Sustainability

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares145 Views

    Study shows how a common fertilizer ingredient benefits plants

    by

    Lanthanides are a class of rare earth elements that in many countries are added to fertilizer as micronutrients to stimulate plant growth. But little is known about how they are absorbed by plants or influence photosynthesis, potentially leaving their benefits untapped.Now, researchers from MIT have shed light on how lanthanides move through and operate within plants. These insights could help farmers optimize their use to grow some of the world’s most popular crops.Published today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the study shows that a single nanoscale dose of lanthanides applied to seeds can make some of the world’s most common crops more resilient to UV stress. The researchers also uncovered the chemical processes by which lanthanides interact with the chlorophyll pigments that drive photosynthesis, showing that different lanthanide elements strengthen chlorophyll by replacing the magnesium at its center.“This is a first step to better understand how these elements work in plants, and to provide an example of how they could be better delivered to plants, compared to simply applying them in the soil,” says Associate Professor Benedetto Marelli, who conducted the research with postdoc Giorgio Rizzo. “This is the first example of a thorough study showing the effects of lanthanides on chlorophyll, and their beneficial effects to protect plants from UV stress.”Inside plant connectionsCertain lanthanides are used as contrast agents in MRI and for applications including light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and lasers. Over the last 50 years, lanthanides have become increasingly used in agriculture to enhance crop yields, with China alone applying lanthanide-based fertilizers to nearly 4 million hectares of land each year.“Lanthanides have been considered for a long time to be biologically irrelevant, but that’s changed in agriculture, especially in China,” says Rizzo, the paper’s first author. “But we largely don’t know how lanthanides work to benefit plants — nor do we understand their uptake mechanisms from plant tissues.”Recent studies have shown that low concentrations of lanthanides can promote plant growth, root elongation, hormone synthesis, and stress tolerance, but higher doses can cause harm to plants. Striking the right balance has been hard because of our lack of understanding around how lanthanides are absorbed by plants or how they interact with root soil.For the study, the researchers leveraged seed coating and treatment technologies they previously developed to investigate the way the plant pigment chlorophyll interacts with lanthanides, both inside and outside of plants. Up until now, researchers haven’t been sure whether chlorophyll interacts with lanthanide ions at all.Chlorophyll drives photosynthesis, but the pigments lose their ability to efficiently absorb light when the magnesium ion at their core is removed. The researchers discovered that lanthanides can fill that void, helping chlorophyll pigments partially recover some of their optical properties in a process known as re-greening.“We found that lanthanides can boost several parameters of plant health,” Marelli says. “They mostly accumulate in the roots, but a small amount also makes its way to the leaves, and some of the new chlorophyll molecules made in leaves have lanthanides incorporated in their structure.”This study also offers the first experimental evidence that lanthanides can increase plant resilience to UV stress, something the researchers say was completely unexpected.“Chlorophylls are very sensitive pigments,” Rizzo says. “They can convert light to energy in plants, but when they are isolated from the cell structure, they rapidly hydrolyze and degrade. However, in the form with lanthanides at their center, they are pretty stable, even after extracting them from plant cells.”The researchers, using different spectroscopic techniques, found the benefits held across a range of staple crops, including chickpea, barley, corn, and soybeans.The findings could be used to boost crop yield and increase the resilience of some of the world’s most popular crops to extreme weather.“As we move into an environment where extreme heat and extreme climate events are more common, and particularly where we can have prolonged periods of sun in the field, we want to provide new ways to protect our plants,” Marelli says. “There are existing agrochemicals that can be applied to leaves for protecting plants from stressors such as UV, but they can be toxic, increase microplastics, and can require multiple applications. This could be a complementary way to protect plants from UV stress.”Identifying new applicationsThe researchers also found that larger lanthanide elements like lanthanum were more effective at strengthening chlorophyll pigments than smaller ones. Lanthanum is considered a low-value byproduct of rare earths mining, and can become a burden to the rare earth element (REE) supply chain due to the need to separate it from more desirable rare earths. Increasing the demand for lanthanum could diversify the economics of REEs and improve the stability of their supply chain, the scientists suggest.“This study shows what we could do with these lower-value metals,” Marelli says. “We know lanthanides are extremely useful in electronics, magnets, and energy. In the U.S., there’s a big push to recycle them. That’s why for the plant studies, we focused on lanthanum, being the most abundant, cheapest lanthanide ion.”Moving forward, the team plans to explore how lanthanides work with other biological molecules, including proteins in the human body.In agriculture, the team hopes to scale up its research to include field and greenhouse studies to continue testing the results of UV resilience on different crop types and in experimental farm conditions.“Lanthanides are already widely used in agriculture,” Rizzo says. “We hope this study provides evidence that allows more conscious use of them and also a new way to apply them through seed treatments.”The research was supported by the MIT Climate Grand Challenge and the Office for Naval Research. More

