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      in Security

      Tackling counterfeit seeds with “unclonable” labels

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      Average crop yields in Africa are consistently far below those expected, and one significant reason is the prevalence of counterfeit seeds whose germination rates are far lower than those of the genuine ones. The World Bank estimates that as much as half of all seeds sold in some African countries are fake, which could help to account for crop production that is far below potential.

      There have been many attempts to prevent this counterfeiting through tracking labels, but none have proved effective; among other issues, such labels have been vulnerable to hacking because of the deterministic nature of their encoding systems. But now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a kind of tiny, biodegradable tag that can be applied directly to the seeds themselves, and that provides a unique randomly created code that cannot be duplicated.

      The new system, which uses minuscule dots of silk-based material, each containing a unique combination of different chemical signatures, is described today in the journal Science Advances in a paper by MIT’s dean of engineering Anantha Chandrakasan, professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, postdoc Hui Sun, and graduate student Saurav Maji.

      The problem of counterfeiting is an enormous one globally, the researchers point out, affecting everything from drugs to luxury goods, and many different systems have been developed to try to combat this. But there has been less attention to the problem in the area of agriculture, even though the consequences can be severe. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the World Bank estimates that counterfeit seeds are a significant factor in crop yields that average less than one-fifth of the potential for maize, and less than one-third for rice.

      Marelli explains that a key to the new system is creating a randomly-produced physical object whose exact composition is virtually impossible to duplicate. The labels they create “leverage randomness and uncertainty in the process of application, to generate unique signature features that can be read, and that cannot be replicated,” he says.

      What they’re dealing with, Sun adds, “is the very old job of trying, basically, not to get your stuff stolen. And you can try as much as you can, but eventually somebody is always smart enough to figure out how to do it, so nothing is really unbreakable. But the idea is, it’s almost impossible, if not impossible, to replicate it, or it takes so much effort that it’s not worth it anymore.”

      The idea of an “unclonable” code was originally developed as a way of protecting the authenticity of computer chips, explains Chandrakasan, who is the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “In integrated circuits, individual transistors have slightly different properties coined device variations,” he explains, “and you could then use that variability and combine that variability with higher-level circuits to create a unique ID for the device. And once you have that, then you can use that unique ID as a part of a security protocol. Something like transistor variability is hard to replicate from device to device, so that’s what gives it its uniqueness, versus storing a particular fixed ID.” The concept is based on what are known as physically unclonable functions, or PUFs.

      The team decided to try to apply that PUF principle to the problem of fake seeds, and the use of silk proteins was a natural choice because the material is not only harmless to the environment but also classified by the Food and Drug Administration in the “generally recognized as safe” category, so it requires no special approval for use on food products.

      “You could coat it on top of seeds,” Maji says, “and if you synthesize silk in a certain way, it will also have natural random variations. So that’s the idea, that every seed or every bag could have a unique signature.”

      Developing effective secure system solutions has long been one of Chandrakasan’s specialties, while Marelli has spent many years developing systems for applying silk coatings to a variety of fruits, vegetables, and seeds, so their collaboration was a natural for developing such a silk-based coding system toward enhanced security.

      “The challenge was what type of form factor to give to silk,” Sun says, “so that it can be fabricated very easily.” They developed a simple drop-casting approach that produces tags that are less than one-tenth of an inch in diameter. The second challenge was to develop “a way where we can read the uniqueness, in also a very high throughput and easy way.”

      For the unique silk-based codes, Marelli says, “eventually we found a way to add a color to these microparticles so that they assemble in random structures.” The resulting unique patterns can be read out not only by a spectrograph or a portable microscope, but even by an ordinary cellphone camera with a macro lens. This image can be processed locally to generate the PUF code and then sent to the cloud and compared with a secure database to ensure the authenticity of the product. “It’s random so that people cannot easily replicate it,” says Sun. “People cannot predict it without measuring it.”

      And the number of possible permutations that could result from the way they mix four basic types of colored silk nanoparticles is astronomical. “We were able to show that with a minimal amount of silk, we were able to generate 128 random bits of security,” Maji says. “So this gives rise to 2 to the power 128 possible combinations, which is extremely difficult to crack given the computational capabilities of the state-of-the-art computing systems.”

      Marelli says that “for us, it’s a good test bed in order to think out-of-the-box, and how we can have a path that somehow is more democratic.” In this case, that means “something that you can literally read with your phone, and you can fabricate by simply drop casting a solution, without using any advanced manufacturing technique, without going in a clean room.”

      Some additional work will be needed to make this a practical commercial product, Chandrakasan says. “There will have to be a development for at-scale reading” via smartphones. “So, that’s clearly a future opportunity.” But the principle now shows a clear path to the day when “a farmer could at least, maybe not every seed, but could maybe take some random seeds in a particular batch and verify them,” he says.

      The research was partially supported by the U.S. Office of Naval research and the National Science Foundation, Analog Devices Inc., an EECS Mathworks fellowship, and a Paul M. Cook Career Development Professorship. More

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      in Environment

      Detailed images from space offer clearer picture of drought effects on plants

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      “MIT is a place where dreams come true,” says César Terrer, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Here at MIT, Terrer says he’s given the resources needed to explore ideas he finds most exciting, and at the top of his list is climate science. In particular, he is interested in plant-soil interactions, and how the two can mitigate impacts of climate change. In 2022, Terrer received seed grant funding from the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) to produce drought monitoring systems for farmers. The project is leveraging a new generation of remote sensing devices to provide high-resolution plant water stress at regional to global scales.

