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    Study shows a link between obesity and what’s on local restaurant menus

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    For many years, health experts have been concerned about “food deserts,” places where residents lack good nutritional options. Now, an MIT-led study of three major global cities uses a new, granular method to examine the issue, and concludes that having fewer and less nutritional eating options nearby correlates with obesity and other health outcomes.Rather than just mapping geographic areas, the researchers examined the dietary value of millions of food items on roughly 30,000 restaurant menus and derived a more precise assessment of the connection between neighborhoods and nutrition.“We show that what is sold in a restaurant has a direct correlation to people’s health,” says MIT researcher Fabio Duarte, co-author of a newly published paper outlining the study’s results. “The food landscape matters.”The open-access paper, “Data-driven nutritional assessment of urban food landscapes: insights from Boston, London, Dubai,” was published this week in Nature: Scientific Reports.The co-authors are Michael Tufano, a PhD student at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands; Duarte, associate director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, which uses data to study cities as dynamic systems; Martina Mazzarello, a postdoc at the Senseable City Lab; Javad Eshtiyagh, a research fellow at the Senseable City Lab; Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice and director of the Senseable City Lab; and Guido Camps, a senior researcher at Wageningen University.Scanning the menuTo conduct the study, the researchers examined menus from Boston, Dubai, and London, in the summer of 2023, compiling a database of millions of items available through popular food-delivery platforms. The team then evaluated the food items as rated by the USDA’s FoodData Central database, an information bank with 375,000 kinds of food products listed. The study deployed two main metrics, the Meal Balance Index, and the Nutrient-Rich Foods Index.The researchers examined about 222,000 menu items from over 2,000 restaurants in Boston, about 1.6 million menu items from roughly 9,000 restaurants in Dubai, and about 3.1 million menu items from about 18,000 restaurants in London. In Boston, about 71 percent of the items were in the USDA database; in Dubai and London, that figure was 42 percent and 56 percent, respectively.The team then rated the nutritional value of the items appearing on menus, and correlated the food data with health-outcome data from Boston and London. In London, they found a clear correlation between neighborhood menu offerings and obesity, or the lack thereof; with a slightly less firm correlation in Boston. Areas with food options that include a lot of dietary fibers, sometimes along with fruits and vegetables, tend to have better health data.In Dubai, the researchers did not have the same types of health data available but did observe a strong correlation between rental prices and the nutritional value of neighborhood-level food, suggesting that wealthier residents have better nourishment options.“At the item level, when we have less nutritional food, we see more cases of obsesity,” Tufano says. “It’s true that not only do we have more fast food in poor neighborhoods, but the nutritional value is not the same.”Re-mapping the food landscapeBy conducting the study in this fashion, the scholars added a layer of analysis to past studies of food deserts. While past work has broken ground by identifying neighborhoods and areas lacking good food access, this research makes a more comprehensive assessment of what people consume. The research moves toward evaluating the complex mix of food available in any given area, which can be true even of areas with more limited options.“We were not satisfied with this idea that if you only have fast food, it’s a food desert, but if you have a Whole Foods, it’s not,” Duarte says. “It’s not necessarily like that.”For the Senseable City Lab researchers, the study is a new technique further enabling them to understand city dynamics and the effects of the urban environment on health. Past lab studies have often focused on issues such as urban mobility, while extending to matters such as mobility and air pollution, among other topics.Being able to study food and health at the neighborhood level, though, is still another example of the ways that data-rich spheres of life can be studied in close detail.“When we started working on cities and data, the data resolution was so low,” Ratti says. “Today the amount of data is so immense we see this great opportunity to look at cities and see the influence of the urban environment as a big determinant of health. We see this as one of the new frontiers of our lab. It’s amazing how we can now look at this very precisely in cities.” More