    More stories

    • 50 Shares116 Views

      in Energy

      Confronting the AI/energy conundrum

      by

      The explosive growth of AI-powered computing centers is creating an unprecedented surge in electricity demand that threatens to overwhelm power grids and derail climate goals. At the same time, artificial intelligence technologies could revolutionize energy systems, accelerating the transition to clean power.“We’re at a cusp of potentially gigantic change throughout the economy,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Spring Symposium, “AI and energy: Peril and promise,” held on May 13. The event brought together experts from industry, academia, and government to explore solutions to what Green described as both “local problems with electric supply and meeting our clean energy targets” while seeking to “reap the benefits of AI without some of the harms.” The challenge of data center energy demand and potential benefits of AI to the energy transition is a research priority for MITEI.AI’s startling energy demandsFrom the start, the symposium highlighted sobering statistics about AI’s appetite for electricity. After decades of flat electricity demand in the United States, computing centers now consume approximately 4 percent of the nation’s electricity. Although there is great uncertainty, some projections suggest this demand could rise to 12-15 percent by 2030, largely driven by artificial intelligence applications.Vijay Gadepally, senior scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, emphasized the scale of AI’s consumption. “The power required for sustaining some of these large models is doubling almost every three months,” he noted. “A single ChatGPT conversation uses as much electricity as charging your phone, and generating an image consumes about a bottle of water for cooling.”Facilities requiring 50 to 100 megawatts of power are emerging rapidly across the United States and globally, driven both by casual and institutional research needs relying on large language programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Gadepally cited congressional testimony by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, highlighting how fundamental this relationship has become: “The cost of intelligence, the cost of AI, will converge to the cost of energy.”“The energy demands of AI are a significant challenge, but we also have an opportunity to harness these vast computational capabilities to contribute to climate change solutions,” said Evelyn Wang, MIT vice president for energy and climate and the former director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy.Wang also noted that innovations developed for AI and data centers — such as efficiency, cooling technologies, and clean-power solutions — could have broad applications beyond computing facilities themselves.Strategies for clean energy solutionsThe symposium explored multiple pathways to address the AI-energy challenge. Some panelists presented models suggesting that while artificial intelligence may increase emissions in the short term, its optimization capabilities could enable substantial emissions reductions after 2030 through more efficient power systems and accelerated clean technology development.Research shows regional variations in the cost of powering computing centers with clean electricity, according to Emre Gençer, co-founder and CEO of Sesame Sustainability and former MITEI principal research scientist. Gençer’s analysis revealed that the central United States offers considerably lower costs due to complementary solar and wind resources. However, achieving zero-emission power would require massive battery deployments — five to 10 times more than moderate carbon scenarios — driving costs two to three times higher.“If we want to do zero emissions with reliable power, we need technologies other than renewables and batteries, which will be too expensive,” Gençer said. He pointed to “long-duration storage technologies, small modular reactors, geothermal, or hybrid approaches” as necessary complements.Because of data center energy demand, there is renewed interest in nuclear power, noted Kathryn Biegel, manager of R&D and corporate strategy at Constellation Energy, adding that her company is restarting the reactor at the former Three Mile Island site, now called the “Crane Clean Energy Center,” to meet this demand. “The data center space has become a major, major priority for Constellation,” she said, emphasizing how their needs for both reliability and carbon-free electricity are reshaping the power industry.Can AI accelerate the energy transition?Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve power systems, according to Priya Donti, assistant professor and the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She showcased how AI can accelerate power grid optimization by embedding physics-based constraints into neural networks, potentially solving complex power flow problems at “10 times, or even greater, speed compared to your traditional models.”AI is already reducing carbon emissions, according to examples shared by Antonia Gawel, global director of sustainability and partnerships at Google. Google Maps’ fuel-efficient routing feature has “helped to prevent more than 2.9 million metric tons of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions since launch, which is the equivalent of taking 650,000 fuel-based cars off the road for a year,” she said. Another Google research project uses artificial intelligence to help pilots avoid creating contrails, which represent about 1 percent of global warming impact.AI’s potential to speed materials discovery for power applications was highlighted by Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “AI-supervised models can be trained to go from structure to property,” he noted, enabling the development of materials crucial for both computing and efficiency.Securing growth with sustainabilityThroughout the symposium, participants grappled with balancing rapid AI deployment against environmental impacts. While AI training receives most attention, Dustin Demetriou, senior technical staff member in sustainability and data center innovation at IBM, quoted a World Economic Forum article that suggested that “80 percent of the environmental footprint is estimated to be due to inferencing.” Demetriou emphasized the need for efficiency across all artificial intelligence applications.Jevons’ paradox, where “efficiency gains tend to increase overall resource consumption rather than decrease it” is another factor to consider, cautioned Emma Strubell, the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Strubell advocated for viewing computing center electricity as a limited resource requiring thoughtful allocation across different applications.Several presenters discussed novel approaches for integrating renewable sources with existing grid infrastructure, including potential hybrid solutions that combine clean installations with existing natural gas plants that have valuable grid connections already in place. These approaches could provide substantial clean capacity across the United States at reasonable costs while minimizing reliability impacts.Navigating the AI-energy paradoxThe symposium highlighted MIT’s central role in developing solutions to the AI-electricity challenge.Green spoke of a new MITEI program on computing centers, power, and computation that will operate alongside the comprehensive spread of MIT Climate Project research. “We’re going to try to tackle a very complicated problem all the way from the power sources through the actual algorithms that deliver value to the customers — in a way that’s going to be acceptable to all the stakeholders and really meet all the needs,” Green said.Participants in the symposium were polled about priorities for MIT’s research by Randall Field, MITEI director of research. The real-time results ranked “data center and grid integration issues” as the top priority, followed by “AI for accelerated discovery of advanced materials for energy.”In addition, attendees revealed that most view AI’s potential regarding power as a “promise,” rather than a “peril,” although a considerable portion remain uncertain about the ultimate impact. When asked about priorities in power supply for computing facilities, half of the respondents selected carbon intensity as their top concern, with reliability and cost following. More