      Growing up in Granada, Spain, Terrer always had an aptitude and passion for science. He studied environmental science at the University of Murcia, where he interned in the Department of Ecology. Using computational analysis tools, he worked on modeling species distribution in response to human development. Early on in his undergraduate experience, Terrer says he regarded his professors as “superheroes” with a kind of scholarly prowess. He knew he wanted to follow in their footsteps by one day working as a faculty member in academia. Of course, there would be many steps along the way before achieving that dream. 

      Upon completing his undergraduate studies, Terrer set his sights on exciting and adventurous research roles. He thought perhaps he would conduct field work in the Amazon, engaging with native communities. But when the opportunity arose to work in Australia on a state-of-the-art climate change experiment that simulates future levels of carbon dioxide, he headed south to study how plants react to CO2 in a biome of native Australian eucalyptus trees. It was during this experience that Terrer started to take a keen interest in the carbon cycle and the capacity of ecosystems to buffer rising levels of CO2 caused by human activity.

      Around 2014, he began to delve deeper into the carbon cycle as he began his doctoral studies at Imperial College London. The primary question Terrer sought to answer during his PhD was “will plants be able to absorb predicted future levels of CO2 in the atmosphere?” To answer the question, Terrer became an early adopter of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and remote sensing to analyze data from real-life, global climate change experiments. His findings from these “ground truth” values and observations resulted in a paper in the journal Science. In it, he claimed that climate models most likely overestimated how much carbon plants will be able to absorb by the end of the century, by a factor of three. 

      After postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, followed by a prestigious Lawrence Fellowship, Terrer says he had “too many ideas and not enough time to accomplish all those ideas.” He knew it was time to lead his own group. Not long after applying for faculty positions, he landed at MIT. 

      New ways to monitor drought

      Terrer is employing similar methods to those he used during his PhD to analyze data from all over the world for his J-WAFS project. He and postdoc Wenzhe Jiao collect data from remote sensing satellites and field experiments and use machine learning to come up with new ways to monitor drought. Terrer says Jiao is a “remote sensing wizard,” who fuses data from different satellite products to understand the water cycle. With Jiao’s hydrology expertise and Terrer’s knowledge of plants, soil, and the carbon cycle, the duo is a formidable team to tackle this project.

      According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, the number and duration of droughts has increased by 29 percent since 2000, as compared to the two previous decades. From the Horn of Africa to the Western United States, drought is devastating vegetation and severely stressing water supplies, compromising food production and spiking food insecurity. Drought monitoring can offer fundamental information on drought location, frequency, and severity, but assessing the impact of drought on vegetation is extremely challenging. This is because plants’ sensitivity to water deficits varies across species and ecosystems. 

      Terrer and Jiao are able to obtain a clearer picture of how drought is affecting plants by employing the latest generation of remote sensing observations, which offer images of the planet with incredible spatial and temporal resolution. Satellite products such as Sentinel, Landsat, and Planet can provide daily images from space with such high resolution that individual trees can be discerned. Along with the images and datasets from satellites, the team is using ground-based observations from meteorological data. They are also using the MIT SuperCloud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to process and analyze all of the data sets. The J-WAFS project is among one of the first to leverage high-resolution data to quantitatively measure plant drought impacts in the United States with the hopes of expanding to a global assessment in the future.

      Assisting farmers and resource managers 

      Every week, the U.S. Drought Monitor provides a map of drought conditions in the United States. The map has zero resolution and is more of a drought recap or summary, unable to predict future drought scenarios. The lack of a comprehensive spatiotemporal evaluation of historic and future drought impacts on global vegetation productivity is detrimental to farmers both in the United States and worldwide.  

      Terrer and Jiao plan to generate metrics for plant water stress at an unprecedented resolution of 10-30 meters. This means that they will be able to provide drought monitoring maps at the scale of a typical U.S. farm, giving farmers more precise, useful data every one to two days. The team will use the information from the satellites to monitor plant growth and soil moisture, as well as the time lag of plant growth response to soil moisture. In this way, Terrer and Jiao say they will eventually be able to create a kind of “plant water stress forecast” that may be able to predict adverse impacts of drought four weeks in advance. “According to the current soil moisture and lagged response time, we hope to predict plant water stress in the future,” says Jiao. 

      The expected outcomes of this project will give farmers, land and water resource managers, and decision-makers more accurate data at the farm-specific level, allowing for better drought preparation, mitigation, and adaptation. “We expect to make our data open-access online, after we finish the project, so that farmers and other stakeholders can use the maps as tools,” says Jiao. 

      Terrer adds that the project “has the potential to help us better understand the future states of climate systems, and also identify the regional hot spots more likely to experience water crises at the national, state, local, and tribal government scales.” He also expects the project will enhance our understanding of global carbon-water-energy cycle responses to drought, with applications in determining climate change impacts on natural ecosystems as a whole. More

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      in Security

      Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

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      There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers.

      Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem in crops around the world, while widespread labor shortages have hit the agricultural sector particularly hard.

      Now the startup FarmWise, co-founded by Sebastien Boyer SM ’16, is giving farmers a third option. The company has developed autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds while leaving crops untouched.

      The company’s first robot, fittingly called the Titan — picture a large tractor that makes use of a trailer in lieu of a driver’s seat — uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crops including leafy greens, cauliflower, artichokes, and tomatoes while snipping weeds with sub-inch precision.

      About 15 Titans have been roaming the fields of 30 large farms in California and Arizona for the last few years, providing weeding as a service while being directed by an iPad. Last month, the company unveiled its newest robot, Vulcan, which is more lightweight and pulled by a tractor.