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      in Environment

      Study: Climate change may make it harder to reduce smog in some regions

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      Global warming will likely hinder our future ability to control ground-level ozone, a harmful air pollutant that is a primary component of smog, according to a new MIT study.The results could help scientists and policymakers develop more effective strategies for improving both air quality and human health. Ground-level ozone causes a host of detrimental health impacts, from asthma to heart disease, and contributes to thousands of premature deaths each year.The researchers’ modeling approach reveals that, as the Earth warms due to climate change, ground-level ozone will become less sensitive to reductions in nitrogen oxide emissions in eastern North America and Western Europe. In other words, it will take greater nitrogen oxide emission reductions to get the same air quality benefits.However, the study also shows that the opposite would be true in northeast Asia, where cutting emissions would have a greater impact on reducing ground-level ozone in the future. The researchers combined a climate model that simulates meteorological factors, such as temperature and wind speeds, with a chemical transport model that estimates the movement and composition of chemicals in the atmosphere.By generating a range of possible future outcomes, the researchers’ ensemble approach better captures inherent climate variability, allowing them to paint a fuller picture than many previous studies.“Future air quality planning should consider how climate change affects the chemistry of air pollution. We may need steeper cuts in nitrogen oxide emissions to achieve the same air quality goals,” says Emmie Le Roy, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and lead author of a paper on this study.Her co-authors include Anthony Y.H. Wong, a postdoc in the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy; Sebastian D. Eastham, principal research scientist in the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy; Arlene Fiore, the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor of EAPS; and senior author Noelle Selin, a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and EAPS. The research appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.Controlling ozoneGround-level ozone differs from the stratospheric ozone layer that protects the Earth from harmful UV radiation. It is a respiratory irritant that is harmful to the health of humans, animals, and plants.Controlling ground-level ozone is particularly challenging because it is a secondary pollutant, formed in the atmosphere by complex reactions involving nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight.“That is why you tend to have higher ozone days when it is warm and sunny,” Le Roy explains.Regulators typically try to reduce ground-level ozone by cutting nitrogen oxide emissions from industrial processes. But it is difficult to predict the effects of those policies because ground-level ozone interacts with nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds in nonlinear ways.Depending on the chemical environment, reducing nitrogen oxide emissions could cause ground-level ozone to increase instead.“Past research has focused on the role of emissions in forming ozone, but the influence of meteorology is a really important part of Emmie’s work,” Selin says.To conduct their study, the researchers combined a global atmospheric chemistry model with a climate model that simulate future meteorology.They used the climate model to generate meteorological inputs for each future year in their study, simulating factors such as likely temperature and wind speeds, in a way that captures the inherent variability of a region’s climate.Then they fed those inputs to the atmospheric chemistry model, which calculates how the chemical composition of the atmosphere would change because of meteorology and emissions.The researchers focused on Eastern North America, Western Europe, and Northeast China, since those regions have historically high levels of the precursor chemicals that form ozone and well-established monitoring networks to provide data.They chose to model two future scenarios, one with high warming and one with low warming, over a 16-year period between 2080 and 2095. They compared them to a historical scenario capturing 2000 to 2015 to see the effects of a 10 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions.Capturing climate variability“The biggest challenge is that the climate naturally varies from year to year. So, if you want to isolate the effects of climate change, you need to simulate enough years to see past that natural variability,” Le Roy says.They could overcome that challenge due to recent advances in atmospheric chemistry modeling and by taking advantage of parallel computing to simulate multiple years at the same time. They simulated five 16-year realizations, resulting in 80 model years for each scenario.The researchers found that eastern North America and Western Europe are especially sensitive to increases in nitrogen oxide emissions from the soil, which are natural emissions driven by increases in temperature.Due to that sensitivity, as the Earth warms and more nitrogen oxide from soil enters the atmosphere, reducing nitrogen oxide emissions from human activities will have less of an impact on ground-level ozone.“This shows how important it is to improve our representation of the biosphere in these models to better understand how climate change may impact air quality,” Le Roy says.On the other hand, since industrial processes in northeast Asia cause more ozone per unit of nitrogen oxide emitted, cutting emissions there would cause greater reductions in ground-level ozone in future warming scenarios.“But I wouldn’t say that is a good thing because it means that, overall, there are higher levels of ozone,” Le Roy adds.Running detailed meteorology simulations, rather than relying on annual average weather data, gave the researchers a more complete picture of the potential effects on human health.“Average climate isn’t the only thing that matters. One high ozone day, which might be a statistical anomaly, could mean we don’t meet our air quality target and have negative human health impacts that we should care about,” Le Roy says.In the future, the researchers want to continue exploring the intersection of meteorology and air quality. They also want to expand their modeling approach to consider other climate change factors with high variability, like wildfires or biomass burning.“We’ve shown that it is important for air quality scientists to consider the full range of climate variability, even if it is hard to do in your models, because it really does affect the answer that you get,” says Selin.This work is funded, in part, by the MIT Praecis Presidential Fellowship, the J.H. and E.V. Wade Fellowship, and the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability. More