    • 88 Shares110 Views

      in Environment

      VAMO proposes an alternative to architectural permanence

      by

      The International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia holds up a mirror to the industry — not only reflecting current priorities and preoccupations, but also projecting an agenda for what might be possible. Curated by Carlo Ratti, MIT professor of practice of urban technologies and planning, this year’s exhibition (“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”) proposes a “Circular Economy Manifesto” with the goal to support the “development and production of projects that utilize natural, artificial, and collective intelligence to combat the climate crisis.” Designers and architects will quickly recognize the paradox of this year’s theme. Global architecture festivals have historically had a high carbon footprint, using vast amounts of energy, resources, and materials to build and transport temporary structures that are later discarded. This year’s unprecedented emphasis on waste elimination and carbon neutrality challenges participants to reframe apparent limitations into creative constraints. In this way, the Biennale acts as a microcosm of current planetary conditions — a staging ground to envision and practice adaptive strategies.VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other)When Ratti approached John Ochsendorf, MIT professor and founding director of MIT Morningside Academy of Design (MAD), with the invitation to interpret the theme of circularity, the project became the premise for a convergence of ideas, tools, and know-how from multiple teams at MIT and the wider MIT community. The Digital Structures research group, directed by Professor Caitlin Mueller, applied expertise in designing efficient structures of tension and compression. The Circular Engineering for Architecture research group, led by MIT alumna Catherine De Wolf at ETH Zurich, explored how digital technologies and traditional woodworking techniques could make optimal use of reclaimed timber. Early-stage startups — including companies launched by the venture accelerator MITdesignX — contributed innovative materials harnessing natural byproducts from vegetal, animal, mineral, and other sources. The result is VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other), an ultra-lightweight, biodegradable, and transportable canopy designed to circle around a brick column in the Corderie of the Venice Arsenale — a historic space originally used to manufacture ropes for the city’s naval fleet. “This year’s Biennale marks a new radicalism in approaches to architecture,” says Ochsendorf. “It’s no longer sufficient to propose an exciting idea or present a stylish installation. The conversation on material reuse must have relevance beyond the exhibition space, and we’re seeing a hunger among students and emerging practices to have a tangible impact. VAMO isn’t just a temporary shelter for new thinking. It’s a material and structural prototype that will evolve into multiple different forms after the Biennale.”Tension and compressionThe choice to build the support structure from reclaimed timber and hemp rope called for a highly efficient design to maximize the inherent potential of comparatively humble materials. Working purely in tension (the spliced cable net) or compression (the oblique timber rings), the structure appears to float — yet is capable of supporting substantial loads across large distances. The canopy weighs less than 200 kilograms and covers over 6 meters in diameter, highlighting the incredible lightness that equilibrium forms can achieve. VAMO simultaneously showcases a series of sustainable claddings and finishes made from surprising upcycled materials — from coconut husks, spent coffee grounds, and pineapple peel to wool, glass, and scraps of leather. The Digital Structures research group led the design of structural geometries conditioned by materiality and gravity. “We knew we wanted to make a very large canopy,” says Mueller. “We wanted it to have anticlastic curvature suggestive of naturalistic forms. We wanted it to tilt up to one side to welcome people walking from the central corridor into the space. However, these effects are almost impossible to achieve with today’s computational tools that are mostly focused on drawing rigid materials.”In response, the team applied two custom digital tools, Ariadne and Theseus, developed in-house to enable a process of inverse form-finding: a way of discovering forms that achieve the experiential qualities of an architectural project based on the mechanical properties of the materials. These tools allowed the team to model three-dimensional design concepts and automatically adjust geometries to ensure that all elements were held in pure tension or compression.“Using digital tools enhances our creativity by allowing us to choose between multiple different options and short-circuit a process that would have otherwise taken months,” says Mueller. “However, our process is also generative of conceptual thinking that extends beyond the tool — we’re constantly thinking about the natural and historic precedents that demonstrate the potential of these equilibrium structures.”Digital efficiency and human creativity Lightweight enough to be carried as standard luggage, the hemp rope structure was spliced by hand and transported from Massachusetts to Venice. Meanwhile, the heavier timber structure was constructed in Zurich, where it could be transported by train — thereby significantly reducing the project’s overall carbon footprint. The wooden rings were fabricated using salvaged beams and boards from two temporary buildings in Switzerland — the Huber and Music Pavilions — following a pedagogical approach that De Wolf has developed for the Digital Creativity for Circular Construction course at ETH Zurich. Each year, her students are tasked with disassembling a building due for demolition and using the materials to design a new structure. In the case of VAMO, the goal was to upcycle the wood while avoiding the use of chemicals, high-energy methods, or non-biodegradable components (such as metal screws or plastics). “Our process embraces all three types of intelligence celebrated by the exhibition,” says De Wolf. “The natural intelligence of the materials selected for the structure and cladding; the artificial intelligence of digital tools empowering us to upcycle, design, and fabricate with these natural materials; and the crucial collective intelligence that unlocks possibilities of newly developed reused materials, made possible by the contributions of many hands and minds.”For De Wolf, true creativity in digital design and construction requires a context-sensitive approach to identifying when and how such tools are best applied in relation to hands-on craftsmanship. Through a process of collective evaluation, it was decided that the 20-foot lower ring would be assembled with eight scarf joints using wedges and wooden pegs, thereby removing the need for metal screws. The scarf joints were crafted through five-axis CNC milling; the smaller, dual-jointed upper ring was shaped and assembled by hand by Nicolas Petit-Barreau, founder of the Swiss woodwork company Anku, who applied his expertise in designing and building yurts, domes, and furniture to the VAMO project. “While digital tools suited the repetitive joints of the lower ring, the upper ring’s two unique joints were more efficiently crafted by hand,” says Petit-Barreau. “When it comes to designing for circularity, we can learn a lot from time-honored building traditions. These methods were refined long before we had access to energy-intensive technologies — they also allow for the level of subtlety and responsiveness necessary when adapting to the irregularities of reused wood.”A material palette for circularityThe structural system of a building is often the most energy-intensive; an impact dramatically mitigated by the collaborative design and fabrication process developed by MIT Digital Structures and ETH Circular Engineering for Architecture. The structure also serves to showcase panels made of biodegradable and low-energy materials — many of which were advanced through ventures supported by MITdesignX, a program dedicated to design innovation and entrepreneurship at MAD. “In recent years, several MITdesignX teams have proposed ideas for new sustainable materials that might at first seem far-fetched,” says Gilad Rosenzweig, executive director of MITdesignX. “For instance, using spent coffee grounds to create a leather-like material (Cortado), or creating compostable acoustic panels from coconut husks and reclaimed wool (Kokus). This reflects a major cultural shift in the architecture profession toward rethinking the way we build, but it’s not enough just to have an inventive idea. To achieve impact — to convert invention into innovation — teams have to prove that their concept is cost-effective, viable as a business, and scalable.”Aligned with the ethos of MAD, MITdesignX assesses profit and productivity in terms of environmental and social sustainability. In addition to presenting the work of R&D teams involved in MITdesignX, VAMO also exhibits materials produced by collaborating teams at University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, and other partners, such as Manteco. The result is a composite structure that encapsulates multiple life spans within a diverse material palette of waste materials from vegetal, animal, and mineral forms. Panels of Ananasse, a material made from pineapple peels developed by Vérabuccia, preserve the fruit’s natural texture as a surface pattern, while rehub repurposes fragments of multicolored Murano glass into a flexible terrazzo-like material; COBI creates breathable shingles from coarse wool and beeswax, and DumoLab produces fuel-free 3D-printable wood panels. A purpose beyond permanence Adriana Giorgis, a designer and teaching fellow in architecture at MIT, played a crucial role in bringing the parts of the project together. Her research explores the diverse network of factors that influence whether a building stands the test of time, and her insights helped to shape the collective understanding of long-term design thinking.“As a point of connection between all the teams, helping to guide the design as well as serving as a project manager, I had the chance to see how my research applied at each level of the project,” Giorgis reflects. “Braiding these different strands of thinking and ultimately helping to install the canopy on site brought forth a stronger idea about what it really means for a structure to have longevity. VAMO isn’t limited to its current form — it’s a way of carrying forward a powerful idea into contemporary and future practice.”What’s next for VAMO? Neither the attempt at architectural permanence associated with built projects, nor the relegation to waste common to temporary installations. After the Biennale, VAMO will be disassembled, possibly reused for further exhibitions, and finally relocated to a natural reserve in Switzerland, where the parts will be researched as they biodegrade. In this way, the lifespan of the project is extended beyond its initial purpose for human habitation and architectural experimentation, revealing the gradual material transformations constantly taking place in our built environment.To quote Carlo Ratti’s Circular Economy Manifesto, the “lasting legacy” of VAMO is to “harness nature’s intelligence, where nothing is wasted.” Through a regenerative symbiosis of natural, artificial, and collective intelligence, could architectural thinking and practice expand to planetary proportions? More

