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    An abundant phytoplankton feeds a global network of marine microbes

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    One of the hardest-working organisms in the ocean is the tiny, emerald-tinged Prochlorococcus marinus. These single-celled “picoplankton,” which are smaller than a human red blood cell, can be found in staggering numbers throughout the ocean’s surface waters, making Prochlorococcus the most abundant photosynthesizing organism on the planet. (Collectively, Prochlorococcus fix as much carbon as all the crops on land.) Scientists continue to find new ways that the little green microbe is involved in the ocean’s cycling and storage of carbon.Now, MIT scientists have discovered a new ocean-regulating ability in the small but mighty microbes: cross-feeding of DNA building blocks. In a study appearing today in Science Advances, the team reports that Prochlorococcus shed these extra compounds into their surroundings, where they are then “cross-fed,” or taken up by other ocean organisms, either as nutrients, energy, or for regulating metabolism. Prochlorococcus’ rejects, then, are other microbes’ resources.What’s more, this cross-feeding occurs on a regular cycle: Prochlorococcus tend to shed their molecular baggage at night, when enterprising microbes quickly consume the cast-offs. For a microbe called SAR11, the most abundant bacteria in the ocean, the researchers found that the nighttime snack acts as a relaxant of sorts, forcing the bacteria to slow down their metabolism and effectively recharge for the next day.Through this cross-feeding interaction, Prochlorococcus could be helping many microbial communities to grow sustainably, simply by giving away what it doesn’t need. And they’re doing so in a way that could set the daily rhythms of microbes around the world.“The relationship between the two most abundant groups of microbes in ocean ecosystems has intrigued oceanographers for years,” says co-author and MIT Institute Professor Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, who played a role in the discovery of Prochlorococcus in 1986. “Now we have a glimpse of the finely tuned choreography that contributes to their growth and stability across vast regions of the oceans.”Given that Prochlorococcus and SAR11 suffuse the surface oceans, the team suspects that the exchange of molecules from one to the other could amount to one of the major cross-feeding relationships in the ocean, making it an important regulator of the ocean carbon cycle.“By looking at the details and diversity of cross-feeding processes, we can start to unearth important forces that are shaping the carbon cycle,” says the study’s lead author, Rogier Braakman, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).Other MIT co-authors include Brandon Satinsky, Tyler O’Keefe, Shane Hogle, Jamie Becker, Robert Li, Keven Dooley, and Aldo Arellano, along with Krista Longnecker, Melissa Soule, and Elizabeth Kujawinski of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).Spotting castawaysCross-feeding occurs throughout the microbial world, though the process has mainly been studied in close-knit communities. In the human gut, for instance, microbes are in close proximity and can easily exchange and benefit from shared resources.By comparison, Prochlorococcus are free-floating microbes that are regularly tossed and mixed through the ocean’s surface layers. While scientists assume that the plankton are involved in some amount of cross-feeding, exactly how this occurs, and who would benefit, have historically been challenging to probe; any stuff that Prochlorococcus cast away would have vanishingly low concentrations,and be exceedingly difficult to measure.But in work published in 2023, Braakman teamed up with scientists at WHOI, who pioneered ways to measure small organic compounds in seawater. In the lab, they grew various strains of Prochlorococcus under different conditions and characterized what the microbes released. They found that among the major “exudants,” or released molecules, were purines and pyridines, which are molecular building blocks of DNA. The molecules also happen to be nitrogen-rich — a fact that puzzled the team. Prochlorococcus are mainly found in ocean regions that are low in nitrogen, so it was assumed they’d want to retain any and all nitrogen-containing compounds they can. Why, then, were they instead throwing such compounds away?Global symphonyIn their new study, the researchers took a deep dive into the details of Prochlorococcus’ cross-feeding and how it influences various types of ocean microbes.They set out to study how Prochlorococcus use purine and pyridine in the first place, before expelling the compounds into their surroundings. They compared published genomes of the microbes, looking for genes that encode purine and pyridine metabolism. Tracing the genes forward through the genomes, the team found that once the compounds are produced, they are used to make DNA and replicate the microbes’ genome. Any leftover purine and pyridine is recycled and used again, though a fraction of the stuff is ultimately released into the environment. Prochlorococcus appear to make the most of the compounds, then cast off what they can’t.The team also looked to gene expression data and found that genes involved in recycling purine and pyrimidine peak several hours after the recognized peak in genome replication that occurs at dusk. The question then was: What could be benefiting from this nightly shedding?For this, the team looked at the genomes of more than 300 heterotrophic microbes — organisms that consume organic carbon rather than making it themselves through photosynthesis. They suspected that such carbon-feeders could be likely consumers of Prochlorococcus’ organic rejects. They found most of the heterotrophs contained genes that take up either purine or pyridine, or in some cases, both, suggesting microbes have evolved along different paths in terms of how they cross-feed.The group zeroed in on one purine-preferring microbe, SAR11, as it is the most abundant heterotrophic microbe in the ocean. When they then compared the genes across different strains of SAR11, they found that various types use purines for different purposes, from simply taking them up and using them intact to breaking them down for their energy, carbon, or nitrogen. What could explain the diversity in how the microbes were using Prochlorococcus’ cast-offs?It turns out the local environment plays a big role. Braakman and his collaborators performed a metagenome analysis in which they compared the collectively sequenced genomes of all microbes in over 600 seawater samples from around the world, focusing on SAR11 bacteria. Metagenome sequences were collected alongside measurements of various environmental conditions and geographic locations in which they are found. This analysis showed that the bacteria gobble up purine for its nitrogen when the nitrogen in seawater is low, and for its carbon or energy when nitrogen is in surplus — revealing the selective pressures shaping these communities in different ocean regimes.“The work here suggests that microbes in the ocean have developed relationships that advance their growth potential in ways we don’t expect,” says co-author Kujawinski.Finally, the team carried out a simple experiment in the lab, to see if they could directly observe a mechanism by which purine acts on SAR11. They grew the bacteria in cultures, exposed them to various concentrations of purine, and unexpectedly found it causes them to slow down their normal metabolic activities and even growth. However, when the researchers put these same cells under environmentally stressful conditions, they continued growing strong and healthy cells, as if the metabolic pausing by purines helped prime them for growth, thereby avoiding the effects of the stress.“When you think about the ocean, where you see this daily pulse of purines being released by Prochlorococcus, this provides a daily inhibition signal that could be causing a pause in SAR11 metabolism, so that the next day when the sun comes out, they are primed and ready,” Braakman says. “So we think Prochlorococcus is acting as a conductor in the daily symphony of ocean metabolism, and cross-feeding is creating a global synchronization among all these microbial cells.”This work was supported, in part, by the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation. More