      “We have growing population, and we can’t expand the land or water we have, so we need to drastically increase the efficiency of the farming industry,” Boyer says. “I think AI and data are going to be major players in that journey.”

      Finding a road to impact

      Boyer came to MIT in 2014 and earned masters’ degrees in technology and policy as well as electrical engineering and computer science over the next two years.

      “What stood out is the passion that my classmates had for what they did — the drive and passion people had to change the world,” Boyer says.

      As part of his graduate work, Boyer researched machine learning and machine vision techniques, and he soon began exploring ways to apply those technologies to environmental problems. He received a small amount of funding from MIT Sandbox to further develop the idea.

      “That helped me make the decision to not take a real job,” Boyer recalls.

      Following graduation, he and FarmWise co-founder Thomas Palomares, a graduate of Stanford University whom Boyer met in his home country of France, began going to farmers’ markets, introducing themselves to small farmers and asking for tours of their farms. About one in three farmers were happy to show them around. From there they’d ask for referrals to larger farmers and service providers in the industry.

      “We realized agriculture is a large contributor of both emissions and, more broadly, to the negative impact of human activities on the environment,” Boyer says. “It also hasn’t been as disrupted by software, cloud computing, AI, and robotics as other industries. That combination really excites us.”

      Through their conversations, the founders learned herbicides are becoming less effective as weeds develop genetic resistance. The only alternative is to hire more workers, which itself was becoming more difficult for farmers.

      “Labor is extremely tight,” says Boyer, adding that bending over and weeding for 10 hours a day is one of the hardest jobs out there. “The labor supply is shrinking if not collapsing in the U.S., and it’s a worldwide trend. That has real environmental implications because of the tradeoff [between labor and herbicides].”

      The problem is especially acute for farmers of specialty crops, including many fruits, vegetables, and nuts, which grow on smaller farms than corn and soybean and each require slightly different growing practices, limiting the effectiveness of many technical and chemical solutions.

      “We don’t harvest corn by hand today, but we still harvest lettuces and nuts and apples by hand,” Boyer says.

      The Titan was built to complement field workers’ efforts to grow and maintain crops. An operator directs it using an iPad, walking alongside the machine and inspecting progress. Both the Titan and Vulcan are powered by an AI that directs hundreds of tiny blades to snip out weeds around each crop. The Vulcan is controlled directly from the tractor cab, where the operator has a touchscreen interface Boyer compares to those found in a Tesla.

      With more than 15,000 commercial hours under its belt, FarmWise hopes the data it collects can be used for more than just weeding in the near future.

      “It’s all about precision,” Boyer says. “We’re going to better understand what the plant needs and make smarter decisions for each one. That will bring us to a point where we can use the same amount of land, much less water, almost no chemicals, much less fertilizer, and still produce more food than we’re producing today. That’s the mission. That’s what excites me.”

      Weeding out farming challenges

      A customer recently told Boyer that without the Titan, he would have to switch all of his organic crops back to conventional because he couldn’t find enough workers.

      “That’s happening with a lot of customers,” Boyer says. “They have no choice but to rely on herbicides. Acres are staying organic because of our product, and conventional farms are reducing their use of herbicides.”

      Now FarmWise is expanding its database to support weeding for six to 12 new crops each year, and Boyer says adding new crops is getting easier and easier for its system.

      As early partners have sought to expand their deployments, Boyer says the only thing limiting the company’s growth is how fast it can build new robots. FarmWise’s new machines will begin being deployed later this year.

      Although the hulking Titan robots are the face of the company today, the founders hope to leverage the data they’ve collected to further improve farming operations.

      “The mission of the company is to turn AI into a tool that is as reliable and dependable as GPS is now in the farming industry,” Boyer says. “Twenty-five years ago, GPS was a very complicated technology. You had to connect to satellites and do some crazy computation to define your position. But a few companies brought GPS to a new level of reliability and simplicity. Today, every farmer in the world uses GPS. We think AI can have an even deeper impact than GPS has had on the farming industry, and we want to be the company that makes it available and easy to use for every farmer in the world.” More

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      in Environment

      Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

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      Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that are important for growth. The novel nanosensors are nondestructive, unlike conventional collection methods, and have been successfully tested in living plants. Applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, the sensors could prove transformative for agriculture and plant biotechnology, giving farmers interested in high-tech precision agriculture and crop management a valuable tool to optimize yield.

      The researchers designed near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotube sensors that are capable of detecting and distinguishing two plant hormones, GA3 and GA4. Belonging to a class of plant hormones known as gibberellins, GA3 and GA4 are diterpenoid phytohormones produced by plants that play an important role in modulating diverse processes involved in plant growth and development. GAs are thought to have played a role in the driving forces behind the “green revolution” of the 1960s, which was in turn credited with averting famine and saving the lives of many worldwide. The continued study of gibberellins could lead to further breakthroughs in agricultural science and have implications for food security.

      Climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels cause farming soil to get contaminated by saltwater, raising soil salinity. In turn, high soil salinity is known to negatively regulate GA biosynthesis and promote GA metabolism, resulting in the reduction of GA content in plants. The new nanosensors developed by the SMART researchers allow for the study of GA dynamics in living plants under salinity stress at a very early stage, potentially enabling farmers to make early interventions when eventually applied in the field. This forms the basis of early-stage stress detection.

      Currently, methods to detect GA3 and GA4 typically require mass spectroscopy-based analysis, a time-consuming and destructive process. In contrast, the new sensors developed by the researchers are highly selective for the respective GAs and offer real-time, in vivo monitoring of changes in GA levels across a broad range of plant species.