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      in Energy

      Drug injection device wins MIT $100K Competition

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      The winner of this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is helping advanced therapies reach more patients faster with a new kind of drug-injection device.CoFlo Medical says its low-cost device can deliver biologic drugs more than 10 times faster than existing methods, accelerating the treatment of a range of conditions including cancers, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases.“For patients battling these diseases, every hour matters,” said Simon Rufer SM ’22 in the winning pitch. “Biologic drugs are capable of treating some of the most challenging diseases, but their administration is unacceptably time-consuming, infringing on the freedom of the patient and effectively leaving them tethered to their hospital beds. The requirement of a hospital setting also makes biologics all but impossible in remote and low-access areas.”Today, biologic drugs are mainly delivered through intravenous fusions, requiring patients to sit in hospital beds for hours during each delivery. That’s because many biologic drugs are too viscous to be pushed through a needle. CoFlo’s device enables quick injections of biologic drugs no matter how viscous. It works by surrounding the viscous drug with a second, lower-viscosity fluid.“Imagine trying to force a liquid as viscous as honey through a needle: It’s simply not possible,” said Rufer, who is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Over the course of six years of research and development at MIT, we’ve overcome a myriad of fluidic instabilities that have otherwise made this technology impossible. We’ve also patented the fundamental inner workings of this device.”Rufer made the winning pitch to a packed Kresge Auditorium that included a panel of judges on May 12. In a video, he showed someone injecting biologic drugs using CoFlo’s device using one hand.Rufer says the second fluid in the device could be the buffer of the drug solution itself, which wouldn’t alter the drug formulation and could potentially expedite the device’s approval in clinical trials. The device can also easily be made using existing mass manufacturing processes, which will keep the cost low.In laboratory experiments, CoFlo’s team has demonstrated injections that are up to 200 times faster.“CoFlo is the only technology that is capable of administering viscous drugs while simultaneously optimizing the patient experience, minimizing the clinical burden, and reducing device cost,” Rufer said.Celebrating entrepreneurshipThe MIT $100K Competition started more than 30 years ago, when students, along with the late MIT Professor Ed Roberts, raised $10,000 to turn MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto into a startup challenge. Over time, with sponsor support, the event grew into the renown, highly anticipated startup competition it is today, highlighting some of the most promising new companies founded by MIT community members each year.The Monday night event was the culmination of months of work and preparation by participating teams. The $100K program began with student pitches in December and was followed by mentorship, funding, and other support for select teams over the course of ensuing months.This year more than 50 teams applied for the $100K’s final event. A network of external judges whittled that down to the eight finalists that made their pitches.Other winnersIn addition to the grand prize, finalists were also awarded a $50,000 second-place prize, a $5,000 third-place prize, and a $5,000 audience choice award, which was voted on during the judge’s deliberations.The second-place prize went to Haven, an artificial intelligence-powered financial planning platform that helps families manage lifelong disability care. Haven’s pitch was delivered by Tej Mehta, a student in the MIT Sloan School of Management who explained the problem by sharing his own family’s experience managing his sister’s intellectual disability.“As my family plans for the future, a number of questions are keeping us up at night,” Mehta told the audience. “How much money do we need to save? What public benefits is she eligible for? How do we structure our private assets so she doesn’t lose those public benefits? Finally, how do we manage the funds and compliance over time?”Haven works by using family information and goals to build a personalized roadmap that can predict care needs and costs over more than 50 years.“We recommend to families the exact next steps they need to take, what to apply for, and when,” Mehta explained.The third-place prize went to Aorta Scope, which combines AI and ultrasound to provide augmented reality guidance during vascular surgery. Today, surgeons must rely on a 2-D X-ray image as they feed a large stent into patients’ body during a common surgery known as endovascular repair.Aorta Scope has developed a platform for real-time, 3-D implant alignment. The solution combines intravascular ultrasound technology with fiber optic shape sensing. Tom Dillon built the system that combines data from those sources as part of his ongoing PhD in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.Finally, the audience choice award went to Flood Dynamics, which provides real-time flood risk modeling to help cities, insurers, and developers adapt and protect urban communities from flooding.Although most urban flood damages are driven by rain today, flood models don’t account for rainfall, making cities less prepared for flooding risks.“Flooding, and especially rain-driven flooding, is the costliest natural hazard around the world today,” said Katerina Boukin SM ’20, PhD ’25, who developed the company’s technology at MIT. “The price of staying rain-blind is really steep. This is an issue that is costing the U.S. alone more than $30 billion a year.” More

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      in Security

      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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      in Environment

      Study: Burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers is the best available option for bulk maritime shipping