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      Unlocking the hidden power of boiling — for energy, space, and beyond

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      Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind boiling has been a decade-long journey filled with unexpected challenges and new insights.The seemingly simple phenomenon is extremely hard to study in complex systems like nuclear reactors, and yet it sits at the core of a wide range of important industrial processes. Unlocking its secrets could thus enable advances in efficient energy production, electronics cooling, water desalination, medical diagnostics, and more.“Boiling is important for applications way beyond nuclear,” says Bucci, who earned tenure at MIT in July. “Boiling is used in 80 percent of the power plants that produce electricity. My research has implications for space propulsion, energy storage, electronics, and the increasingly important task of cooling computers.”Bucci’s lab has developed new experimental techniques to shed light on a wide range of boiling and heat transfer phenomena that have limited energy projects for decades. Chief among those is a problem caused by bubbles forming so quickly they create a band of vapor across a surface that prevents further heat transfer. In 2023, Bucci and collaborators developed a unifying principle governing the problem, known as the boiling crisis, which could enable more efficient nuclear reactors and prevent catastrophic failures.For Bucci, each bout of progress brings new possibilities — and new questions to answer.“What’s the best paper?” Bucci asks. “The best paper is the next one. I think Alfred Hitchcock used to say it doesn’t matter how good your last movie was. If your next one is poor, people won’t remember it. I always tell my students that our next paper should always be better than the last. It’s a continuous journey of improvement.”From engineering to bubblesThe Italian village where Bucci grew up had a population of about 1,000 during his childhood. He gained mechanical skills by working in his father’s machine shop and by taking apart and reassembling appliances like washing machines and air conditioners to see what was inside. He also gained a passion for cycling, competing in the sport until he attended the University of Pisa for undergraduate and graduate studies.In college, Bucci was fascinated with matter and the origins of life, but he also liked building things, so when it came time to pick between physics and engineering, he decided nuclear engineering was a good middle ground.“I have a passion for construction and for understanding how things are made,” Bucci says. “Nuclear engineering was a very unlikely but obvious choice. It was unlikely because in Italy, nuclear was already out of the energy landscape, so there were very few of us. At the same time, there were a combination of intellectual and practical challenges, which is what I like.”For his PhD, Bucci went to France, where he met his wife, and went on to work at a French national lab. One day his department head asked him to work on a problem in nuclear reactor safety known as transient boiling. To solve it, he wanted to use a method for making measurements pioneered by MIT Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, so he received grant money to become a visiting scientist at MIT in 2013. He’s been studying boiling at MIT ever since.Today Bucci’s lab is developing new diagnostic techniques to study boiling and heat transfer along with new materials and coatings that could make heat transfer more efficient. The work has given researchers an unprecedented view into the conditions inside a nuclear reactor.“The diagnostics we’ve developed can collect the equivalent of 20 years of experimental work in a one-day experiment,” Bucci says.That data, in turn, led Bucci to a remarkably simple model describing the boiling crisis.“The effectiveness of the boiling process on the surface of nuclear reactor cladding determines the efficiency and the safety of the reactor,” Bucci explains. “It’s like a car that you want to accelerate, but there is an upper limit. For a nuclear reactor, that upper limit is dictated by boiling heat transfer, so we are interested in understanding what that upper limit is and how we can overcome it to enhance the reactor performance.”Another particularly impactful area of research for Bucci is two-phase immersion cooling, a process wherein hot server parts bring liquid to boil, then the resulting vapor condenses on a heat exchanger above to create a constant, passive cycle of cooling.“It keeps chips cold with minimal waste of energy, significantly reducing the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of data centers,” Bucci explains. “Data centers emit as much CO2 as the entire aviation industry. By 2040, they will account for over 10 percent of emissions.”Supporting studentsBucci says working with students is the most rewarding part of his job. “They have such great passion and competence. It’s motivating to work with people who have the same passion as you.”“My students have no fear to explore new ideas,” Bucci adds. “They almost never stop in front of an obstacle — sometimes to the point where you have to slow them down and put them back on track.”In running the Red Lab in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Bucci tries to give students independence as well as support.“We’re not educating students, we’re educating future researchers,” Bucci says. “I think the most important part of our work is to not only provide the tools, but also to give the confidence and the self-starting attitude to fix problems. That can be business problems, problems with experiments, problems with your lab mates.”Some of the more unique experiments Bucci’s students do require them to gather measurements while free falling in an airplane to achieve zero gravity.“Space research is the big fantasy of all the kids,” says Bucci, who joins students in the experiments about twice a year. “It’s very fun and inspiring research for students. Zero g gives you a new perspective on life.”Applying AIBucci is also excited about incorporating artificial intelligence into his field. In 2023, he was a co-recipient of a multi-university research initiative (MURI) project in thermal science dedicated solely to machine learning. In a nod to the promise AI holds in his field, Bucci also recently founded a journal called AI Thermal Fluids to feature AI-driven research advances.“Our community doesn’t have a home for people that want to develop machine-learning techniques,” Bucci says. “We wanted to create an avenue for people in computer science and thermal science to work together to make progress. I think we really need to bring computer scientists into our community to speed this process up.”Bucci also believes AI can be used to process huge reams of data gathered using the new experimental techniques he’s developed as well as to model phenomena researchers can’t yet study.“It’s possible that AI will give us the opportunity to understand things that cannot be observed, or at least guide us in the dark as we try to find the root causes of many problems,” Bucci says. More