    • 100 Shares177 Views

      in Energy

      Evelyn Wang: A new energy source at MIT

      by

      Evelyn Wang ’00 knows a few things about engineering solutions to hard problems. After all, she invented a way to pull water out of thin air.Now, Wang is applying that problem-solving experience — and a deep, enduring sense of optimism — toward the critical issue of climate change, to strengthen the American energy economy and ensure resilience for all.Wang, a mechanical engineering professor by trade, began work this spring as MIT’s first vice president for energy and climate, overseeing the Institute’s expanding work on climate change. That means broadening the Institute’s already-wide research portfolio, scaling up existing innovations, seeking new breakthroughs, and channeling campus community input to drive work forward.“MIT has the potential to do so much, when we know that climate, energy, and resilience are paramount to events happening around us every day,” says Wang, who is also the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. “There’s no better place than MIT to come up with the transformational solutions that can help shape our world.”That also means developing partnerships with corporate allies, startups, government, communities, and other organizations. Tackling climate change, Wang says, “requires a lot of partnerships. It’s not an MIT-only endeavor. We’re going to have to collaborate with other institutions and think about where industry can help us deploy and scale so the impact can be greater.”She adds: “The more partnerships we have, the more understanding we have of the best pathways to make progress in difficult areas.”From MIT to ARPA-EAn MIT faculty member since 2007, Wang leads the Device Research Lab. Along with collaborators, she identifies new materials and optimizations based on heat and mass transport processes that unlock the creation of leading-edge innovations. Her development of the device that extracts water from even very dry air led Foreign Policy Magazine to name her its 2017 Global ReThinker, and she won the 2018 Eighth Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.Her research also extends to other areas such as energy and desalination research. In 2016, Wang and several colleagues announced a device based on nanophotonic crystals with the potential to double the amount of power produced by a given area of solar panels, which led to one of her graduate researchers on the project to co-found the startup Antora Energy. More recently, Wang and colleagues developed an aerogel that improves window insulation, now being commercialized through her former graduate students in a startup, AeroShield.Wang also spent two years recently as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which supports early-stage R&D on energy generation, storage, and use.  Returning to MIT, she began her work as vice president for energy and climate in April, engaging with researchers, holding community workshops, and planning to build partnerships.“I’ve been energized coming back to the Institute, given the talented students, the faculty, the staff. It’s invigorating to be back in this community,” Wang says. “People are passionate, excited, and mission-driven, and that’s the energy we need to make a big impact in the world.”Wang is also working to help align the Institute’s many existing climate efforts. This includes the Climate Project at MIT, an Institute-wide presidential initiative announced in 2024, which aims to accelerate and scale up climate solutions while generating new tools and policy proposals. All told, about 300 MIT faculty conduct research related to climate issues in one form or another.“The fact that there are so many faculty working on climate is astounding,” Wang says. “Everyone’s doing exciting work, but how can we leverage our unique strengths to create something bigger than the sum of its parts? That’s what I’m working toward. We’ve spun out so many technologies. How do we do more of that? How do we do that faster, and in a way so the world will feel the impact?”A deep connection to campus — and strong sense of optimismUnderstanding MIT is one of Wang’s strengths, given that she has spent over two decades at the Institute.Wang earned her undergraduate degree from MIT in mechanical engineering, and her MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. She has held several chaired faculty positions at MIT. In 2008, Wang was named the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor; in 2015, she was named the Gail E. Kendall Professor; and in 2021, she became the Ford Professor of Engineering. Wang served as head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 2018 through 2022.As it happens, Wang’s parents, Kang and Edith, met as graduate students at the Institute. Her father, an electrical engineer, became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Wang also met her husband at MIT, and both of her brothers graduated from the Institute.Along with her deep institutional knowledge, administrative experience, and track record as an innovator, Wang is bringing several other things to her new role as vice president for climate: a sense of urgency about the issue, coupled with a continual sense of optimism that innovators can meet society’s needs.“I think optimism can make a difference, and is great to have in the midst of collective challenge,” Wang says. “We’re such a mission-driven university, and people come here to solve real-world problems.”That hopeful approach is why Wang describes the work as not only as a challenge but also a generational opportunity. “We have the chance to design the world we want,” she says, “one that’s cleaner, more sustainable and more resilient. This future is ours to shape and build together.”Wang thinks MIT contains many examples of world-shaping progress, She cites MIT’s announcement this month of the creation of the Schmidt Laboratory for Materials in Nuclear Technologies, at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion center, to conduct research on next-generation materials that could help enable the construction of fusion power plants. Another example Wang references is MIT research earlier this year on developing clean ammonia, a way to make the world’s most widely-produced chemical with drastically-reduced greenhouse gas emissions.“Those solutions could be breakthroughs,” Wang says. “Those are the kinds of things that give us optimism. There’s still a lot of research to be done, but it suggests the potential of what our world can be.”Optimism: There’s that word again.“Optimism is the only way to go,” Wang says. “Yes, the world is challenged. But this is where MIT’s strengths — in research, innovation, and education — can bring optimism to the table.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Environment

