutions to revitalize the world’s water and food systems while empowering the next generation of pioneers in these critical fields.  More

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      Rohit Karnik named director of J-WAFS

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      Rohit Karnik, the Tata Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the new director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), effective March 1. Karnik, who has served as associate director of J-WAFS since 2023, succeeds founding director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering.Karnik assumes the role of director at a pivotal time for J-WAFS, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Announcing the appointment today in a letter to the J-WAFS research community, Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz noted Karnik’s deep involvement with the lab’s research efforts and programming, as well as his accolades as a researcher, teacher, leader, and mentor. “I am delighted that Rohit will bring his talent and vision to bear on the J-WAFS mission, ensuring the program sustains its direct support of research on campus and its important impact around the world,” Waitz wrote.J-WAFS is the only program at MIT focused exclusively on water and food research. Since 2015, the lab has made grants totaling approximately $25M to researchers across the Institute, including from all five schools and 40 departments, labs, and centers. It has supported 300 faculty, research staff, and students combined. Furthermore, the J-WAFS Solutions Program, which supports efforts to commercialize innovative water and food technologies, has spun out 12 companies and two open-sourced products. “We launched J-WAFS with the aim of building a community of water and food researchers at MIT, taking advantage of MIT’s strengths in so many disciplines that contribute to these most essential human needs,” writes Lienhard, who will retire this June. “After a decade’s work, that community is strong and visible. I am delighted that Rohit has agreed to take the reins. He will bring the program to the next level.” Lienhard has served as director since founding J-WAFS in 2014, along with executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who last fall shared her intent to retire as well. “It’s a big change for a program to turn over both the director and executive director roles at the same time,” says Robins. “Having worked alongside Rohit as our associate director for the past couple of years, I am greatly assured that J-WAFS will be in good hands with a new and steady leadership team.”Karnik became associate director of J-WAFS in July 2023, a move that coincided with the start of a sabbatical for Lienhard. Before that time, Karnik was already well engaged with J-WAFS as a grant recipient, reviewer, and community member. As associate director, Rohit has been integral to J-WAFS operations, planning, and grant management, including the proposal selection process. He was instrumental in planning the second J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant and led workshops at which researchers brainstormed proposal topics and formed teams. Karnik also engaged with J-WAFS’ corporate partners, helped plan lectures and events, and offered project oversight. “The experience gave me broad exposure to the amazing ideas and research at MIT in the water and food space, and the collaborations and synergies across departments and schools that enable excellence in research,” says Karnik. “The strengths of J-WAFS lie in being able to support principal investigators in pursuing research to address humanity’s water and food needs; in creating a community of students though the fellowship program and support of student clubs; and in bringing people together at seminars, workshops, and other events. All of this is made possible by the endowment and a dedicated team with close involvement in the projects after the grants are awarded.”J-WAFS was established through a generous gift from Community Jameel, an independent, global organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world. The lab was named in honor of the late Abdul Latif Jameel, the founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel company and father of MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78, who founded and chairs Community Jameel. J-WAFS’ operations are carried out by a small but passionate team of people at MIT who are dedicated to the mission of securing water and food systems. That mission is more important than ever, as climate change, urbanization, and a growing global population are putting tremendous stress on the world’s water and food supplies. These challenges drive J-WAFS’ efforts to mobilize the research, innovation, and technology that can sustainably secure humankind’s most vital resources. As director, Karnik will help shape the research agenda and key priorities for J-WAFS and usher the program into its second decade.Karnik originally joined MIT as a postdoc in the departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering in October 2006. In September 2007, he became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, before being promoted to associate professor in 2012. His research group focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and applying that to the design of micro- and nanofluidic systems for applications in water, healthcare, energy, and the environment. Past projects include ones on membranes for water filtration and chemical separations, sensors for water, and water filters from waste wood. Karnik has served as associate department head and interim co-department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as faculty director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering.Before coming to MIT, Karnik received a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a master’s and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. He has authored numerous publications, is co-inventor on several patents, and has received awards and honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the MIT Office of Graduate Education’s Committed to Caring award, and election to the National Academy of Inventors as a senior member. Lienhard, J-WAFS’ outgoing director, has served on the MIT faculty since 1988. His research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, thermodynamics, and separation processes. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and master’s theses, and he is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and three textbooks. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, most commercialized through startup companies with his students. One of these, the water treatment company Gradiant Corporation, is now valued over $1 billion and employs more than 1,200 people. Lienhard has received many awards, including the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association.Since 1998, Renee Robins has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. She served in roles for the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, in biology and humanities/anthropology, and a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She has overseen significant growth in J-WAFS’ activities, funding, staffing, and collaborations over the past decade. In 2021, she was awarded an Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research, in recognition of her contributions within her role at J-WAFS to help the Institute carry out its mission.“John and Renee have done a remarkable job in establishing J-WAFS and bringing it up to its present form,” says Karnik. “I’m committed to making sure that the key aspects of J-WAFS that bring so much value to the MIT community, the nation, and the world continue to function well. MIT researchers and alumni in the J-WAFS community are already having an impact on addressing humanity’s water and food needs, and I believe that there is potential for MIT to have an even greater positive impact on securing humanity’s vital resources in the future.” More