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      in Environment

      Surface-based sonar system could rapidly map the ocean floor at high resolution

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      On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible was about an hour-and-a-half into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it lost contact with its support ship. This cease in communication set off a frantic search for the tourist submersible and five passengers onboard, located about two miles below the ocean’s surface.Deep-ocean search and recovery is one of the many missions of military services like the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue and the U.S. Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving. For this mission, the longest delays come from transporting search-and-rescue equipment via ship to the area of interest and comprehensively surveying that area. A search operation on the scale of that for Titan — which was conducted 420 nautical miles from the nearest port and covered 13,000 square kilometers, an area roughly twice the size of Connecticut — could take weeks to complete. The search area for Titan is considered relatively small, focused on the immediate vicinity of the Titanic. When the area is less known, operations could take months. (A remotely operated underwater vehicle deployed by a Canadian vessel ended up finding the debris field of Titan on the seafloor, four days after the submersible had gone missing.)A research team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Ocean Science and Engineering lab is developing a surface-based sonar system that could accelerate the timeline for small- and large-scale search operations to days. Called the Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder, the system scans at surface-ship rates while providing sufficient resolution to find objects and features in the deep ocean, without the time and expense of deploying underwater vehicles. The echo sounder — which features a large sonar array using a small set of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) that can be deployed via aircraft into the ocean — holds the potential to map the seabed at 50 times the coverage rate of an underwater vehicle and 100 times the resolution of a surface vessel.

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      Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo SounderVideo: MIT Lincoln Laboratory

      “Our array provides the best of both worlds: the high resolution of underwater vehicles and the high coverage rate of surface ships,” says co–principal investigator Andrew March, assistant leader of the laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. “Though large surface-based sonar systems at low frequency have the potential to determine the materials and profiles of the seabed, they typically do so at the expense of resolution, particularly with increasing ocean depth. Our array can likely determine this information, too, but at significantly enhanced resolution in the deep ocean.”Underwater unknownOceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface, yet more than 80 percent of this underwater realm remains undiscovered and unexplored. Humans know more about the surface of other planets and the moon than the bottom of our oceans. High-resolution seabed maps would not only be useful to find missing objects like ships or aircraft, but also to support a host of other scientific applications: understanding Earth’s geology, improving forecasting of ocean currents and corresponding weather and climate impacts, uncovering archaeological sites, monitoring marine ecosystems and habitats, and identifying locations containing natural resources such as mineral and oil deposits.Scientists and governments worldwide recognize the importance of creating a high-resolution global map of the seafloor; the problem is that no existing technology can achieve meter-scale resolution from the ocean surface. The average depth of our oceans is approximately 3,700 meters. However, today’s technologies capable of finding human-made objects on the seabed or identifying person-sized natural features — these technologies include sonar, lidar, cameras, and gravitational field mapping — have a maximum range of less than 1,000 meters through water.Ships with large sonar arrays mounted on their hull map the deep ocean by emitting low-frequency sound waves that bounce off the seafloor and return as echoes to the surface. Operation at low frequencies is necessary because water readily absorbs high-frequency sound waves, especially with increasing depth; however, such operation yields low-resolution images, with each image pixel representing a football field in size. Resolution is also restricted because sonar arrays installed on large mapping ships are already using all of the available hull space, thereby capping the sonar beam’s aperture size. By contrast, sonars on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that operate at higher frequencies within a few hundred meters of the seafloor generate maps with each pixel representing one square meter or less, resulting in 10,000 times more pixels in that same football field–sized area. However, this higher resolution comes with trade-offs: AUVs are time-consuming and expensive to deploy in the deep ocean, limiting the amount of seafloor that can be mapped; they have a maximum range of about 1,000 meters before their high-frequency sound gets absorbed; and they move at slow speeds to conserve power. The area-coverage rate of AUVs performing high-resolution mapping is about 8 square kilometers per hour; surface vessels map the deep ocean at more than 50 times that rate.A solution surfacesThe Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder could offer a cost-effective approach to high-resolution, rapid mapping of the deep seafloor from the ocean’s surface. A collaborative fleet of about 20 ASVs, each hosting a small sonar array, effectively forms a single sonar array 100 times the size of a large sonar array installed on a ship. The large aperture achieved by the array (hundreds of meters) produces a narrow beam, which enables sound to be precisely steered to generate high-resolution maps at low frequency. Because very few sonars are installed relative to the array’s overall size (i.e., a sparse aperture), the cost is tractable.However, this collaborative and sparse setup introduces some operational challenges. First, for coherent 3D imaging, the relative position of each ASV’s sonar subarray must be accurately tracked through dynamic ocean-induced motions. Second, because sonar elements are not placed directly next to each other without any gaps, the array suffers from a lower signal-to-noise ratio and is less able to reject noise coming from unintended or undesired directions. To mitigate these challenges, the team has been developing a low-cost precision-relative navigation system and leveraging acoustic signal processing tools and new ocean-field estimation algorithms. The MIT campus collaborators are developing algorithms for data processing and image formation, especially to estimate depth-integrated water-column parameters. These enabling technologies will help account for complex ocean physics, spanning physical properties like temperature, dynamic processes like currents and waves, and acoustic propagation factors like sound speed.Processing for all required control and calculations could be completed either remotely or onboard the ASVs. For example, ASVs deployed from a ship or flying boat could be controlled and guided remotely from land via a satellite link or from a nearby support ship (with direct communications or a satellite link), and left to map the seabed for weeks or months at a time until maintenance is needed. Sonar-return health checks and coarse seabed mapping would be conducted on board, while full, high-resolution reconstruction of the seabed would require a supercomputing infrastructure on land or on a support ship.”Deploying vehicles in an area and letting them map for extended periods of time without the need for a ship to return home to replenish supplies and rotate crews would significantly simplify logistics and operating costs,” says co–principal investigator Paul Ryu, a researcher in the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group.Since beginning their research in 2018, the team has turned their concept into a prototype. Initially, the scientists built a scale model of a sparse-aperture sonar array and tested it in a water tank at the laboratory’s Autonomous Systems Development Facility. Then, they prototyped an ASV-sized sonar subarray and demonstrated its functionality in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In follow-on sea tests in Boston Harbor, they deployed an 8-meter array containing multiple subarrays equivalent to 25 ASVs locked together; with this array, they generated 3D reconstructions of the seafloor and a shipwreck. Most recently, the team fabricated, in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a first-generation, 12-foot-long, all-electric ASV prototype carrying a sonar array underneath. With this prototype, they conducted preliminary relative navigation testing in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island. Their full deep-ocean concept calls for approximately 20 such ASVs of a similar size, likely powered by wave or solar energy.This work was funded through Lincoln Laboratory’s internally administered R&D portfolio on autonomous systems. The team is now seeking external sponsorship to continue development of their ocean floor–mapping technology, which was recognized with a 2024 R&D 100 Award.  More