      Described in a paper titled “Near-Infrared Fluorescent Carbon Nanotube Sensors for the Plant Hormone Family Gibberellins” published in the journal Nano Letters, the research represents a breakthrough for early-stage plant stress detection and holds tremendous potential to advance plant biotechnology and agriculture. This paper builds on previous research by the team at SMART DiSTAP on single-walled carbon nanotube-based nanosensors using the corona phase molecular recognition (CoPhMoRe) platform.

      Based on the CoPhMoRe concept introduced by the lab of MIT Professor Professor Michael Strano, the novel sensors are able to detect GA kinetics in the roots of a variety of model and non-model plant species, including Arabidopsis, lettuce, and basil, as well as GA accumulation during lateral root emergence, highlighting the importance of GA in root system architecture. This was made possible by the researchers’ related development of a new coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter that enables self-referencing of nanosensor near infrared fluorescence with its Raman G-band, a new hardware innovation that removes the need for a separate reference nanosensor and greatly simplifies the instrumentation requirements by using a single optical channel to measure hormone concentration.

      Using the reversible GA nanosensors, the researchers detected increased endogenous GA levels in mutant plants producing greater amounts of GA20ox1, a key enzyme in GA biosynthesis, as well as decreased GA levels in plants under salinity stress. When exposed to salinity stress, researchers also found that lettuce growth was severely stunted — an indication that only became apparent after 10 days. In contrast, the GA nanosensors reported decreased GA levels after just six hours, demonstrating their efficacy as a much earlier indicator of salinity stress.

      “Our CoPhMoRe technique allows us to create nanoparticles that act like natural antibodies in that they can recognize and lock onto specific molecules. But they tend to be far more stable than alternatives. We have used this method to successfully create nanosensors for plant signals such as hydrogen peroxide and heavy-metal pollutants like arsenic in plants and soil,” says Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT who is co-corresponding author and DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator. “The method works to create sensors for organic molecules like synthetic auxin — an important plant hormone — as we have shown. This latest breakthrough now extends this success to a plant hormone family called gibberellins — an exceedingly difficult one to recognize.”

      Strano adds: “The resulting technology offers a rapid, real-time, and in vivo method to monitor changes in GA levels in virtually any plant, and can replace current sensing methods which are laborious, destructive, species-specific, and much less efficient.”

      Mervin Chun-Yi Ang, associate scientific director at DiSTAP and co-first author of the paper, says, “More than simply a breakthrough in plant stress detection, we have also demonstrated a hardware innovation in the form of a new coupled Raman/NIR fluorimeter that enabled self-referencing of SWNT sensor fluorescence with its Raman G-band, representing a major advance in the translation of our nanosensing tool sets to the field. In the near future, our sensors can be combined with low-cost electronics, portable optodes, or microneedle interfaces for industrial use, transforming how the industry screens for and mitigates plant stress in food crops and potentially improving growth and yield.”

      The new sensors could yet have a variety of industrial applications and use cases. Daisuke Urano, a Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory principal investigator, National University of Singapore (NUS) adjunct assistant professor, and co-corresponding author of the paper, explains, “GAs are known to regulate a wide range of plant development processes, from shoot, root, and flower development, to seed germination and plant stress responses. With the commercialization of GAs, these plant hormones are also sold to growers and farmers as plant growth regulators to promote plant growth and seed germination. Our novel GA nanosensors could be applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, and also be used by growers and farmers to track the uptake or metabolism of GA in their crops.”

      The design and development of the nanosensors, creation and validation of the coupled Raman/near infrared fluorimeter and related image/data processing algorithms, as well as statistical analysis of readouts from plant sensors for this study were performed by SMART and MIT. The Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory was responsible for the design, execution, and analysis of plant-related studies, including validation of nanosensors in living plants.

      This research was carried out by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program. The DiSTAP program, led by Strano and Singapore co-lead principal investigator Professor Chua Nam Hai, addresses deep problems in food production in Singapore and the world by developing a suite of impactful and novel analytical, genetic, and biomaterial technologies. The goal is to fundamentally change how plant biosynthetic pathways are discovered, monitored, engineered, and ultimately translated to meet the global demand for food and nutrients. Scientists from MIT, Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and NUS are collaboratively developing new tools for the continuous measurement of important plant metabolites and hormones for novel discovery, deeper understanding and control of plant biosynthetic pathways in ways not yet possible, especially in the context of green leafy vegetables; leveraging these new techniques to engineer plants with highly desirable properties for global food security, including high yield density production, and drought and pathogen resistance, and applying these technologies to improve urban farming.

      SMART was established by MIT and the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007. SMART serves as an intellectual and innovation hub for research interactions between MIT and Singapore, undertaking cutting-edge research projects in areas of interest to both Singapore and MIT. SMART currently comprises an Innovation Center and five interdisciplinary research groups: Antimicrobial Resistance, Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, DiSTAP, Future Urban Mobility, and Low Energy Electronic Systems. More

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      in Energy

      New MIT internships expand research opportunities in Africa

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      With new support from the Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MIT-Africa program are expanding internship opportunities for MIT students at universities and leading academic research centers in Africa. This past summer, MISTI supported 10 MIT student interns at African universities, significantly more than in any previous year.

      “These internships are an opportunity to better merge the research ecosystem of MIT with academia-based research systems in Africa,” says Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and faculty director for MISTI.

      For decades, MISTI has helped MIT students to learn and explore through international experiential learning opportunities and internships in industries like health care, education, agriculture, and energy. MISTI’s MIT-Africa Seed Fund supports collaborative research between MIT faculty and Africa-based researchers, and the new student research internship opportunities are part of a broader vision for deeper engagement between MIT and research institutions across the African continent.