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      High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a pool

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      Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. If the droplets land in a puddle or pond, they can form a crown-like splash that, with enough force, can dislodge any surface particles and launch them into the air.Now MIT scientists have taken high-speed videos of droplets splashing into a deep pool, to track how the fluid evolves, above and below the water line, frame by millisecond frame. Their work could help to predict how spashing droplets, such as from rainstorms and irrigation systems, may impact watery surfaces and aerosolize surface particles, such as pollen on puddles or pesticides in agricultural runoff.The team carried out experiments in which they dispensed water droplets of various sizes and from various heights into a pool of water. Using high-speed imaging, they measured how the liquid pool deformed as the impacting droplet hit the pool’s surface.Across all their experiments, they observed a common splash evolution: As a droplet hit the pool, it pushed down below the surface to form a “crater,” or cavity. At nearly the same time, a wall of liquid rose above the surface, forming a crown. Interestingly, the team observed that small, secondary droplets were ejected from the crown before the crown reached its maximum height. This entire evolution happens in a fraction of a second.

      “This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Lydia Bourouiba says. GIF has been edited down to 5 frames per second.

      Image: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News

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      Scientists have caught snapshots of droplet splashes in the past, such as the famous “Milk Drop Coronet” — a photo of a drop of milk in mid-splash, taken by the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who invented a photographic technique to capture quickly moving objects.The new work represents the first time scientists have used such high-speed images to model the entire splash dynamics of a droplet in a deep pool, combining what happens both above and below the surface. The team has used the imaging to gather new data central to build a mathematical model that predicts how a droplet’s shape will morph and merge as it hits a pool’s surface. They plan to use the model as a baseline to explore to what extent a splashing droplet might drag up and launch particles from the water pool.“Impacts of drops on liquid layers are ubiquitous,” says study author Lydia Bourouiba, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). “Such impacts can produce myriads of secondary droplets that could act as carriers for pathogens, particles, or microbes that are on the surface of impacted pools or contaminated water bodies. This work is key in enabling prediction of droplet size distributions, and potentially also what such drops can carry with them.”Bourouiba and her mentees have published their results in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. MIT co-authors include former graduate student Raj Dandekar PhD ’22, postdoc (Eric) Naijian Shen, and student mentee Boris Naar.Above and belowAt MIT, Bourouiba heads up the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, part of the Fluids and Health Network, where she and her team explore the fundamental physics of fluids and droplets in a range of environmental, energy, and health contexts, including disease transmission. For their new study, the team looked to better understand how droplets impact a deep pool — a seemingly simple phenomenon that nevertheless has been tricky to precisely capture and characterize.Bourouiba notes that there have been recent breakthroughs in modeling the evolution of a splashing droplet below a pool’s surface. As a droplet hits a pool of water, it breaks through the surface and drags air down through the pool to create a short-lived crater. Until now, scientists have focused on the evolution of this underwater cavity, mainly for applications in energy harvesting. What happens above the water, and how a droplet’s crown-like shape evolves with the cavity below, remained less understood.“The descriptions and understanding of what happens below the surface, and above, have remained very much divorced,” says Bourouiba, who believes such an understanding can help to predict how droplets launch and spread chemicals, particles, and microbes into the air.Splash in 3DTo study the coupled dynamics between a droplet’s cavity and crown, the team set up an experiment to dispense water droplets into a deep pool. For the purposes of their study, the researchers considered a deep pool to be a body of water that is deep enough that a splashing droplet would remain far away from the pool’s bottom. In these terms, they found that a pool with a depth of at least 20 centimeters was sufficient for their experiments.They varied each droplet’s size, with an average diameter of about 5 millimeters. They also dispensed droplets from various heights, causing the droplets to hit the pool’s surface at different speeds, which on average was about 5 meters per second. The overall dynamics, Bourouiba says, should be similar to what occurs on the surface of a puddle or pond during an average rainstorm.“This is capturing the speed at which raindrops fall,” she says. “These wouldn’t be very small, misty drops. This would be rainstorm drops for which one needs an umbrella.”Using high-speed imaging techniques inspired by Edgerton’s pioneering photography, the team captured videos of pool-splashing droplets, at rates of up to 12,500 frames per second. They then applied in-house imaging processing methods to extract key measurements from the image sequences, such as the changing width and depth of the underwater cavity, and the evolving diameter and height of the rising crown. The researchers also captured especially tricky measurements, of the crown’s wall thickness profile and inner flow — the cylinder that rises out of the pool, just before it forms a rim and points that are characteristic of a crown.“This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Bourouiba says. “It’s what connects the fluid from the pool to what will go into the rim and then be ejected into the air through smaller, secondary droplets.”The researchers worked the image data into a set of “evolution equations,” or a mathematical model that relates the various properties of an impacting droplet, such as the width of its cavity and the thickness and speed profiles of its crown wall, and how these properties change over time, given a droplet’s starting size and impact speed.“We now have a closed-form mathematical expression that people can use to see how all these quantities of a splashing droplet change over space and time,” says co-author Shen, who plans, with Bourouiba, to apply the new model to the behavior of secondary droplets and understanding how a splash end-up dispersing particles such as pathogens and pesticides. “This opens up the possibility to study all these problems of splash in 3D, with self-contained closed-formed equations, which was not possible before.”This research was supported, in part, by the Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative; the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Inditex; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. More