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      in Energy

      MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems unveils plans for the world’s first fusion power plant

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      America is one step closer to tapping into a new and potentially limitless clean energy source today, with the announcement from MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) that it plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.The announcement is the latest milestone for the company, which has made groundbreaking progress toward harnessing fusion — the reaction that powers the sun — since its founders first conceived of their approach in an MIT classroom in 2012. CFS is now commercializing a suite of advanced technologies developed in MIT research labs.“This moment exemplifies the power of MIT’s mission, which is to create knowledge that serves the nation and the world, whether via the classroom, the lab, or out in communities,” MIT Vice President for Research Ian Waitz says. “From student coursework 12 years ago to today’s announcement of the siting in Virginia of the world’s first fusion power plant, progress has been amazingly rapid. At the same time, we owe this progress to over 65 years of sustained investment by the U.S. federal government in basic science and energy research.”The new fusion power plant, named ARC, is expected to come online in the early 2030s and generate about 400 megawatts of clean, carbon-free electricity — enough energy to power large industrial sites or about 150,000 homes.The plant will be built at the James River Industrial Park outside of Richmond through a nonfinancial collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia, which will provide development and technical expertise along with leasing rights for the site. CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the power plant.The plant will support Virginia’s economic and clean energy goals by generating what is expected to be billions of dollars in economic development and hundreds of jobs during its construction and long-term operation.More broadly, ARC will position the U.S. to lead the world in harnessing a new form of safe and reliable energy that could prove critical for economic prosperity and national security, including for meeting increasing electricity demands driven by needs like artificial intelligence.“This will be a watershed moment for fusion,” says CFS co-founder Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT. “It sets the pace in the race toward commercial fusion power plants. The ambition is to build thousands of these power plants and to change the world.”Fusion can generate energy from abundant fuels like hydrogen and lithium isotopes, which can be sourced from seawater, and leave behind no emissions or toxic waste. However, harnessing fusion in a way that produces more power than it takes in has proven difficult because of the high temperatures needed to create and maintain the fusion reaction. Over the course of decades, scientists and engineers have worked to make the dream of fusion power plants a reality.In 2012, teaching the MIT class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), Whyte challenged a group of graduate students to design a fusion device that would use a new kind of superconducting magnet to confine the plasma used in the reaction. It turned out the magnets enabled a more compact and economic reactor design. When Whyte reviewed his students’ work, he realized that could mean a new development path for fusion.Since then, a huge amount of capital and expertise has rushed into the once fledgling fusion industry. Today there are dozens of private fusion companies around the world racing to develop the first net-energy fusion power plants, many utilizing the new superconducting magnets. CFS, which Whyte founded with several students from his class, has attracted more than $2 billion in funding.“It all started with that class, where our ideas kept evolving as we challenged the standard assumptions that came with fusion,” Whyte says. “We had this new superconducting technology, so much of the common wisdom was no longer valid. It was a perfect forum for students, who can challenge the status quo.”Since the company’s founding in 2017, it has collaborated with researchers in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) on a range of initiatives, from validating the underlying plasma physics for the first demonstration machine to breaking records with a new kind of magnet to be used in commercial fusion power plants. Each piece of progress moves the U.S. closer to harnessing a revolutionary new energy source.CFS is currently completing development of its fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, at its headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC is expected to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after, demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than it consumes. SPARC will pave the way for ARC, which is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.“There’s more challenging engineering and science to be done in this field, and we’re very enthusiastic about the progress that CFS and the researchers on our campus are making on those problems,” Waitz says. “We’re in a ‘hockey stick’ moment in fusion energy, where things are moving incredibly quickly now. On the other hand, we can’t forget about the much longer part of that hockey stick, the sustained support for very complex, fundamental research that underlies great innovations. If we’re going to continue to lead the world in these cutting-edge technologies, continued investment in those areas will be crucial.” More