      While Africa is home to 12.5 percent of the world’s population, it generates less than 1 percent of scientific research output in the form of academic journal publications, according to the African Academy of Sciences. Research internships are one way that MIT can build mutually beneficial partnerships across Africa’s research ecosystem, to advance knowledge and spawn innovation in fields important to MIT and its African counterparts, including health care, biotechnology, urban planning, sustainable energy, and education.

      Ari Jacobovits, managing director of MIT-Africa, notes that the new internships provide additional funding to the lab hosting the MIT intern, enabling them to hire a counterpart student research intern from the local university. This support can make the internships more financially feasible for host institutions and helps to grow the research pipeline.

      With the support of MIT, State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) lecturers Raya Ahmada and Abubakar Bakar were able to hire local students to work alongside MIT graduate students Mel Isidor and Rajan Hoyle. Together the students collaborated over a summer on a mapping project designed to plan and protect Zanzibar’s coastal economy.

      “It’s been really exciting to work with research peers in a setting where we can all learn alongside one another and develop this project together,” says Hoyle.

      Using low-cost drone technology, the students and their local counterparts worked to create detailed maps of Zanzibar to support community planning around resilience projects designed to combat coastal flooding and deforestation and assess climate-related impacts to seaweed farming activities. 

      “I really appreciated learning about how engagement happens in this particular context and how community members understand local environmental challenges and conditions based on research and lived experience,” says Isidor. “This is beneficial for us whether we’re working in an international context or in the United States.”

      For biology major Shaida Nishat, her internship at the University of Cape Town allowed her to work in a vital sphere of public health and provided her with the chance to work with a diverse, international team headed by Associate Professor Salome Maswine, head of the global surgery division and a widely-renowned expert in global surgery, a multidisciplinary field in the sphere of global health focused on improved and equitable surgical outcomes.

      “It broadened my perspective as to how an effort like global surgery ties so many nations together through a common goal that would benefit them all,” says Nishat, who plans to pursue a career in public health.

      For computer science sophomore Antonio L. Ortiz Bigio, the MISTI research internship in Africa was an incomparable experience, culturally and professionally. Bigio interned at the Robotics Autonomous Intelligence and Learning Laboratory at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, led by Professor Benjamin Rosman, where he developed software to enable a robot to play chess. The experience has inspired Bigio to continue to pursue robotics and machine learning.

      Participating faculty at the host institutions welcomed their MIT interns, and were impressed by their capabilities. Both Rosman and Maswime described their MIT interns as hard-working and valued team members, who had helped to advance their own work.  

      Building strong global partnerships, whether through faculty research, student internships, or other initiatives, takes time and cultivation, explains Jacobovits. Each successful collaboration helps to seed future exchanges and builds interest at MIT and peer institutions in creative partnerships. As MIT continues to deepen its connections to institutions and researchers across Africa, says Jacobovits, “students like Shaida, Rajan, Mel, and Antonio are really effective ambassadors in building those networks.” More

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      in Environment

      Nonabah Lane, Navajo educator and environmental sustainability specialist with numerous ties to MIT, dies at 46

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      Nonabah Lane, a Navajo educator and environmental sustainability specialist with numerous MIT ties to MIT, passed away in October. She was 46.

      Lane had recently been an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow; MIT Solve 2019 Indigenous Communities Fellow; Department of Urban Studies and Planning guest lecturer and community partner; community partner with the PKG Public Service Center, Terrascope, and D-Lab; and a speaker at this year’s MIT Energy Week.

      Lane was a passionate sustainability specialist with experience spearheading successful environmental civic science projects focused in agriculture, water science, and energy. Committed to mitigating water pollutants and environmental hazards in tribal communities, she held extensive knowledge of environmental policy and Indigenous water rights. 

      Lane’s clans were Ta’neezahnii (Tangled People), born for Tł’izíłání (Manygoats People), and her maternal grandfathers are the Kiiyaa’aanii (Towering House People), and paternal grandfathers are Bįįh Bitoo’nii (Deer Spring People).

      Lane was a member of the Navajo Nation, Nenahnezad Chapter. At Navajo Power, she worked as the lead developer for solar and energy storage projects to benefit tribal communities on the Navajo Nation and other tribal nations in New Mexico. Prior to joining Navajo Power, Lane co-founded Navajo Ethno-Agriculture, a farm that teaches Navajo culture through traditional farming and bilingual education. Lane also launched a campaign to partner with local Navajo schools and tribal colleges to create their own water-testing capabilities and translate data into information to local farmers.

      “I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with Nonabah on a range of initiatives she was championing on energy, food, justice, water, Indigenous leadership, youth STEM, and more. She was innovative, entrepreneurial, inclusive, heartfelt, and positively impacted MIT on every visit to campus. She articulated important things that needed saying and expanded people’s thinking constantly. We will all miss her insights and teamwork,” says Megan Smith ’86, SM ’88, MIT Corporation life member; third U.S. chief technology officer and assistant to the president in the Office of Science and Technology Policy; and founder and CEO of shift7.

      In March 2019, Lane and her family — parents Gloria and Harry and brother Bruce — welcomed students and staff of the MIT Terrascope first-year learning community to their farm, where they taught unique, hands-on lessons about traditional Diné farming and spirituality. She then continued to collaborate with Terrascope, helping staff and students develop community-based work with partners in Navajo Nation. 

      Terrascope associate director and lecturer Ari Epstein says, “Nonabah was an inspiring person and a remarkable collaborator; she had a talent for connecting and communicating across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural differences, and she was generous with her expertise and knowledge. We will miss her very much.”