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      Pivot Bio is using microbial nitrogen to make agriculture more sustainable

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      The Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s growing population, but it also created huge environmental problems. It is one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes in the world, responsible for 1-2 percent of global energy consumption. It also releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that harms the ozone layer. Excess nitrogen also routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater.In place of synthetic fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming more sustainable. The company, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to grow on plant roots, where they feed on the root’s sugars and precisely deliver nitrogen in return.Pivot’s microbial colonies grow with the plant and produce more nitrogen at exactly the time the plant needs it, minimizing nitrogen runoff.“The way we have delivered nutrients to support plant growth historically is fertilizer, but that’s an inefficient way to get all the nutrients you need,” says Temme, Pivot’s chief innovation officer. “We have the ability now to help farmers be more efficient and productive with microbes.”Farmers can replace up to 40 pounds per acre of traditional nitrogen with Pivot’s product, which amounts to about a quarter of the total nitrogen needed for a crop like corn.Pivot’s products are already being used to grow corn, wheat, barley, oats, and other grains across millions of acres of American farmland, eliminating hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 equivalent in the process. The company’s impact is even more striking given its unlikely origins, which trace back to one of the most challenging times of Voigt’s career.A Pivot from despairThe beginning of every faculty member’s career can be a sink-or-swim moment, and by Voigt’s own account, he was drowning. As a freshly minted assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to stand up his lab, attract funding, and get experiments started.Around 2008, Voigt joined a research group out of the University of California at Berkeley that was writing a grant proposal focused on photovoltaic materials. His initial role was minor, but a senior researcher pulled out of the group a week before the proposal had to be submitted, so Voigt stepped up.“I said ‘I’ll finish this section in a week,’” Voigt recalls. “It was my big chance.”For the proposal, Voigt detailed an ambitious plan to rearrange the genetics of biologic photosynthetic systems to make them more efficient. He barely submitted it in time.A few months went by, then the proposal reviews finally came back. Voigt hurried to the meeting with some of the most senior researchers at UC Berkeley to discuss the responses.“My part of the proposal got completely slammed,” Voigt says. “There were something like 15 reviews on it — they were longer than the actual grant — and it’s just one after another tearing into my proposal. All the most famous people are in this meeting, future energy secretaries, future leaders of the university, and it was totally embarrassing. After that meeting, I was considering leaving academia.”A few discouraging months later, Voigt got a call from Paul Ludden, the dean of the School of Science at UC Berkeley. He wanted to talk.“As I walk into Paul’s office, he’s reading my proposal,” Voigt recalls. “He sits me down and says, ‘Everybody’s telling me how terrible this is.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ But then he says, ‘I think there’s something here. Your idea is good, you just picked the wrong system.’”Ludden went on to explain to Voigt that he should apply his gene-swapping idea to nitrogen fixation. He even offered to send Voigt a postdoc from his lab, Dehua Zhao, to help. Voigt paired Zhao with Temme, and sure enough, the resulting 2011 paper of their work was well-received by the nitrogen fixation community.“Nitrogen fixation has been a holy grail for scientists, agronomists, and farmers for almost a century, ever since somebody discovered the first microbe that can fix nitrogen for legumes like soybeans,” Temme says. “Everybody always said that someday we’ll be able to do this for the cereal crops. The excitement with Pivot was this is the first time that technology became accessible.”Voigt had moved to MIT in 2010. When the paper came out, he founded Pivot Bio with Temme and another Berkeley researcher, Alvin Tamsir. Since then, Voigt, who is the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor at MIT and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering, has continued collaborating with Pivot on things like increasing nitrogen production, making strains more stable, and making them inducible to different signals from the plant. Pivot has licensed technology from MIT, and the research has also received support from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).Pivot’s first goals were to gain regulatory approval and prove themselves in the marketplace. To gain approval in the U.S., Pivot’s team focused on using DNA from within the same organism rather than bringing in totally new DNA, which simplified the approval process. It also partnered with independent corn seed dealers to get its product to farms. Early deployments occurred in 2019.Farmers apply Pivot’s product at planting, either as a liquid that gets sprayed on the soil or as a dry powder that is rehydrated and applied to the seeds as a coating. The microbes live on the surface of the growing root system, eating plant sugars and releasing nitrogen throughout the plant’s life cycle.“Today, our microbes colonize just a fraction of the total sugars provided by the plant,” Temme explains. “They’re also sharing ammonia with the plant, and all of those things are just a portion of what’s possible technically. Our team is always trying to figure out how to make those microbes more efficient at getting the energy they need to grow or at fixing nitrogen and sharing it with the crop.”In 2023, Pivot started the N-Ovator program to connect companies with growers who practice sustainable farming using Pivot’s microbial nitrogen. Through the program, companies buy nitrogen credits and farmers can get paid by verifying their practices. The program was named one of the Inventions of the Year by Time Magazine last year and has paid out millions of dollars to farmers to date.Microbial nitrogen and beyondPivot is currently selling to farmers across the U.S. and working with smallholder farmers in Kenya. It’s also hoping to gain approval for its microbial solution in Brazil and Canada, which it hopes will be its next markets.”How do we get the economics to make sense for everybody — the farmers, our partners, and the company?” Temme says of Pivot’s mission. “Because this truly can be a deflationary technology that upends the very expensive traditional way of making fertilizer.”Pivot’s team is also extending the product to cotton, and Temme says microbes can be a nitrogen source for any type of plant on the planet. Further down the line, the company believes it can help farmers with other nutrients essential to help their crops grow.“Now that we’ve established our technology, how can Pivot help farmers overcome all the other limitations they face with crop nutrients to maximize yields?” Temme asks. “That really starts to change the way a farmer thinks about managing the entire acre from a price, productivity, and sustainability perspective.” More

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      Coffee fix: MIT students decode the science behind the perfect cup