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      in Environment

      In a unique research collaboration, students make the case for less e-waste

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      Brought together as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, a community of students known as SERC Scholars is collaborating to examine the most urgent problems humans face in the digital landscape.Each semester, students from all levels from across MIT are invited to join a different topical working group led by a SERC postdoctoral associate. Each group delves into a specific issue — such as surveillance or data ownership — culminating in a final project presented at the end of the term.Typically, students complete the program with hands-on experience conducting research in a new cross-disciplinary field. However, one group of undergraduate and graduate students recently had the unique opportunity to enhance their resume by becoming published authors of a case study about the environmental and climate justice implications of the electronics hardware life cycle.Although it’s not uncommon for graduate students to co-author case studies, it’s unusual for undergraduates to earn this opportunity — and for their audience to be other undergraduates around the world.“Our team was insanely interdisciplinary,” says Anastasia Dunca, a junior studying computer science and one of the co-authors. “I joined the SERC Scholars Program because I liked the idea of being part of a cohort from across MIT working on a project that utilized all of our skillsets. It also helps [undergraduates] learn the ins and outs of computing ethics research.”Case study co-author Jasmin Liu, an MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees the program as a platform to learn about the intersection of technology, society, and ethics: “I met team members spanning computer science, urban planning, to art/culture/technology. I was excited to work with a diverse team because I know complex problems must be approached with many different perspectives. Combining my background in humanities and business with the expertise of others allowed us to be more innovative and comprehensive.”Christopher Rabe, a former SERC postdoc who facilitated the group, says, “I let the students take the lead on identifying the topic and conducting the research.” His goal for the group was to challenge students across disciplines to develop a working definition of climate justice.From mining to e-wasteThe SERC Scholars’ case study, “From Mining to E-waste: The Environmental and Climate Justice Implications of the Electronics Hardware Life Cycle,” was published by the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.The ongoing case studies series, which releases new issues twice a year on an open-source platform, is enabling undergraduate instructors worldwide to incorporate research-based education materials on computing ethics into their existing class syllabi.This particular case study broke down the electronics life cycle from mining to manufacturing, usage, and disposal. It offered an in-depth look at how this cycle promotes inequity in the Global South. Mining for the average of 60 minerals that power everyday devices lead to illegal deforestation, compromising air quality in the Amazon, and triggering armed conflict in Congo. Manufacturing leads to proven health risks for both formal and informal workers, some of whom are child laborers.Life cycle assessment and circular economy are proposed as mechanisms for analyzing environmental and climate justice issues in the electronics life cycle. Rather than posing solutions, the case study offers readers entry points for further discussion and for assessing their own individual responsibility as producers of e-waste.Crufting and crafting a case studyDunca joined Rabe’s working group, intrigued by the invitation to conduct a rigorous literature review examining issues like data center resource and energy use, manufacturing waste, ethical issues with AI, and climate change. Rabe quickly realized that a common thread among all participants was an interest in understanding and reducing e-waste and its impact on the environment.“I came in with the idea of us co-authoring a case study,” Rabe said. However, the writing-intensive process was initially daunting to those students who were used to conducting applied research. Once Rabe created sub-groups with discrete tasks, the steps for researching, writing, and iterating a case study became more approachable.For Ellie Bultena, an undergraduate student studying linguistics and philosophy and a contributor to the study, that meant conducting field research on the loading dock of MIT’s Stata Center, where students and faculty go “crufting” through piles of clunky printers, broken computers, and used lab equipment discarded by the Institute’s labs, departments, and individual users.Although not a formally sanctioned activity on-campus, “crufting” is the act of gleaning usable parts from these junk piles to be repurposed into new equipment or art. Bultena’s respondents, who opted to be anonymous, said that MIT could do better when it comes to the amount of e-waste generated and suggested that formal strategies could be implemented to encourage community members to repair equipment more easily or recycle more formally.Rabe, now an education program director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, is hopeful that through the Zero-Carbon Campus Initiative, which commits MIT to eliminating all direct emissions by 2050, MIT will ultimately become a model for other higher education institutions.Although the group lacked the time and resources to travel to communities in the Global South that they profiled in their case study, members leaned into exhaustive secondary research, collecting data on how some countries are irresponsibly dumping e-waste. In contrast, others have developed alternative solutions that can be duplicated elsewhere and scaled.“We source materials, manufacture them, and then throw them away,” Lelia Hampton says. A PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and another co-author, Hampton jumped at the opportunity to serve in a writing role, bringing together the sub-groups research findings. “I’d never written a case study, and it was exciting. Now I want to write 10 more.”The content directly informed Hampton’s dissertation research, which “looks at applying machine learning to climate justice issues such as urban heat islands.” She said that writing a case study that is accessible to general audiences upskilled her for the non-profit organization she’s determined to start. “It’s going to provide communities with free resources and data needed to understand how they are impacted by climate change and begin to advocate against injustice,” Hampton explains.Dunca, Liu, Rabe, Bultena, and Hampton are joined on the case study by fellow authors Mrinalini Singha, a graduate student in the Art, Culture, and Technology program; Sungmoon Lim, a graduate student in urban studies and planning and EECS; Lauren Higgins, an undergraduate majoring in political science; and Madeline Schlegal, a Northeastern University co-op student.Taking the case study to classrooms around the worldAlthough PhD candidates have contributed to previous case studies in the series, this publication is the first to be co-authored with MIT undergraduates. Like any other peer-reviewed journal, before publication, the SERC Scholars’ case study was anonymously reviewed by senior scholars drawn from various fields.The series editor, David Kaiser, also served as one of SERC’s inaugural associate deans and helped shape the program. “The case studies, by design, are short, easy to read, and don’t take up lots of time,” Kaiser explained. “They are gateways for students to explore, and instructors can cover a topic that has likely already been on their mind.” This semester, Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a professor of physics, is teaching STS.004 (Intersections: Science, Technology, and the World), an undergraduate introduction to the field of science, technology, and society. The last month of the semester has been dedicated wholly to SERC case studies, one of which is: “From Mining to E-Waste.”Hampton was visibly moved to hear that the case study is being used at MIT but also by some of the 250,000 visitors to the SERC platform, many of whom are based in the Global South and directly impacted by the issues she and her cohort researched. “Many students are focused on climate, whether through computer science, data science, or mechanical engineering. I hope that this case study educates them on environmental and climate aspects of e-waste and computing.” More