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      When the International Maritime Organization enacted a mandatory cap on the sulfur content of marine fuels in 2020, with an eye toward reducing harmful environmental and health impacts, it left shipping companies with three main options.They could burn low-sulfur fossil fuels, like marine gas oil, or install cleaning systems to remove sulfur from the exhaust gas produced by burning heavy fuel oil. Biofuels with lower sulfur content offer another alternative, though their limited availability makes them a less feasible option.While installing exhaust gas cleaning systems, known as scrubbers, is the most feasible and cost-effective option, there has been a great deal of uncertainty among firms, policymakers, and scientists as to how “green” these scrubbers are.Through a novel lifecycle assessment, researchers from MIT, Georgia Tech, and elsewhere have now found that burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers in the open ocean can match or surpass using low-sulfur fuels, when a wide variety of environmental factors is considered.The scientists combined data on the production and operation of scrubbers and fuels with emissions measurements taken onboard an oceangoing cargo ship.They found that, when the entire supply chain is considered, burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers was the least harmful option in terms of nearly all 10 environmental impact factors they studied, such as greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial acidification, and ozone formation.“In our collaboration with Oldendorff Carriers to broadly explore reducing the environmental impact of shipping, this study of scrubbers turned out to be an unexpectedly deep and important transitional issue,” says Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and senior author of the study.“Claims about environmental hazards and policies to mitigate them should be backed by science. You need to see the data, be objective, and design studies that take into account the full picture to be able to compare different options from an apples-to-apples perspective,” adds lead author Patricia Stathatou, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, who began this study as a postdoc in the CBA.Stathatou is joined on the paper by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty and others at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece and the maritime shipping firm Oldendorff Carriers. The research appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.Slashing sulfur emissionsHeavy fuel oil, traditionally burned by bulk carriers that make up about 30 percent of the global maritime fleet, usually has a sulfur content around 2 to 3 percent. This is far higher than the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 cap of 0.5 percent in most areas of the ocean and 0.1 percent in areas near population centers or environmentally sensitive regions.Sulfur oxide emissions contribute to air pollution and acid rain, and can damage the human respiratory system.In 2018, fewer than 1,000 vessels employed scrubbers. After the cap went into place, higher prices of low-sulfur fossil fuels and limited availability of alternative fuels led many firms to install scrubbers so they could keep burning heavy fuel oil.Today, more than 5,800 vessels utilize scrubbers, the majority of which are wet, open-loop scrubbers.“Scrubbers are a very mature technology. They have traditionally been used for decades in land-based applications like power plants to remove pollutants,” Stathatou says.A wet, open-loop marine scrubber is a huge, metal, vertical tank installed in a ship’s exhaust stack, above the engines. Inside, seawater drawn from the ocean is sprayed through a series of nozzles downward to wash the hot exhaust gases as they exit the engines.The seawater interacts with sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, converting it to sulfates — water-soluble, environmentally benign compounds that naturally occur in seawater. The washwater is released back into the ocean, while the cleaned exhaust escapes to the atmosphere with little to no sulfur dioxide emissions.But the acidic washwater can contain other combustion byproducts like heavy metals, so scientists wondered if scrubbers were comparable, from a holistic environmental point of view, to burning low-sulfur fuels.Several studies explored toxicity of washwater and fuel system pollution, but none painted a full picture.The researchers set out to fill that scientific gap.A “well-to-wake” analysisThe team conducted a lifecycle assessment using a global environmental database on production and transport of fossil fuels, such as heavy fuel oil, marine gas oil, and very-low sulfur fuel oil. Considering the entire lifecycle of each fuel is key, since producing low-sulfur fuel requires extra processing steps in the refinery, causing additional emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter.“If we just look at everything that happens before the fuel is bunkered onboard the vessel, heavy fuel oil is significantly more low-impact, environmentally, than low-sulfur fuels,” she says.The researchers also collaborated with a scrubber manufacturer to obtain detailed information on all materials, production processes, and transportation steps involved in marine scrubber fabrication and installation.“If you consider that the scrubber has a lifetime of about 20 years, the environmental impacts of producing the scrubber over its lifetime are negligible compared to producing heavy fuel oil,” she adds.For the final piece, Stathatou spent a week onboard a bulk carrier vessel in China to measure emissions and gather seawater and washwater samples. The ship burned heavy fuel oil with a scrubber and low-sulfur fuels under similar ocean conditions and engine settings.Collecting these onboard data was the most challenging part of the study.“All the safety gear, combined with the heat and the noise from the engines on a moving ship, was very overwhelming,” she says.Their results showed that scrubbers reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 97 percent, putting heavy fuel oil on par with low-sulfur fuels according to that measure. The researchers saw similar trends for emissions of other pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.In addition, they tested washwater samples for more than 60 chemical parameters, including nitrogen, phosphorus, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and 23 metals.The concentrations of chemicals regulated by the IMO were far below the organization’s requirements. For unregulated chemicals, the researchers compared the concentrations to the strictest limits for industrial effluents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and European Union.Most chemical concentrations were at least an order of magnitude below these requirements.In addition, since washwater is diluted thousands of times as it is dispersed by a moving vessel, the concentrations of such chemicals would be even lower in the open ocean.These findings suggest that the use of scrubbers with heavy fuel oil can be considered as equal to or more environmentally friendly than low-sulfur fuels across many of the impact categories the researchers studied.“This study demonstrates the scientific complexity of the waste stream of scrubbers. Having finally conducted a multiyear, comprehensive, and peer-reviewed study, commonly held fears and assumptions are now put to rest,” says Scott Bergeron, managing director at Oldendorff Carriers and co-author of the study.“This first-of-its-kind study on a well-to-wake basis provides very valuable input to ongoing discussion at the IMO,” adds Thomas Klenum, executive vice president of innovation and regulatory affairs at the Liberian Registry, emphasizing the need “for regulatory decisions to be made based on scientific studies providing factual data and conclusions.”Ultimately, this study shows the importance of incorporating lifecycle assessments into future environmental impact reduction policies, Stathatou says.“There is all this discussion about switching to alternative fuels in the future, but how green are these fuels? We must do our due diligence to compare them equally with existing solutions to see the costs and benefits,” she adds.This study was supported, in part, by Oldendorff Carriers. More