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      Elaine Jutamulia ’24 took a sip of coffee with a few drops of anise extract. It was her second try.“What do you think?” asked Omar Orozco, standing at a lab table in MIT’s Breakerspace, surrounded by filters, brewing pots, and other coffee paraphernalia.“I think when I first tried it, it was still pretty bitter,” Jutamulia said thoughtfully. “But I think now that it’s steeped for a little bit — it took out some of the bitterness.”Jutamulia and current MIT senior Orozco were part of class 3.000 (Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup), a new MIT course that debuted in spring 2024. The class combines lectures on chemistry and the science of coffee with hands-on experimentation and group projects. Their project explored how additives such as anise, salt, and chili oil influence coffee extraction — the process of dissolving flavor compounds from ground coffee into water — to improve taste and correct common brewing errors.Alongside tasting, they used an infrared spectrometer to identify the chemical compounds in their coffee samples that contribute to flavor. Does anise make bitter coffee smoother? Could chili oil balance the taste?“Generally speaking, if we could make a recommendation, that’s what we’re trying to find,” Orozco said.A three-unit “discovery class” designed to help first-year students explore majors, 3.000 was widely popular, enrolling more than 50 students. Its success was driven by the beverage at its core and the class’s hands-on approach, which pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.For aeronautics and astronautics majors Gabi McDonald and McKenzie Dinesen, coffee was the draw, but the class encouraged them to experiment and think in new ways. “It’s easy to drop people like us in, who love coffee, and, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s this class where we can go make coffee half the time and try all different kinds of things?’” McDonald says.Percolating knowledgeThe class pairs weekly lectures on topics such as coffee chemistry, the anatomy and composition of a coffee bean, the effects of roasting, and the brewing process with tasting sessions — students sample coffee brewed from different beans, roasts, and grinds. In the MIT Breakerspace, a new space on campus conceived and managed by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), students use equipment such as a digital optical microscope to examine ground coffee particles and a scanning electron microscope, which shoots beams of electrons at samples to reveal cross-sections of beans in stunning detail.Once students learn to operate instruments for guided tasks, they form groups and design their own projects.“The driver for those projects is some question they have about coffee raised by one of the lectures or the tasting sessions, or just something they’ve always wanted to know,” says DMSE Professor Jeffrey Grossman, who designed and teaches the class. “Then they’ll use one or more of these pieces of equipment to shed some light on it.”Grossman traces the origins of the class to his initial vision for the Breakerspace, a laboratory for materials analysis and lounge for MIT undergraduates. Opened in November 2023, the space gives students hands-on experience with materials science and engineering, an interdisciplinary field combining chemistry, physics, and engineering to probe the composition and structure of materials.“The world is made of stuff, and these are the tools to understand that stuff and bring it to life,” says Grossman. So he envisioned a class that would give students an “exploratory, inspiring nudge.”“Then the question wasn’t the pedagogy, it was, ‘What’s the hook?’ In materials science, there are a lot of directions you could go, but if you have one that inspires people because they know it and maybe like it already, then that’s exciting.”Cup of ambitionThat hook, of course, was coffee, the second-most-consumed beverage after water. It captured students’ imagination and motivated them to push boundaries.Orozco brought a fair amount of coffee knowledge to the class. In 2023, he taught in Mexico through the MISTI Global Teaching Labs program, where he toured several coffee farms and acquired a deeper knowledge of the beverage. He learned, for example, that black coffee, contrary to general American opinion, isn’t naturally bitter; bitterness arises from certain compounds that develop during the roasting process.