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      in Environment

      Enabling a circular economy in the built environment

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      The amount of waste generated by the construction sector underscores an urgent need for embracing circularity — a sustainable model that aims to minimize waste and maximize material efficiency through recovery and reuse — in the built environment: 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste was produced in the United States alone in 2018, with 820 million tons reported in the European Union, and an excess of 2 billion tons annually in China.This significant resource loss embedded in our current industrial ecosystem marks a linear economy that operates on a “take-make-dispose” model of construction; in contrast, the “make-use-reuse” approach of a circular economy offers an important opportunity to reduce environmental impacts.A team of MIT researchers has begun to assess what may be needed to spur widespread circular transition within the built environment in a new open-access study that aims to understand stakeholders’ current perceptions of circularity and quantify their willingness to pay.“This paper acts as an initial endeavor into understanding what the industry may be motivated by, and how integration of stakeholder motivations could lead to greater adoption,” says lead author Juliana Berglund-Brown, PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT.Considering stakeholders’ perceptionsThree different stakeholder groups from North America, Europe, and Asia — material suppliers, design and construction teams, and real estate developers — were surveyed by the research team that also comprises Akrisht Pandey ’23; Fabio Duarte, associate director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; Raquel Ganitsky, fellow in the Sustainable Real Estate Development Action Program; Randolph Kirchain, co-director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub; and Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning.Despite growing awareness of reuse practice among construction industry stakeholders, circular practices have yet to be implemented at scale — attributable to many factors that influence the intersection of construction needs with government regulations and the economic interests of real estate developers.The study notes that perceived barriers to circular adoption differ based on industry role, with lack of both client interest and standardized structural assessment methods identified as the primary concern of design and construction teams, while the largest deterrents for material suppliers are logistics complexity, and supply uncertainty. Real estate developers, on the other hand, are chiefly concerned with higher costs and structural assessment. Yet encouragingly, respondents expressed willingness to absorb higher costs, with developers indicating readiness to pay an average of 9.6 percent higher construction costs for a minimum 52.9 percent reduction in embodied carbon — and all stakeholders highly favor the potential of incentives like tax exemptions to aid with cost premiums.Next steps to encourage circularityThe findings highlight the need for further conversation between design teams and developers, as well as for additional exploration into potential solutions to practical challenges. “The thing about circularity is that there is opportunity for a lot of value creation, and subsequently profit,” says Berglund-Brown. “If people are motivated by cost, let’s provide a cost incentive, or establish strategies that have one.”When it comes to motivating reasons to adopt circularity practices, the study also found trends emerging by industry role. Future net-zero goals influence developers as well as design and construction teams, with government regulation the third-most frequently named reason across all respondent types.“The construction industry needs a market driver to embrace circularity,” says Berglund-Brown, “Be it carrots or sticks, stakeholders require incentives for adoption.”The effect of policy to motivate change cannot be understated, with major strides being made in low operational carbon building design after policy restricting emissions was introduced, such as Local Law 97 in New York City and the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance in Boston. These pieces of policy, and their results, can serve as models for embodied carbon reduction policy elsewhere.Berglund-Brown suggests that municipalities might initiate ordinances requiring buildings to be deconstructed, which would allow components to be reused, curbing demolition methods that result in waste rather than salvage. Top-down ordinances could be one way to trigger a supply chain shift toward reprocessing building materials that are typically deemed “end-of-life.”The study also identifies other challenges to the implementation of circularity at scale, including risk associated with how to reuse materials in new buildings, and disrupting status quo design practices.“Understanding the best way to motivate transition despite uncertainty is where our work comes in,” says Berglund-Brown. “Beyond that, researchers can continue to do a lot to alleviate risk — like developing standards for reuse.”Innovations that challenge the status quoDisrupting the status quo is not unusual for MIT researchers; other visionary work in construction circularity pioneered at MIT includes “a smart kit of parts” called Pixelframe. This system for modular concrete reuse allows building elements to be disassembled and rebuilt several times, aiding deconstruction and reuse while maintaining material efficiency and versatility.Developed by MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Associate Director Caitlin Mueller’s research team, Pixelframe is designed to accommodate a wide range of applications from housing to warehouses, with each piece of interlocking precast concrete modules, called Pixels, assigned a material passport to enable tracking through its many life cycles.Mueller’s work demonstrates that circularity can work technically and logistically at the scale of the built environment — by designing specifically for disassembly, configuration, versatility, and upfront carbon and cost efficiency.“This can be built today. This is building code-compliant today,” said Mueller of Pixelframe in a keynote speech at the recent MCSC Annual Symposium, which saw industry representatives and members of the MIT community coming together to discuss scalable solutions to climate and sustainability problems. “We currently have the potential for high-impact carbon reduction as a compelling alternative to the business-as-usual construction methods we are used to.”Pixelframe was recently awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to pursue commercialization, an important next step toward integrating innovations like this into a circular economy in practice. “It’s MassCEC’s job to make sure that these climate leaders have the resources they need to turn their technologies into successful businesses that make a difference around the world,” said MassCEC CEO Emily Reichart, in a press release.Additional support for circular innovation has emerged thanks to a historic piece of climate legislation from the Biden administration. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded a federal grant on the topic of advancing steel reuse to Berglund-Brown — whose PhD thesis focuses on scaling the reuse of structural heavy-section steel — and John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at MIT.“There is a lot of exciting upcoming work on this topic,” says Berglund-Brown. “To any practitioners reading this who are interested in getting involved — please reach out.”The study is supported in part by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. 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      in Energy

      Transforming fusion from a scientific curiosity into a powerful clean energy source