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      How climate change will impact outdoor activities in the US

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      It can be hard to connect a certain amount of average global warming with one’s everyday experience, so researchers at MIT have devised a different approach to quantifying the direct impact of climate change. Instead of focusing on global averages, they came up with the concept of “outdoor days”: the number days per year in a given location when the temperature is not too hot or cold to enjoy normal outdoor activities, such as going for a walk, playing sports, working in the garden, or dining outdoors.In a study published earlier this year, the researchers applied this method to compare the impact of global climate change on different countries around the world, showing that much of the global south would suffer major losses in the number of outdoor days, while some northern countries could see a slight increase. Now, they have applied the same approach to comparing the outcomes for different parts of the United States, dividing the country into nine climatic regions, and finding similar results: Some states, especially Florida and other parts of the Southeast, should see a significant drop in outdoor days, while some, especially in the Northwest, should see a slight increase.The researchers also looked at correlations between economic activity, such as tourism trends, and changing climate conditions, and examined how numbers of outdoor days could result in significant social and economic impacts. Florida’s economy, for example, is highly dependent on tourism and on people moving there for its pleasant climate; a major drop in days when it is comfortable to spend time outdoors could make the state less of a draw.The new findings were published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, in a paper by researchers Yeon-Woo Choi and Muhammad Khalifa and professor of civil and environmental engineering Elfatih Eltahir.“This is something very new in our attempt to understand impacts of climate change impact, in addition to the changing extremes,” Choi says. It allows people to see how these global changes may impact them on a very personal level, as opposed to focusing on global temperature changes or on extreme events such as powerful hurricanes or increased wildfires. “To the best of my knowledge, nobody else takes this same approach” in quantifying the local impacts of climate change, he says. “I hope that many others will parallel our approach to better understand how climate may affect our daily lives.”The study looked at two different climate scenarios — one where maximum efforts are made to curb global emissions of greenhouse gases and one “worst case” scenario where little is done and global warming continues to accelerate. They used these two scenarios with every available global climate model, 32 in all, and the results were broadly consistent across all 32 models.The reality may lie somewhere in between the two extremes that were modeled, Eltahir suggests. “I don’t think we’re going to act as aggressively” as the low-emissions scenarios suggest, he says, “and we may not be as careless” as the high-emissions scenario. “Maybe the reality will emerge in the middle, toward the end of the century,” he says.The team looked at the difference in temperatures and other conditions over various ranges of decades. The data already showed some slight differences in outdoor days from the 1961-1990 period compared to 1991-2020. The researchers then compared these most recent 30 years with the last 30 years of this century, as projected by the models, and found much greater differences ahead for some regions. The strongest effects in the modeling were seen in the Southeastern states. “It seems like climate change is going to have a significant impact on the Southeast in terms of reducing the number of outdoor days,” Eltahir says, “with implications for the quality of life of the population, and also for the attractiveness of tourism and for people who want to retire there.”He adds that “surprisingly, one of the regions that would benefit a little bit is the Northwest.” But the gain there is modest: an increase of about 14 percent in outdoor days projected for the last three decades of this century, compared to the period from 1976 to 2005. The Southwestern U.S., by comparison, faces an average loss of 23 percent of their outdoor days.The study also digs into the relationship between climate and economic activity by looking at tourism trends from U.S. National Park Service visitation data, and how that aligned with differences in climate conditions. “Accounting for seasonal variations, we find a clear connection between the number of outdoor days and the number of tourist visits in the United States,” Choi says.For much of the country, there will be little overall change in the total number of annual outdoor days, the study found, but the seasonal pattern of those days could change significantly. While most parts of the country now see the most outdoor days in summertime, that will shift as summers get hotter, and spring and fall will become the preferred seasons for outdoor activity.In a way, Eltahir says, “what we are talking about that will happen in the future [for most of the country] is already happening in Florida.” There, he says, “the really enjoyable time of year is in the spring and fall, and summer is not the best time of year.”People’s level of comfort with temperatures varies somewhat among individuals and among regions, so the researchers designed a tool, now freely available online, that allows people to set their own definitions of the lowest and highest temperatures they consider suitable for outdoor activities, and then see what the climate models predict would be the change in the number of outdoor days for their location, using their own standards of comfort. For their study, they used a widely accepted range of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) to 25 C (77 F), which is the “thermoneutral zone” in which the human body does not require either metabolic heat generation or evaporative cooling to maintain its core temperature — in other words, in that range there is generally no need to either shiver or sweat.The model mainly focuses on temperature but also allows people to include humidity or precipitation in their definition of what constitutes a comfortable outdoor day. The model could be extended to incorporate other variables such as air quality, but the researchers say temperature tends to be the major determinant of comfort for most people.Using their software tool, “If you disagree with how we define an outdoor day, you could define one for yourself, and then you’ll see what the impacts of that are on your number of outdoor days and their seasonality,” Eltahir says.This work was inspired by the realization, he says, that “people’s understanding of climate change is based on the assumption that climate change is something that’s going to happen sometime in the future and going to happen to someone else. It’s not going to impact them directly. And I think that contributes to the fact that we are not doing enough.”Instead, the concept of outdoor days “brings the concept of climate change home, brings it to personal everyday activities,” he says. “I hope that people will find that useful to bridge that gap, and provide a better understanding and appreciation of the problem. And hopefully that would help lead to sound policies that are based on science, regarding climate change.”The research was based on work supported by the Community Jameel for Jameel Observatory CREWSnet and Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT. More