      Students and staff work together for MIT’s first “No Mow May”

      by

      In recent years, some grass lawns around the country have grown a little taller in springtime thanks to No Mow May, a movement originally launched by U.K. nonprofit Plantlife in 2019 designed to raise awareness about the ecological impacts of the traditional, resource-intensive, manicured grass lawn. No Mow May encourages people to skip spring mowing to allow for grass to grow tall and provide food and shelter for beneficial creatures including bees, beetles, and other pollinators.This year, MIT took part in the practice for the first time, with portions of the Kendall/MIT Open Space, Bexley Garden, and the Tang Courtyard forgoing mowing from May 1 through June 6 to make space for local pollinators, decrease water use, and encourage new thinking about the traditional lawn. MIT’s first No Mow May was the result of championing by the Graduate Student Council Sustainability Subcommittee (GSC Sustain) and made possible by the Office of the Vice Provost for Campus Space Management and Planning. A student idea sproutsDespite being a dense urban campus, MIT has no shortage of green spaces — from pocket gardens and community-managed vegetable plots to thousands of shade trees — and interest in these spaces continues to grow. In recent years, student-led initiatives supported by Institute leadership and operational staff have transformed portions of campus by increasing the number of native pollinator plants and expanding community gardens, like the Hive Garden. With No Mow May, these efforts stepped out of the garden and into MIT’s many grassy open spaces. “The idea behind it was to raise awareness for more sustainable and earth-friendly lawn practices,” explains Gianmarco Terrones, GSC Sustain member. Those practices include reducing the burden of mowing, limiting use of fertilizers, and providing shelter and food for pollinators. “The insects that live in these spaces are incredibly important in terms of pollination, but they’re also part of the food chain for a lot of animals,” says Terrones. Research has shown that holding off on mowing in spring, even in small swaths of green space, can have an impact. The early months of spring have the lowest number of flowers in regions like New England, and providing a resource and refuge — even for a short duration — can support fragile pollinators like bees. Additionally, No Mow May aims to help people rethink their yards and practices, which are not always beneficial for local ecosystems. Signage at each No Mow site on campus highlighted information on local pollinators, the impact of the project, and questions for visitors to ask themselves. “Having an active sign there to tell people, ‘look around. How many butterflies do you see after six weeks of not mowing? Do you see more? Do you see more bees?’ can cause subtle shifts in people’s awareness of ecosystems,” says GSC Sustain member Mingrou Xie. A mowed barrier around each project also helped visitors know that areas of tall grass at No Mow sites are intentional.Campus partners bring sustainable practices to lifeTo make MIT’s No Mow May possible, GSC Sustain members worked with the Office of the Vice Provost and the Open Space Working Group, co-chaired by Vice Provost for Campus Space Management and Planning Brent Ryan and Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. The Working Group, which also includes staff from Open Space Programming, Campus Planning, and faculty in the School of Architecture and Planning, helped to identify potential No Mow locations and develop strategies for educational signage and any needed maintenance. “Massachusetts is a biodiverse state, and No Mow May provides an exciting opportunity for MIT to support that biodiversity on its own campus,” says Ryan. Students were eager for space on campus with high visibility, and the chosen locations of the Kendall/MIT Open Space, Bexley Garden, and the Tang Courtyard fit the bill. “We wanted to set an example and empower the community to feel like they can make a positive change to an environment they spend so much time in,” says Xie. For GSC Sustain, that positive change also takes the form of the Native Plant Project, which they launched in 2022 to increase the number of Massachusetts-native pollinator plants on campus — plants like swamp milkweed, zigzag goldenrod, big leaf aster, and red columbine, with which native pollinators have co-evolved. Partnering with the Open Space Working Group, GSC Sustain is currently focused on two locations for new native plant gardens — the President’s Garden and the terrace gardens at the E37 Graduate Residence. “Our short-term goal is to increase the number of native [plants] on campus, but long term we want to foster a community of students and staff interested in supporting sustainable urban gardening,” says Xie.Campus as a test bed continues to growAfter just a few weeks of growing, the campus No Mow May locations sprouted buttercups, mouse ear chickweed, and small tree saplings, highlighting the diversity waiting dormant in the average lawn. Terrones also notes other discoveries: “It’s been exciting to see how much the grass has sprung up these last few weeks. I thought the grass would all grow at the same rate, but as May has gone on the variations in grass height have become more apparent, leading to non-uniform lawns with a clearly unmanicured feel,” he says. “We hope that members of MIT noticed how these lawns have evolved over the span of a few weeks and are inspired to implement more earth-friendly lawn practices in their own homes/spaces.”No Mow May and the Native Plant Project fit into MIT’s overall focus on creating resilient ecosystems that support and protect the MIT community and the beneficial critters that call it home. MIT Grounds Services has long included native plants in the mix of what is grown on campus and native pollinator gardens, like the Hive Garden, have been developed and cared for through partnerships with students and Grounds Services in recent years. Grounds, along with consultants that design and install our campus landscape projects, strive to select plants that assist us with meeting sustainability goals, like helping with stormwater runoff and cooling. No Mow May can provide one more data point for the iterative process of choosing the best plants and practices for a unique microclimate like the MIT campus.“We are always looking for new ways to use our campus as a test bed for sustainability,” says Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. “Community-led projects like No Mow May help us to learn more about our campus and share those lessons with the larger community.”The Office of the Vice Provost, the Open Space Working Group, and GSC Sustain will plan to reconnect in the fall for a formal debrief of the project and its success. Given the positive community feedback, future possibilities of expanding or extending No Mow May will be discussed. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in Environment