“If you properly brew it with the right beans, it actually tastes good,” says Orozco, a humanities and engineering major. A year later, in 3.000, he expanded his understanding of making a good brew, particularly through the group project with Jutamulia and other students to fix bad coffee.The group prepared a control sample of “perfectly brewed” coffee — based on taste, coffee-to-water ratio, and other standards covered in class — alongside coffee that was under-extracted and over-extracted. Under-extracted coffee, made with water that isn’t hot enough or brewed for too short a time, tastes sharp or sour. Over-extracted coffee, brewed with too much coffee or for too long, tastes bitter.Those coffee samples got additives and were analyzed using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, measuring how coffee absorbed infrared light to identify flavor-related compounds. Jutamulia examined FTIR readings taken from a sample with lime juice to see how the citric acid influenced its chemical profile.“Can we find any correlation between what we saw and the existing known measurements of citric acid?” asks Jutamulia, who studied computation and cognition at MIT, graduating last May.Another group dove into coffee storage, questioning why conventional wisdom advises against freezing.“We just wondered why that’s the case,” says electrical engineering and computer science major Noah Wiley, a coffee enthusiast with his own espresso machine.The team compared methods like freezing brewed coffee, frozen coffee grounds, and whole beans ground after freezing, evaluating their impact on flavor and chemical composition.“Then we’re going to see which ones taste good,” says Wiley. The team used a class coffee review sheet to record attributes like acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and overall flavor, pairing the results with FTIR analysis to determine how storage affected taste.Wiley acknowledged that “good” is subjective. “Sometimes there’s a group consensus. I think people like fuller coffee, not watery,” he says.Other student projects compared caffeine levels in different coffee types, analyzed the effect of microwaving coffee on its chemical composition and flavor, and investigated the differences between authentic and counterfeit coffee beans.“We gave the students some papers to look at in case they were interested,” says Justin Lavallee, Breakerspace manager and co-teacher of the class. “But mostly we told them to focus on something they wanted to learn more about.”Drip, drip, dripBeyond answering specific questions about coffee, both students and teachers gained deeper insights into the beverage.“Coffee is a complicated material. There are thousands of molecules in the beans, which change as you roast and extract them,” says Grossman. “The number of ways you can engineer this collection of molecules — it’s profound, ranging from where and how the coffee’s grown to how the cherries are then treated to get the beans to how the beans are roasted and ground to the brewing method you use.”Dinesen learned firsthand, discovering, for example, that darker roasts have less caffeine than lighter roasts, puncturing a common misconception. “You can vary coffee so much — just with the roast of the bean, the size of the ground,” she says. “It’s so easily manipulatable, if that’s a word.”In addition to learning about the science and chemistry behind coffee, Dinesen and McDonald gained new brewing techniques, like using a pour-over cone. The pair even incorporated coffee making and testing into their study routine, brewing coffee while tackling problem sets for another class.“I would put my pour-over cone in my backpack with a Ziploc bag full of grounds, and we would go to the Student Center and pull out the cone, a filter, and the coffee grounds,” McDonald says. “And then we would make pour-overs while doing a P-set. We tested different amounts of water, too. It was fun.”Tony Chen, a materials science and engineering major, reflected on the 3.000’s title — “Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup” — and whether making a perfect cup is possible. “I don’t think there’s one perfect cup because each person has their own preferences. I don’t think I’ve gotten to mine yet,” he says.Enthusiasm for coffee’s complexity and the discovery process was exactly what Grossman hoped to inspire in his students. “The best part for me was also just seeing them developing their own sense of curiosity,” he says.He recalled a moment early in the class when students, after being given a demo of the optical microscope, saw the surface texture of a magnified coffee bean, the mottled shades of color, and the honeycomb-like pattern of tiny irregular cells.“They’re like, ‘Wait a second. What if we add hot water to the grounds while it’s under the microscope? Would we see the extraction?’ So, they got hot water and some ground coffee beans, and lo and behold, it looked different. They could see the extraction right there,” Grossman says. “It’s like they have an idea that’s inspired by the learning, and they go and try it. I saw that happen many, many times throughout the semester.” More