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      in Environment

      Study finds mercury pollution from human activities is declining

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      MIT researchers have some good environmental news: Mercury emissions from human activity have been declining over the past two decades, despite global emissions inventories that indicate otherwise.In a new study, the researchers analyzed measurements from all available monitoring stations in the Northern Hemisphere and found that atmospheric concentrations of mercury declined by about 10 percent between 2005 and 2020.They used two separate modeling methods to determine what is driving that trend. Both techniques pointed to a decline in mercury emissions from human activity as the most likely cause.Global inventories, on the other hand, have reported opposite trends. These inventories estimate atmospheric emissions using models that incorporate average emission rates of polluting activities and the scale of these activities worldwide.“Our work shows that it is very important to learn from actual, on-the-ground data to try and improve our models and these emissions estimates. This is very relevant for policy because, if we are not able to accurately estimate past mercury emissions, how are we going to predict how mercury pollution will evolve in the future?” says Ari Feinberg, a former postdoc in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and lead author of the study.The new results could help inform scientists who are embarking on a collaborative, global effort to evaluate pollution models and develop a more in-depth understanding of what drives global atmospheric concentrations of mercury.However, due to a lack of data from global monitoring stations and limitations in the scientific understanding of mercury pollution, the researchers couldn’t pinpoint a definitive reason for the mismatch between the inventories and the recorded measurements.“It seems like mercury emissions are moving in the right direction, and could continue to do so, which is heartening to see. But this was as far as we could get with mercury. We need to keep measuring and advancing the science,” adds co-author Noelle Selin, an MIT professor in the IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).Feinberg and Selin, his MIT postdoctoral advisor, are joined on the paper by an international team of researchers that contributed atmospheric mercury measurement data and statistical methods to the study. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Mercury mismatchThe Minamata Convention is a global treaty that aims to cut human-caused emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin that enters the atmosphere from sources like coal-fired power plants and small-scale gold mining.The treaty, which was signed in 2013 and went into force in 2017, is evaluated every five years. The first meeting of its conference of parties coincided with disheartening news reports that said global inventories of mercury emissions, compiled in part from information from national inventories, had increased despite international efforts to reduce them.This was puzzling news for environmental scientists like Selin. Data from monitoring stations showed atmospheric mercury concentrations declining during the same period.Bottom-up inventories combine emission factors, such as the amount of mercury that enters the atmosphere when coal mined in a certain region is burned, with estimates of pollution-causing activities, like how much of that coal is burned in power plants.“The big question we wanted to answer was: What is actually happening to mercury in the atmosphere and what does that say about anthropogenic emissions over time?” Selin says.Modeling mercury emissions is especially tricky. First, mercury is the only metal that is in liquid form at room temperature, so it has unique properties. Moreover, mercury that has been removed from the atmosphere by sinks like the ocean or land can be re-emitted later, making it hard to identify primary emission sources.At the same time, mercury is more difficult to study in laboratory settings than many other air pollutants, especially due to its toxicity, so scientists have limited understanding of all chemical reactions mercury can undergo. There is also a much smaller network of mercury monitoring stations, compared to other polluting gases like methane and nitrous oxide.“One of the challenges of our study was to come up with statistical methods that can address those data gaps, because available measurements come from different time periods and different measurement networks,” Feinberg says.Multifaceted modelsThe researchers compiled data from 51 stations in the Northern Hemisphere. They used statistical techniques to aggregate data from nearby stations, which helped them overcome data gaps and evaluate regional trends.By combining data from 11 regions, their analysis indicated that Northern Hemisphere atmospheric mercury concentrations declined by about 10 percent between 2005 and 2020.Then the researchers used two modeling methods — biogeochemical box modeling and chemical transport modeling — to explore possible causes of that decline.  Box modeling was used to run hundreds of thousands of simulations to evaluate a wide array of emission scenarios. Chemical transport modeling is more computationally expensive but enables researchers to assess the impacts of meteorology and spatial variations on trends in selected scenarios.For instance, they tested one hypothesis that there may be an additional environmental sink that is removing more mercury from the atmosphere than previously thought. The models would indicate the feasibility of an unknown sink of that magnitude.“As we went through each hypothesis systematically, we were pretty surprised that we could really point to declines in anthropogenic emissions as being the most likely cause,” Selin says.Their work underscores the importance of long-term mercury monitoring stations, Feinberg adds. Many stations the researchers evaluated are no longer operational because of a lack of funding.While their analysis couldn’t zero in on exactly why the emissions inventories didn’t match up with actual data, they have a few hypotheses.One possibility is that global inventories are missing key information from certain countries. For instance, the researchers resolved some discrepancies when they used a more detailed regional inventory from China. But there was still a gap between observations and estimates.They also suspect the discrepancy might be the result of changes in two large sources of mercury that are particularly uncertain: emissions from small-scale gold mining and mercury-containing products.Small-scale gold mining involves using mercury to extract gold from soil and is often performed in remote parts of developing countries, making it hard to estimate. Yet small-scale gold mining contributes about 40 percent of human-made emissions.In addition, it’s difficult to determine how long it takes the pollutant to be released into the atmosphere from discarded products like thermometers or scientific equipment.“We’re not there yet where we can really pinpoint which source is responsible for this discrepancy,” Feinberg says.In the future, researchers from multiple countries, including MIT, will collaborate to study and improve the models they use to estimate and evaluate emissions. This research will be influential in helping that project move the needle on monitoring mercury, he says.This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More

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      Study evaluates impacts of summer heat in U.S. prison environments