      After more than a decade of successes, ESI’s work will spread out across the Institute

      by

      MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a pioneering cross-disciplinary body that helped give a major boost to sustainability and solutions to climate change at MIT, will close as a separate entity at the end of June. But that’s far from the end for its wide-ranging work, which will go forward under different auspices. Many of its key functions will become part of MIT’s recently launched Climate Project. John Fernandez, head of ESI for nearly a decade, will return to the School of Architecture and Planning, where some of ESI’s important work will continue as part of a new interdisciplinary lab.When the ideas that led to the founding of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative first began to be discussed, its founders recall, there was already a great deal of work happening at MIT relating to climate change and sustainability. As Professor John Sterman of the MIT Sloan School of Management puts it, “there was a lot going on, but it wasn’t integrated. So the whole added up to less than the sum of its parts.”ESI was founded in 2014 to help fill that coordinating role, and in the years since it has accomplished a wide range of significant milestones in research, education, and communication about sustainable solutions in a wide range of areas. Its founding director, Professor Susan Solomon, helmed it for its first year, and then handed the leadership to Fernandez, who has led it since 2015.“There wasn’t much of an ecosystem [on sustainability] back then,” Solomon recalls. But with the help of ESI and some other entities, that ecosystem has blossomed. She says that Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” including work on nature-based climate solutions, and also other areas such as sustainable mining, and reduction of plastics in the environment.Desiree Plata, director of MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says that one key achievement of the initiative has been in “communication with the external world, to help take really complex systems and topics and put them in not just plain-speak, but something that’s scientifically rigorous and defensible, for the outside world to consume.”In particular, ESI has created three very successful products, which continue under the auspices of the Climate Project. These include the popular TIL Climate Podcast, the Webby Award-winning Climate Portal website, and the online climate primer developed with Professor Kerry Emanuel. “These are some of the most frequented websites at MIT,” Plata says, and “the impact of this work on the global knowledge base cannot be overstated.”Fernandez says that ESI has played a significant part in helping to catalyze what has become “a rich institutional landscape of work in sustainability and climate change” at MIT. He emphasizes three major areas where he feels the ESI has been able to have the most impact: engaging the MIT community, initiating and stewarding critical environmental research, and catalyzing efforts to promote sustainability as fundamental to the mission of a research university.Engagement of the MIT community, he says, began with two programs: a research seed grant program and the creation of MIT’s undergraduate minor in environment and sustainability, launched in 2017.ESI also created a Rapid Response Group, which gave students a chance to work on real-world projects with external partners, including government agencies, community groups, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. In the process, they often learned why dealing with environmental challenges in the real world takes so much longer than they might have thought, he says, and that a challenge that “seemed fairly straightforward at the outset turned out to be more complex and nuanced than expected.”The second major area, initiating and stewarding environmental research, grew into a set of six specific program areas: natural climate solutions, mining, cities and climate change, plastics and the environment, arts and climate, and climate justice.These efforts included collaborations with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, three successive presidential administrations from Colombia, and members of communities affected by climate change, including coal miners, indigenous groups, various cities, companies, the U.N., many agencies — and the popular musical group Coldplay, which has pledged to work toward climate neutrality for its performances. “It was the role that the ESI played as a host and steward of these research programs that may serve as a key element of our legacy,” Fernandez says.The third broad area, he says, “is the idea that the ESI as an entity at MIT would catalyze this movement of a research university toward sustainability as a core priority.” While MIT was founded to be an academic partner to the industrialization of the world, “aren’t we in a different world now? The kind of massive infrastructure planning and investment and construction that needs to happen to decarbonize the energy system is maybe the largest industrialization effort ever undertaken. Even more than in the recent past, the set of priorities driving this have to do with sustainable development.”Overall, Fernandez says, “we did everything we could to infuse the Institute in its teaching and research activities with the idea that the world is now in dire need of sustainable solutions.”Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” Solomon says. “It’s been a very strong and useful program, both for education and research.” But it is appropriate at this time to distribute its projects to other venues, she says. “We do now have a major thrust in the Climate Project, and you don’t want to have redundancies and overlaps between the two.”Fernandez says “one of the missions of the Climate Project is really acting to coalesce and aggregate lots of work around MIT.” Now, with the Climate Project itself, along with the Climate Policy Center and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, it makes more sense for ESI’s climate-related projects to be integrated into these new entities, and other projects that are less directly connected to climate to take their places in various appropriate departments or labs, he says.“We did enough with ESI that we made it possible for these other centers to really flourish,” he says. “And in that sense, we played our role.”As of June 1, Fernandez has returned to his role as professor of architecture and urbanism and building technology in the School of Architecture and Planning, where he directs the Urban Metabolism Group. He will also be starting up a new group called Environment ResearchAction (ERA) to continue ESI work in cities, nature, and artificial intelligence.  More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Energy