      Lane came to MIT in May 2019 for the MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship and Solve at MIT event, representing Navajo Ethno-Agriculture with her mother, Gloria Lane, and brother, Bruce Lane, and later serving as a Fellow Leadership Group member. 

      “Nonabah was an incredible individual who worked tirelessly to better all of her communities, whether it was back home on the Navajo Nation, here at MIT Solve, or supporting her family and friends,” says Alex Amouyel, executive director of MIT Solve. “More than that, Nonabah was a passionate mentor and caring friend of so many, carefully tending the next generation of Indigenous innovators, entrepreneurs, and change-makers. Her loss will be felt deeply by the MIT community, and her legacy of heartfelt service will not be forgotten.”

      She continued to be heavily involved across the MIT campus — named as a 2019 Media Lab Director’s Fellow, leading a workshop at the 2020 MIT Media Lab Festival of Learning on modernizing Navajo foods using traditional food science and cultural narrative, speaking at the 2022 MIT Energy Conference “Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition,” and taking part in the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) innovation weekly co-working groups for Covid-response related innovations. 

      “My CBA colleagues and I enjoyed working with Nonabah on rapid-prototyping for the Covid response, on expanding access to digital fabrication, and on ambitious proposals for connecting emerging technology with Indigenous knowledge,” says Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

      Nonabah also guest lectured for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s Indigenous Environmental Planning class in Spring 2022. Professors Lawrence Susskind and Gabriella Carolini and teaching assistant Dení López led the class in cooperation with Elizabeth Rule, Chickasaw Nation member and professor at American University. 

      Carolini shares, on behalf of Susskind and the class, “During this time, our teaching team and students from a broad range of fields at MIT had the deep honor of learning from and with the inimitable Nonabah Lane. Nonabah was a dedicated and critical partner to our class, representing in this instance Navajo Power — but of course, also so much more. Her broad experiences and knowledge — working with fellow Navajo members on energy and agriculture sovereignty, as well as in advancing entrepreneurship and innovation — reflected the urgency Nonabah saw in meeting the challenges and opportunities for sustainable and equitable futures in Navajo nation and beyond. She was a pure life force, running on all fires, and brought to our class a dedicated drive to educate, learn, and extend our reference points beyond current knowledge frontiers.” 

      Three MIT students — junior Isabella Gandara, Alexander Gerszten ’22, and Paul Picciano MS ’22 — who worked closely with Lane on a project with Navajo Power, recalled how she shared herself with them in so many ways, through her truly exceptional work ethic, stories about herself and her family, and the care and thought that she put into her ventures. They noted there was always something new to feel inspired by when in her presence. 

      “The PKG Public Service Center mourns the passing of Nonabah Lane. Navajo Ethno-Agriculture is a valued PKG Center partner that offers MIT undergraduate students the opportunity to support community-led projects with the Diné Community on Navajo Nation. Nonabah inspired students to examine broad social and technical issues that impact Indigenous communities in Navajo Nation and beyond, in many cases leaving an indelible mark on their personal and professional paths,” says Jill S. Bassett, associate dean and director of the PKG Public Service Center.

      Lane was a Sequoyah Fellow of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and remained actively engaged in the AISES community by mentoring young people interested in the fields of science, engineering, agriculture, and energy. Over the years, Lane collaborated with leaders across tribal lands and beyond on projects related to agriculture, energy, sustainable chemicals, and finance. Lane had an enormous positive impact on many through her accomplishments and also the countless meaningful connections she helped to form among people in diverse fields.

      Donations may be made to a memorial fund organized by Navajo Power, PBC in honor of Nonabah Lane, in support of Navajo Ethno-Agriculture, the Native American nonprofit she co-founded and cared deeply for. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Environment

      MIT PhD students shed light on important water and food research

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      One glance at the news lately will reveal countless headlines on the dire state of global water and food security. Pollution, supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine are all threatening water and food systems, compounding climate change impacts from heat waves, drought, floods, and wildfires.

      Every year, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) offers fellowships to outstanding MIT graduate students who are working on innovative ways to secure water and food supplies in light of these urgent worldwide threats. J-WAFS announced this year’s fellowship recipients last April. Aditya Ghodgaonkar and Devashish Gokhale were awarded Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowships for Water Solutions, which are made possible by a generous gift from Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. James Zhang, Katharina Fransen, and Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang were awarded J-WAFS Fellowships for Water and Food Solutions. The J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions is funded in part by J-WAFS Research Affiliate companies: Xylem, Inc., a water technology company, and GoAigua, a company leading the digital transformation of the water industry.

      The five fellows were each awarded a stipend and full tuition for one semester. They also benefit from mentorship, networking connections, and opportunities to showcase their research.

      “This year’s cohort of J-WAFS fellows show an indefatigable drive to explore, create, and push back boundaries,” says John H. Lienhard, director of J-WAFS. “Their passion and determination to create positive change for humanity are evident in these unique video portraits, which describe their solutions-oriented research in water and food,” Lienhard adds.

      J-WAFS funder Community Jameel recently commissioned video portraitures of each student that highlight their work and their inspiration to solve challenges in water and food. More about each J-WAFS fellow and their research follows.