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      When summer temperatures spike, so does our vulnerability to heat-related illness or even death. For the most part, people can take measures to reduce their heat exposure by opening a window, turning up the air conditioning, or simply getting a glass of water. But for people who are incarcerated, freedom to take such measures is often not an option. Prison populations therefore are especially vulnerable to heat exposure, due to their conditions of confinement.A new study by MIT researchers examines summertime heat exposure in prisons across the United States and identifies characteristics within prison facilities that can further contribute to a population’s vulnerability to summer heat.The study’s authors used high-spatial-resolution air temperature data to determine the daily average outdoor temperature for each of 1,614 prisons in the U.S., for every summer between the years 1990 and 2023. They found that the prisons that are exposed to the most extreme heat are located in the southwestern U.S., while prisons with the biggest changes in summertime heat, compared to the historical record, are in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and parts of the Midwest.Those findings are not entirely unique to prisons, as any non-prison facility or community in the same geographic locations would be exposed to similar outdoor air temperatures. But the team also looked at characteristics specific to prison facilities that could further exacerbate an incarcerated person’s vulnerability to heat exposure. They identified nine such facility-level characteristics, such as highly restricted movement, poor staffing, and inadequate mental health treatment. People living and working in prisons with any one of these characteristics may experience compounded risk to summertime heat. The team also looked at the demographics of 1,260 prisons in their study and found that the prisons with higher heat exposure on average also had higher proportions of non-white and Hispanic populations. The study, appearing today in the journal GeoHealth, provides policymakers and community leaders with ways to estimate, and take steps to address, a prison population’s heat risk, which they anticipate could worsen with climate change.“This isn’t a problem because of climate change. It’s becoming a worse problem because of climate change,” says study lead author Ufuoma Ovienmhada SM ’20, PhD ’24, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, who recently completed her doctorate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “A lot of these prisons were not built to be comfortable or humane in the first place. Climate change is just aggravating the fact that prisons are not designed to enable incarcerated populations to moderate their own exposure to environmental risk factors such as extreme heat.”The study’s co-authors include Danielle Wood, MIT associate professor of media arts and sciences, and of AeroAstro; and Brent Minchew, MIT associate professor of geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; along with Ahmed Diongue ’24, Mia Hines-Shanks of Grinnell College, and Michael Krisch of Columbia University.Environmental intersectionsThe new study is an extension of work carried out at the Media Lab, where Wood leads the Space Enabled research group. The group aims to advance social and environmental justice issues through the use of satellite data and other space-enabled technologies.The group’s motivation to look at heat exposure in prisons came in 2020 when, as co-president of MIT’s Black Graduate Student Union, Ovienmhada took part in community organizing efforts following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.“We started to do more organizing on campus around policing and reimagining public safety. Through that lens I learned more about police and prisons as interconnected systems, and came across this intersection between prisons and environmental hazards,” says Ovienmhada, who is leading an effort to map the various environmental hazards that prisons, jails, and detention centers face. “In terms of environmental hazards, extreme heat causes some of the most acute impacts for incarcerated people.”She, Wood, and their colleagues set out to use Earth observation data to characterize U.S. prison populations’ vulnerability, or their risk of experiencing negative impacts, from heat.The team first looked through a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that lists the location