      Decarbonizing steel is as tough as steel

      by

      The long-term aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change is to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and thereby reduce the frequency and severity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. Achieving that goal will require a massive reduction in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across all economic sectors. A major roadblock, however, could be the industrial sector, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions — particularly within the iron and steel sector, industry’s largest emitter of CO2.Iron and steel production now relies heavily on fossil fuels (coal or natural gas) for heat, converting iron ore to iron, and making steel strong. Steelmaking could be decarbonized by a combination of several methods, including carbon capture technology, the use of low- or zero-carbon fuels, and increased use of recycled steel. Now a new study in the Journal of Cleaner Production systematically explores the viability of different iron-and-steel decarbonization strategies.Today’s strategy menu includes improving energy efficiency, switching fuels and technologies, using more scrap steel, and reducing demand. Using the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model, a multi-sector, multi-region model of the world economy, researchers at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co. evaluate the decarbonization potential of replacing coal-based production processes with electric arc furnaces (EAF), along with either scrap steel or “direct reduced iron” (DRI), which is fueled by natural gas with carbon capture and storage (NG CCS DRI-EAF) or by hydrogen (H2 DRI-EAF).Under a global climate mitigation scenario aligned with the 1.5 C climate goal, these advanced steelmaking technologies could result in deep decarbonization of the iron and steel sector by 2050, as long as technology costs are low enough to enable large-scale deployment. Higher costs would favor the replacement of coal with electricity and natural gas, greater use of scrap steel, and reduced demand, resulting in a more-than-50-percent reduction in emissions relative to current levels. Lower technology costs would enable massive deployment of NG CCS DRI-EAF or H2 DRI-EAF, reducing emissions by up to 75 percent.Even without adoption of these advanced technologies, the iron-and-steel sector could significantly reduce its CO2 emissions intensity (how much CO2 is released per unit of production) with existing steelmaking technologies, primarily by replacing coal with gas and electricity (especially if it is generated by renewable energy sources), using more scrap steel, and implementing energy efficiency measures.“The iron and steel industry needs to combine several strategies to substantially reduce its emissions by mid-century, including an increase in recycling, but investing in cost reductions in hydrogen pathways and carbon capture and sequestration will enable even deeper emissions mitigation in the sector,” says study supervising author Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (MIT CS3) and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).This study was supported by MIT CS3 and ExxonMobil through its membership in MITEI. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Energy

      “Each of us holds a piece of the solution”

      by

      MIT has an unparalleled history of bringing together interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems — think of the development of radar during World War II, or leading the international coalition that cracked the code of the human genome — but the challenge of climate change could demand a scale of collaboration unlike any that’s come before at MIT.“Solving climate change is not just about new technologies or better models. It’s about forging new partnerships across campus and beyond — between scientists and economists, between architects and data scientists, between policymakers and physicists, between anthropologists and engineers, and more,” MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate Evelyn Wang told an energetic crowd of faculty, students, and staff on May 6. “Each of us holds a piece of the solution — but only together can we see the whole.”Undeterred by heavy rain, approximately 300 campus community members filled the atrium in the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) for a spring gathering hosted by Wang and the Climate Project at MIT. The initiative seeks to direct the full strength of MIT to address climate change, which Wang described as one of the defining challenges of this moment in history — and one of its greatest opportunities.“It calls on us to rethink how we power our world, how we build, how we live — and how we work together,” Wang said. “And there is no better place than MIT to lead this kind of bold, integrated effort. Our culture of curiosity, rigor, and relentless experimentation makes us uniquely suited to cross boundaries — to break down silos and build something new.”The Climate Project is organized around six missions, thematic areas in which MIT aims to make significant impact, ranging from decarbonizing industry to new policy approaches to designing resilient cities. The faculty leaders of these missions posed challenges to the crowd before circulating among the crowd to share their perspectives and to discuss community questions and ideas.Wang and the Climate Project team were joined by a number of research groups, startups, and MIT offices conducting relevant work today on issues related to energy and climate. For example, the MIT Office of Sustainability showcased efforts to use the MIT campus as a living laboratory; MIT spinouts such as Forma Systems, which is developing high-performance, low-carbon building systems, and Addis Energy, which envisions using the earth as a reactor to produce clean ammonia, presented their technologies; and visitors learned about current projects in MIT labs, including DebunkBot, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that can persuade people to shift their attitudes about conspiracies, developed by David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who leads the Wild Cards Mission, said the energy and enthusiasm that filled the room was inspiring — but that the individual conversations were equally valuable.“I was especially pleased to see so many students come out. I also spoke with other faculty, talked to staff from across the Institute, and met representatives of external companies interested in collaborating with MIT,” Marelli said. “You could see connections being made all around the room, which is exactly what we need as we build momentum for the Climate Project.” More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Security