      Play video

      Katharina Fransen

      In Professor Bradley Olsen’s lab in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Katharina Fransen works to develop biologically-based, biodegradable plastics which can be used for food packing that won’t pollute the environment. Fransen, a third-year PhD student, is motivated by the challenge of protecting the most vulnerable global communities from waste generated by the materials that are essential to connecting them to the global food supply. “We can’t ensure that all of our plastic waste gets recycled or reused, and so we want to make sure that if it does escape into the environment it can degrade, and that’s kind of where a lot of my research really comes in,” says Fransen. Most of her work involves creating polymers, or “really long chains of chemicals,” kind of like the paper rings a lot of us looped into chains as kids, Fransen explains. The polymers are optimized for food packaging applications to keep food fresher for longer, preventing food waste. Fransen says she finds the work “really interesting from the scientific perspective as well as from the idea that [she’s] going to make the world a little better with these new materials.” She adds, “I think it is both really fulfilling and really exciting and engaging.”

      Play video

      Aditya Ghodgaonkar

      “When I went to Kenya this past spring break, I had an opportunity to meet a lot of farmers and talk to them about what kind of maintenance issues they face,” says Aditya Ghodgaonkar, PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Ghodgaonkar works with Associate Professor Amos Winter in the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab, where he designs hydraulic components for drip irrigation systems to make them water-efficient, off-grid, inexpensive, and low-maintenance. On his trip to Kenya, Ghodgaonkar gained firsthand knowledge from farmers about a common problem they encounter: clogging of drip irrigation emitters. He learned that clogging can be an expensive technical challenge to diagnose, mitigate, and resolve. He decided to focus his attention on designing emitters that are resistant to clogging, testing with sand and passive hydrodynamic filtration back in the lab at MIT. “I got into this from an academic standpoint,” says Ghodgaonkar. “It is only once I started working on the emitters, spoke with industrial partners that make these emitters, spoke with farmers, that I really truly appreciated the impact of what we’re doing.”

      Play video

      Devashish Gokhale

      Devashish Gokhale is a PhD student advised by Professor Patrick Doyle in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Gokhale’s commitment to global water security stems from his childhood in Pune, India, where both flooding and drought can occur depending on the time of year. “I’ve had these experiences where there’s been too much water and also too little water” he recalls. At MIT, Gokhale is developing cost-effective, sustainable, and reusable materials for water treatment with a focus on the elimination of emerging contaminants and low-concentration pollutants like heavy metals. Specifically, he works on making and optimizing polymeric hydrogel microparticles that can absorb micropollutants. “I know how important it is to do something which is not just scientifically interesting, but something which is impactful in a real way,” says Gokhale. Before starting a research project he asks himself, “are people going to be able to afford this? Is it really going to reach the people who need it the most?” Adding these constraints in the beginning of the research process sometimes makes the problem more difficult to solve, but Gokhale notes that in the end, the solution is much more promising.

      Play video

      James Zhang

      “We don’t really think much about it, it’s transparent, odorless, we just turn on our sink in many parts of the world and it just flows through,” says James Zhang when talking about water. Yet he notes that “many other parts of the world face water scarcity and this will only get worse due to global climate change.” A PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhang works in the Nano Engineering Laboratory with Professor Gang Chen. Zhang is working on a technology that uses light-induced evaporation to clean water. He is currently investigating the fundamental properties of how light at different wavelengths interacts with liquids at the surface, particularly with brackish water surfaces. With strong theoretical and experimental components, his research could lead to innovations in desalinating water at high energy efficiencies. Zhang hopes that the technology can one day “produce lots of clean water for communities around the world that currently don’t have access to fresh water,” and create a new appreciation for this common liquid that many of us might not think about on a day-to-day basis.

      Play video

      Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang

      “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,” says chemical engineering PhD candidate Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang. This fact led Zhang to develop a micronutrient delivery platform that fortifies foods with essential vitamins and nutrients. With her advisors, Professor Robert Langer and Research Scientist Ana Jaklenec, Zhang brings biomedical engineering approaches to global health issues. Zhang says that “one of the most serious problems is vitamin A deficiency, because vitamin A is not very stable.” She goes on to explain that although vitamin A is present in different vegetables, when the vegetables are cooked, vitamin A can easily degrade. Zhang helped develop a group of biodegradable polymers that can stabilize micronutrients under cooking and storage conditions. With this technology, vitamin A, for example, could be encapsulated and effectively stabilized under boiling water. The platform has also shown efficient release in a simulation of the stomach environment. Zhang says it is the “little, tiny steps every day that are pushing us forward to the final impactful product.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Security

      Pesticide innovation takes top prize at Collegiate Inventors Competition

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      On Oct. 12, MIT mechanical engineering alumnus Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 was named the first-place winner in the graduate category of the Collegiate Inventors Competition. The annual competition, which is organized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, celebrates college and university student inventors. Jayaprakash won for his pesticide innovation AgZen-Cloak, which he developed while he was a student in the lab of Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering.

      Currently, only 2 percent of pesticide spray is retained by crops. Many crops are naturally water-repellent, causing pesticide-laden water to bounce off of them. Farmers are forced to over-spray significantly to ensure proper spray coverage on their crops. Not only does this waste expensive pesticides, but it also comes at an environmental cost.

      Runoff from pesticide treatment pollutes soil and nearby streams. Droplets can travel in the air, leading to illness and death in nearby populations. It is estimated that each year, pesticide pollution causes between 20,000 and 200,000 deaths, and up to 385 million acute illnesses like cancer, birth defects, and neurological conditions.   

      With his invention AgZen-Cloak, Jayaprakash has found a way to keep droplets of water containing pesticide from bouncing off crops by “cloaking” the droplets in a small amount of plant-derived oil. As a result, farmers could use just one-fifth the amount of spray, minimizing water waste and cost for farmers and eliminating airborne pollution and toxic runoff. It also improves pesticide retention, which can lead to higher crop yield.

      “By cloaking each droplet with a minute quantity of a plant-based oil, we promote water retention on even the most water-repellent plant surfaces,” says Jayaprakash. “AgZen-Cloak presents a universal, inexpensive, and environmentally sustainable way to prevent pesticide overuse and waste.”