and boundaries of carceral facilities in the U.S. From the database’s more than 6,000 prisons, jails, and detention centers, the researchers highlighted 1,614 prison-specific facilities, which together incarcerate nearly 1.4 million people, and employ about 337,000 staff.They then looked to Daymet, a detailed weather and climate database that tracks daily temperatures across the United States, at a 1-kilometer resolution. For each of the 1,614 prison locations, they mapped the daily outdoor temperature, for every summer between the years 1990 to 2023, noting that the majority of current state and federal correctional facilities in the U.S. were built by 1990.The team also obtained U.S. Census data on each facility’s demographic and facility-level characteristics, such as prison labor activities and conditions of confinement. One limitation of the study that the researchers acknowledge is a lack of information regarding a prison’s climate control.“There’s no comprehensive public resource where you can look up whether a facility has air conditioning,” Ovienmhada notes. “Even in facilities with air conditioning, incarcerated people may not have regular access to those cooling systems, so our measurements of outdoor air temperature may not be far off from reality.”Heat factorsFrom their analysis, the researchers found that more than 98 percent of all prisons in the U.S. experienced at least 10 days in the summer that were hotter than every previous summer, on average, for a given location. Their analysis also revealed the most heat-exposed prisons, and the prisons that experienced the highest temperatures on average, were mostly in the Southwestern U.S. The researchers note that with the exception of New Mexico, the Southwest is a region where there are no universal air conditioning regulations in state-operated prisons.“States run their own prison systems, and there is no uniformity of data collection or policy regarding air conditioning,” says Wood, who notes that there is some information on cooling systems in some states and individual prison facilities, but the data is sparse overall, and too inconsistent to include in the group’s nationwide study.While the researchers could not incorporate air conditioning data, they did consider other facility-level factors that could worsen the effects that outdoor heat triggers. They looked through the scientific literature on heat, health impacts, and prison conditions, and focused on 17 measurable facility-level variables that contribute to heat-related health problems. These include factors such as overcrowding and understaffing.“We know that whenever you’re in a room that has a lot of people, it’s going to feel hotter, even if there’s air conditioning in that environment,” Ovienmhada says. “Also, staffing is a huge factor. Facilities that don’t have air conditioning but still try to do heat risk-mitigation procedures might rely on staff to distribute ice or water every few hours. If that facility is understaffed or has neglectful staff, that may increase people’s susceptibility to hot days.”The study found that prisons with any of nine of the 17 variables showed statistically significant greater heat exposures than the prisons without those variables. Additionally, if a prison exhibits any one of the nine variables, this could worsen people’s heat risk through the combination of elevated heat exposure and vulnerability. The variables, they say, could help state regulators and activists identify prisons to prioritize for heat interventions.“The prison population is aging, and even if you’re not in a ‘hot state,’ every state has responsibility to respond,” Wood emphasizes. “For instance, areas in the Northwest, where you might expect to be temperate overall, have experienced a number of days in recent years of increasing heat risk. A few days out of the year can still be dangerous, particularly for a population with reduced agency to regulate their own exposure to heat.”This work was supported, in part, by NASA, the MIT Media Lab, and MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society’s Research Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. More

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      in Security

      New filtration material could remove long-lasting chemicals from water

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

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

      Image: Courtesy of the researchers

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