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      If you’re looking for hard problems, building a nuclear fusion power plant is a pretty good place to start. Fusion — the process that powers the sun — has proven to be a difficult thing to recreate here on Earth despite decades of research.“There’s something very attractive to me about the magnitude of the fusion challenge,” Hartwig says. “It’s probably true of a lot of people at MIT. I’m driven to work on very hard problems. There’s something intrinsically satisfying about that battle. It’s part of the reason I’ve stayed in this field. We have to cross multiple frontiers of physics and engineering if we’re going to get fusion to work.”The problem got harder when, in Hartwig’s last year in graduate school, the Department of Energy announced plans to terminate funding for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a major fusion experiment in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center that Hartwig needed to do to graduate. Hartwig was able to finish his PhD, and the scare didn’t dissuade him from the field. In fact, he took an associate professor position at MIT in 2017 to keep working on fusion.“It was a pretty bleak time to take a faculty position in fusion energy, but I am a person who loves to find a vacuum,” says Hartwig, who is a newly tenured associate professor at MIT. “I adore a vacuum because there’s enormous opportunity in chaos.”Hartwig did have one very good reason for hope. In 2012, he had taken a class taught by Professor Dennis Whyte that challenged students to design and assess the economics of a nuclear fusion power plant that incorporated a new kind of high-temperature superconducting magnet. Hartwig says the magnets enable fusion reactors to be much smaller, cheaper, and faster.Whyte, Hartwig, and a few other members of the class started working nights and weekends to prove the reactors were feasible. In 2017, the group founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to build the world’s first commercial-scale fusion power plants.Over the next four years, Hartwig led a research project at MIT with CFS that further developed the magnet technology and scaled it to create a 20-Tesla superconducting magnet — a suitable size for a nuclear fusion power plant.The magnet and subsequent tests of its performance represented a turning point for the industry. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has since attracted more than $2 billion in investments to build its first reactors, while the fusion industry overall has exceeded $8 billion in private investment.The old joke in fusion is that the technology is always 30 years away. But fewer people are laughing these days.“The perspective in 2024 looks quite a bit different than it did in 2016, and a huge part of that is tied to the institutional capability of a place like MIT and the willingness of people here to accomplish big things,” Hartwig says.A path to the starsAs a child growing up in St. Louis, Hartwig was interested in sports and playing outside with friends but had little interest in physics. When he went to Boston University as an undergraduate, he studied biomedical engineering simply because his older brother had done it, so he thought he could get a job. But as he was introduced to tools for structural experiments and analysis, he found himself more interested in how the tools worked than what they could do.“That led me to physics, and physics ended up leading me to nuclear science, where I’m basically still doing applied physics,” Hartwig explains.Joining the field late in his undergraduate studies, Hartwig worked hard to get his physics degree on time. After graduation, he was burnt out, so he took two years off and raced his bicycle competitively while working in a bike shop.“There’s so much pressure on people in science and engineering to go straight through,” Hartwig says. “People say if you take time off, you won’t be able to get into graduate school, you won’t be able to get recommendation letters. I always tell my students, ‘It depends on the person.’ Everybody’s different, but it was a great period for me, and it really set me up to enter graduate school with a more mature mindset and to be more focused.”Hartwig returned to academia as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in 2007. When his thesis advisor, Dennis Whyte, announced a course focused on designing nuclear fusion power plants, it caught Hartwig’s eye. The final projects showed a surprisingly promising path forward for a fusion field that had been stagnant for decades. The rest was history.“We started CFS with the idea that it would partner deeply with MIT and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center to leverage the infrastructure, expertise, people, and capabilities that we have MIT,” Hartwig says. “We had to start the company with the idea that it would be deeply partnered with MIT in an innovative way that hadn’t really been done before.”Guided by impactHartwig says the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in particular, have seen a huge influx in graduate student applications in recent years.“There’s so much demand, because people are excited again about the possibilities,” Hartwig says. “Instead of having fusion and a machine built in one or two generations, we’ll hopefully be learning how these things work in under a decade.”Hartwig’s research group is still testing CFS’ new magnets, but it is also partnering with other fusion companies in an effort to advance the field more broadly.Overall, when Hartwig looks back at his career, the thing he is most proud of is switching specialties every six years or so, from building equipment for his PhD to conducting fundamental experiments to designing reactors to building magnets.“It’s not that traditional in academia,” Hartwig says. “Where I’ve found success is coming into something new, bringing a naivety but also realism to a new field, and offering a different toolkit, a different approach, or a different idea about what can be done.”Now Hartwig is onto his next act, developing new ways to study materials for use in fusion and fission reactors.“I’m already interested in moving on to the next thing; the next field where I’m not a trained expert,” Hartwig says. “It’s about identifying where there’s stagnation in fusion and in technology, where innovation is not happening where we desperately need it, and bringing new ideas to that.” More

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      in Energy

      So you want to build a solar or wind farm? Here’s how to decide where.

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      Deciding where to build new solar or wind installations is often left up to individual developers or utilities, with limited overall coordination. But a new study shows that regional-level planning using fine-grained weather data, information about energy use, and energy system modeling can make a big difference in the design of such renewable power installations. This also leads to more efficient and economically viable operations.The findings show the benefits of coordinating the siting of solar farms, wind farms, and storage systems, taking into account local and temporal variations in wind, sunlight, and energy demand to maximize the utilization of renewable resources. This approach can reduce the need for sizable investments in storage, and thus the total system cost, while maximizing availability of clean power when it’s needed, the researchers found.The study, appearing today in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, was co-authored by Liying Qiu and Rahman Khorramfar, postdocs in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and professors Saurabh Amin and Michael Howland.Qiu, the lead author, says that with the team’s new approach, “we can harness the resource complementarity, which means that renewable resources of different types, such as wind and solar, or different locations can compensate for each other in time and space. This potential for spatial complementarity to improve system design has not been emphasized and quantified in existing large-scale planning.”Such complementarity will become ever more important as variable renewable energy sources account for a greater proportion of power entering the grid, she says. By coordinating the peaks and valleys of production and demand more smoothly, she says, “we are actually trying to use the natural variability itself to address the variability.”Typically, in planning large-scale renewable energy installations, Qiu says, “some work on a country level, for example saying that 30 percent of energy should be wind and 20 percent solar. That’s very general.” For this study, the team looked at both weather data and energy system planning modeling on a scale of less than 10-kilometer (about 6-mile) resolution. “It’s a way of determining where should we, exactly, build each renewable energy plant, rather than just saying this city should have this many wind or solar farms,” she explains.To compile their data and enable high-resolution planning, the researchers relied on a variety of sources that had not previously been integrated. They used high-resolution meteorological data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is publicly available at 2-kilometer resolution but rarely used in a planning model at such a fine scale. These data were combined with an energy system model they developed to optimize siting at a sub-10-kilometer resolution. To get a sense of how the fine-scale data and model made a difference in different regions, they focused on three U.S. regions — New England, Texas, and California — analyzing up to 138,271 possible siting locations simultaneously for a single region.By comparing the results of siting based on a typical method vs. their high-resolution approach, the team showed that “resource complementarity really helps us reduce the system cost by aligning renewable power generation with demand,” which should translate directly to real-world decision-making, Qiu says. “If an individual developer wants to build a wind or solar farm and just goes to where there is the most wind or solar resource on average, it may not necessarily guarantee the best fit into a decarbonized energy system.”That’s because of the complex interactions between production and demand for electricity, as both vary hour by hour, and month by month as seasons change. “What we are trying to do is minimize the difference between the energy supply and demand rather than simply supplying as much renewable energy as possible,” Qiu says. “Sometimes your generation cannot be utilized by the system, while at other times, you don’t have enough to match the demand.”In New England, for example, the new analysis shows there should be more wind farms in locations where there is a strong wind resource during the night, when solar energy is unavailable. Some locations tend to be windier at night, while others tend to have more wind during the day.These insights were revealed through the integration of high-resolution weather data and energy system optimization used by the researchers. When planning with lower resolution weather data, which was generated at a 30-kilometer resolution globally and is more commonly used in energy system planning, there was much less complementarity among renewable power plants. Consequently, the total system cost was much higher. The complementarity between wind and solar farms was enhanced by the high-resolution modeling due to improved representation of renewable resource variability.The researchers say their framework is very flexible and can be easily adapted to any region to account for the local geophysical and other conditions. In Texas, for example, peak winds in the west occur in the morning, while along the south coast they occur in the afternoon, so the two naturally complement each other.Khorramfar says that this work “highlights the importance of data-driven decision making in energy planning.” The work shows that using such high-resolution data coupled with carefully formulated energy planning model “can drive the system cost down, and ultimately offer more cost-effective pathways for energy transition.”One thing that was surprising about the findings, says Amin, who is a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory of Information and Data Systems, is how significant the gains were from analyzing relatively short-term variations in inputs and outputs that take place in a 24-hour period. “The kind of cost-saving potential by trying to harness complementarity within a day was not something that one would have expected before this study,” he says.In addition, Amin says, it was also surprising how much this kind of modeling could reduce the need for storage as part of these energy systems. “This study shows that there is actually a hidden cost-saving potential in exploiting local patterns in weather, that can result in a monetary reduction in storage cost.”The system-level analysis and planning suggested by this study, Howland says, “changes how we think about where we site renewable power plants and how we design those renewable plants, so that they maximally serve the energy grid. It has to go beyond just driving down the cost of energy of individual wind or solar farms. And these new insights can only be realized if we continue collaborating across traditional research boundaries, by integrating expertise in fluid dynamics, atmospheric science, and energy engineering.”The research was supported by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and MIT Climate Grand Challenges. More