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      Liquid on Mars was not necessarily all water

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      Dry river channels and lake beds on Mars point to the long-ago presence of a liquid on the planet’s surface, and the minerals observed from orbit and from landers seem to many to prove that the liquid was ordinary water. Not so fast, the authors of a new Perspectives article in Nature Geoscience suggest. Water is only one of two possible liquids under what are thought to be the conditions present on ancient Mars. The other is liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), and it may actually have been easier for CO2 in the atmosphere to condense into a liquid under those conditions than for water ice to melt. While others have suggested that liquid CO2 (LCO2) might be the source of some of the river channels seen on Mars, the mineral evidence has seemed to point uniquely to water. However, the new paper cites recent studies of carbon sequestration, the process of burying liquefied CO2 recovered from Earth’s atmosphere deep in underground caverns, which show that similar mineral alteration can occur in liquid CO2 as in water, sometimes even more rapidly.The new paper is led by Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE instrument aboard the NASA Mars Rover Perseverance. Hecht, a research scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory and a former associate director, says, “Understanding how sufficient liquid water was able to flow on early Mars to explain the morphology and mineralogy we see today is probably the greatest unsettled question of Mars science. There is likely no one right answer, and we are merely suggesting another possible piece of the puzzle.”In the paper, the authors discuss the compatibility of their proposal with current knowledge of Martian atmospheric content and implications for Mars surface mineralogy. They also explore the latest carbon sequestration research and conclude that “LCO2–mineral reactions are consistent with the predominant Mars alteration products: carbonates, phyllosilicates, and sulfates.” The argument for the probable existence of liquid CO2 on the Martian surface is not an all-or-nothing scenario; either liquid CO2, liquid water, or a combination may have brought about such geomorphological and mineralogical evidence for a liquid Mars.Three plausible cases for liquid CO2 on the Martian surface are proposed and discussed: stable surface liquid, basal melting under CO2 ice, and subsurface reservoirs. The likelihood of each depends on the actual inventory of CO2 at the time, as well as the temperature conditions on the surface.The authors acknowledge that the tested sequestration conditions, where the liquid CO2 is above room temperature at pressures of tens of atmospheres, are very different from the cold, relatively low-pressure conditions that might have produced liquid CO2 on early Mars. They call for further laboratory investigations under more realistic conditions to test whether the same chemical reactions occur.Hecht explains, “It’s difficult to say how likely it is that this speculation about early Mars is actually true. What we can say, and we are saying, is that the likelihood is high enough that the possibility should not be ignored.”  More