      Farming is in Jayaprakash’s DNA. His family operates a 10-acre farm near Chennai, India, where they grow rice and mangoes. Upon joining the Varanasi Research Group as a graduate student, Jayaprakash was instantly drawn to Varanasi’s work on pesticides in agriculture.

      “Growing up, I would spray crops on my family farm wearing a backpack sprayer. So, I’ve always wanted to work on research that made farmer’s lives easier,” says Jayaprakash, who serves as CEO of the startup AgZen.

      Play video

      2022 World Food Day First Prize Winner – AgZen Cloak: Reducing Pesticide Pollution and Waste

      Helping droplets stick

      Varanasi and his lab at MIT work on what is known as interfacial phenomena — or the study of what happens when different phases come into contact and interact with one another. Understanding how a liquid interacts with a solid or how a liquid reacts to a certain gas has endless applications, which explains the diversity of the research Varanasi has conducted over the years. He and his team have developed solutions for everything from consumer product packaging to power plant emissions.

      In 2009, Varanasi gave a talk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). There, he learned from the USDA just how big of a problem runoff from pesticide spray was for farmers around the world.
      A green cabbage leaf is treated with pesticide-laden water using conventional spraying. Image courtesy of AgZen.A green cabbage leaf is treated with pesticide-laden water using AgZen’s technology. By cloaking droplets in a tiny amount of plant-derived oil, the droplets stick to the leaf, minimizing over-spraying, waste, and pollution. Image courtesy of AgZen.He enlisted the help of then-graduate student Maher Damak SM ’15, PhD ’18 to apply their work in interfacial phenomena to pesticide sprays. Over the next several years, the Varanasi Research Group developed a technology that utilized electrically charged polymers to keep droplets from bouncing off hydrophobic surfaces. When droplets containing positively and negatively charged additives meet, their surface chemistry allows them to stick to a plant’s surface.

      Using polyelectrolytes, the researchers could reduce the amount of spray needed to cover a crop by tenfold in the lab. This motivated the Varanasi Research Group to pursue three years of field trials with various commercial growers around the world, where they were able to demonstrate significant savings for farmers.

      “We got fantastic feedback on our technology from farmers. We are really excited to change the paradigm for agriculture. Not only is it good for the environment, but we’ve heard from farmers that they love it. If we can put money back into farms, it helps society as a whole,” adds Varanasi.

      In response to the positive feedback, Varanasi and Jayaprakash co-founded startup AgZen in 2020. 

      When field testing their polyelectrolyte technology, Varanasi and Jayaprakash came up with the idea to explore the use of a fully plant-based material to help farmers achieve the same savings. 

      Cloaking droplets and engineering nozzles

      Jayaprakash found that by cloaking a small amount of plant-derived oil around a water droplet, droplets stick to plant surfaces that would typically repel water. After conducting many studies in the lab, he found that the oil only needs to make up 0.1 percent of a droplet’s total volume to stick to crops and provide total, uniform coverage.

      While his cloaking solution worked in the lab, Jayaprakash knew that to have a tangible impact in the real world he needed to find an easy, low-cost way for farmers to coat pesticide spray droplets in oil.

      Jayaprakash focused on spray nozzles. He developed a proprietary nozzle that coats each droplet with a small amount of oil as they are being formed. The nozzles can easily be added to any hose or farming equipment.

      “What we’ve done is figured out a smart way to cloak these droplets by using a very small quantity of oil on the outside of each drop. Because of that, we get this drastic improvement in performance that can really be a game-changer for farmers,” says Jayaprakash.

      In addition to improving pesticide retention in crops, the AgZen-Cloak solves a second problem. Since large droplets are prone to break apart and bounce off crops, historically, farmers have sprayed pesticide in tiny, mist-like droplets. These fine droplets are often carried by the wind, increasing pesticide pollution in nearby areas. 

      When AgZen-Cloak is used, the pesticide-laden droplets can be larger and still stick to crops. These larger droplets aren’t carried by the wind, decreasing the risk of pollution and minimizing the health impacts on local populations.  

      “We’re actually solving two problems with one solution. With the cloaking technology, we can spray much larger droplets that aren’t prone to wind drift and they can stick to the plant,” Jayaprakash adds.

      Bringing AgZen-Cloaks to farmers around the world

      This spring, Varanasi encouraged Jayaprakash to submit AgZen-Cloak to the Collegiate Inventors Competition. Out of hundreds of applications, Jayaprakash was one of 25 student inventors to be chosen as a finalist.

      On Oct. 12, Jayaprakash presented his technology to a panel of judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officials. Meeting with such an illustrious group of inventors and officials left an impression on Jayaprakash.

      “These are people who have invented things that have changed the world. So, to get their feedback on what we’re doing was incredibly valuable,” he says. Jayaprakash received a $10,000 prize for being named the first-place graduate winner.

      As full-time CEO of AgZen, Jayaprakash is shifting focus to field testing and commercialization. He and the AgZen team have already conducted field testing across the world at locations including a Prosecco vineyard outside of Venice, a ranch in California, and Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s vegetable extension program, led by their program director Susan Scheufele, recently concluded a field test that validated AgZen’s on-field performance.

      Two days after his win at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, Jayaprakash was named the first prize winner of the MIT Abdul Latif Jamel Water and Food Systems Lab World Food Day student video competition. Hours later, he flew across the country to attend an agricultural tech conference in California, eager to meet with farmers and discuss plans for rolling out AgZen’s innovations to farms everywhere. More