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      in Environment

      A new biodegradable material to replace certain microplastics

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      Microplastics are an environmental hazard found nearly everywhere on Earth, released by the breakdown of tires, clothing, and plastic packaging. Another significant source of microplastics is tiny beads that are added to some cleansers, cosmetics, and other beauty products.In an effort to cut off some of these microplastics at their source, MIT researchers have developed a class of biodegradable materials that could replace the plastic beads now used in beauty products. These polymers break down into harmless sugars and amino acids.“One way to mitigate the microplastics problem is to figure out how to clean up existing pollution. But it’s equally important to look ahead and focus on creating materials that won’t generate microplastics in the first place,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.These particles could also find other applications. In the new study, Jaklenec and her colleagues showed that the particles could be used to encapsulate nutrients such as vitamin A. Fortifying foods with encapsulated vitamin A and other nutrients could help some of the 2 billion people around the world who suffer from nutrient deficiencies.Jaklenec and Robert Langer, an MIT Institute Professor and member of the Koch Institute, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering. The paper’s lead author is Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, an MIT graduate student in chemical engineering.Biodegradable plasticsIn 2019, Jaklenec, Langer, and others reported a polymer material that they showed could be used to encapsulate vitamin A and other essential nutrients. They also found that people who consumed bread made from flour fortified with encapsulated iron showed increased iron levels.However, since then, the European Union has classified this polymer, known as BMC, as a microplastic and included it in a ban that went into effect in 2023. As a result, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded the original research, asked the MIT team if they could design an alternative that would be more environmentally friendly.The researchers, led by Zhang, turned to a type of polymer that Langer’s lab had previously developed, known as poly(beta-amino esters). These polymers, which have shown promise as vehicles for gene delivery and other medical applications, are biodegradable and break down into sugars and amino acids.By changing the composition of the material’s building blocks, researchers can tune properties such as hydrophobicity (ability to repel water), mechanical strength, and pH sensitivity. After creating five different candidate materials, the MIT team tested them and identified one that appeared to have the optimal composition for microplastic applications, including the ability to dissolve when exposed to acidic environments such as the stomach.The researchers showed that they could use these particles to encapsulate vitamin A, as well as vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin C, zinc, and iron. Many of these nutrients are susceptible to heat and light degradation, but when encased in the particles, the researchers found that the nutrients could withstand exposure to boiling water for two hours.They also showed that even after being stored for six months at high temperature and high humidity, more than half of the encapsulated vitamins were undamaged.To demonstrate their potential for fortifying food, the researchers incorporated the particles into bouillon cubes, which are commonly consumed in many African countries. They found that when incorporated into bouillon, the nutrients remained intact after being boiled for two hours.“Bouillon is a staple ingredient in sub-Saharan Africa, and offers a significant opportunity to improve the nutritional status of many billions of people in those regions,” Jaklenec says.In this study, the researchers also tested the particles’ safety by exposing them to cultured human intestinal cells and measuring their effects on the cells. At the doses that would be used for food fortification, they found no damage to the cells.Better cleansingTo explore the particles’ ability to replace the microbeads that are often added to cleansers, the researchers mixed the particles with soap foam. This mixture, they found, could remove permanent marker and waterproof eyeliner from skin much more effectively than soap alone.Soap mixed with the new microplastic was also more effective than a cleanser that includes polyethylene microbeads, the researchers found. They also discovered that the new biodegradable particles did a better job of absorbing potentially toxic elements such as heavy metals.“We wanted to use this as a first step to demonstrate how it’s possible to develop a new class of materials, to expand from existing material categories, and then to apply it to different applications,” Zhang says.With a grant from Estée Lauder, the researchers are now working on further testing the microbeads as a cleanser and potentially other applications, and they plan to run a small human trial later this year. They are also gathering safety data that could be used to apply for GRAS (generally regarded as safe) classification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are planning a clinical trial of foods fortified with the particles.The researchers hope their work could help to significantly reduce the amount of microplastic released into the environment from health and beauty products.“This is just one small part of the broader microplastics issue, but as a society we’re beginning to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. This work offers a step forward in addressing it,” Jaklenec says. “Polymers are incredibly useful and essential in countless applications in our daily lives, but they come with downsides. This is an example of how we can reduce some of those negative aspects.”The research was funded by the Gates Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation. More