      Guardian Ag’s crop-spraying drone is replacing dangerous pilot missions

      by

      Every year during the growing season, thousands of pilots across the country climb into small planes loaded with hundreds of pounds of pesticides and fly extremely close to the ground at upward of 140 miles an hour, unloading their cargo onto rows of corn, cotton, and soybeans.The world of agricultural aviation is as dangerous as it is vital to America’s farms. Unfortunately, fatal crashes are common. Now Guardian Ag, founded by former MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makers Adam Bercu and Charles Guan ’11, is offering an alternative in the form of a large, purpose-built drone that can autonomously deliver 200-pound payloads across farms. The company’s drones feature an 18-foot spray radius, 80-inch rotors, a custom battery pack, and aerospace-grade materials designed to make crop spraying more safe, efficient, and inexpensive for farmers.“We’re trying to bring technology to American farms that are hundreds or thousands of acres, where you’re not replacing a human with a hand pump — you’re replacing a John Deere tractor or a helicopter or an airplane,” Bercu says.“With Guardian, the operator shows up about 30 minutes before they want to spray, they mix the product, path plan the field in our app, and it gives an estimate for how long the job will take,” he says. “With our fast charging, you recharge the aircraft while you fill the tank, and those two operations take about the same amount of time.”

      Play video

      From Battlebots to farmlandsAt a young age, Bercu became obsessed with building robots. Growing up in south Florida, he’d attend robotic competitions, build prototypes, and even dumpster dive for particularly hard-to-find components. At one competition, Bercu met Charles Guan, who would go on to major in mechanical engineering at MIT, and the two robot enthusiasts became lifelong friends.“When Charles came to MIT, he basically convinced me to move to Cambridge,” Bercu says. “He said, ‘You need to come up here. I found more people like us. Hackers!’”Bercu visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and indeed fell in love with the region’s makerspaces and hacker culture. He moved soon after, and he and Guan began spending free time at spaces including the Artisans Asylum makerspace in Somerville, Massachusetts; MIT’s International Design Center; and the MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makerspace. Guan held several leadership positions at MITERS, including facilities manager, treasurer, and president.“MIT offered enormous latitude to its students to be independent and creative, which was reflected in the degree of autonomy they permit student-run organizations like MITERS to have compared to other top-tier schools,” Guan says. “It was a key selling point to me when I was touring mechanical engineering labs as a junior in high school. I was well-known in the department circle for being at MITERS all the time, possibly even more than I spent on classes.”After Guan graduated, he and Bercu started a hardware consulting business and competed in the robot combat show Battlebots. Guan also began working as a design instructor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he taught a section of Course 2.007 that tasked students with building go-karts.Eventually, Guan and Bercu decided to use their experience to start a drone company.“Over the course of Battlebots and building go-karts, we knew electric batteries were getting really cheap and electric vehicle supply chains were established,” Bercu explains. “People were raising money to build eVTOL [electric vertical take-off and landing] vehicles to transport people, but we knew diesel fuel still outperformed batteries over long distances. Where electric systems did outperform combustion engines was in areas where you needed peak power for short periods of time. Basically, batteries are awesome when you have a short mission.”That idea made the founders think crop spraying could be a good early application. Bercu’s family runs an aviation business, and he knew pilots who would spray crops as their second jobs.“It’s one of those high-paying but very dangerous jobs,” Bercu says. “Even in the U.S., we lose between 1 and 2 percent of all agriculture pilots each year to fatal accidents. These people are rolling the dice every time they do this: You’re flying 6 feet off the ground at 140 miles an hour with 800 gallons of pesticide in your tank.”After cobbling together spare parts from Battlebots and their consulting business, the founders built a 600-pound drone. When they finally got it to fly, they decided the time was right to launch their company, receiving crucial early guidance and their first funding from the MIT-affiliated investment firm the E14 Fund.The founders spent the next year interviewing crop dusters and farmers. They also started engaging with the Federal Aviation Administration.“There was no category for anything like this,” Bercu explains. “With the FAA, we not only got through the approval process, we helped them build the process as we went through it, because we wanted to establish some common-sense standards.”Guardian custom-built its batteries to optimize throughput and utilization rate of its drones. Depending on the farm, Bercu says his machines can unload about 1.5 to 2 tons of payload per hour.Guardian’s drones can also spray more precisely than planes, reducing the environmental impact of pesticides, which often pollute the landscapes and waterways surrounding farms.“This thing has the precision to spray the ‘Mona Lisa’ on 20 acres, but we’re not leveraging that functionality today,” Bercu says. “For the operator we want to make it very easy. The goal is to take someone who sprays with a tractor and teach them to spray with a drone in less than a week.”Scaling for farmersTo date, Guardian Ag has built eight of its aircraft, which are actively delivering payloads over California farms in trials with paying customers. The company is currently ramping up manufacturing in its 60,000-square-foot facility in Massachusetts, and Bercu says Guardian has a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of drones.“Grower demand has been exceptional,” Bercu says. “We don’t need to educate them on the need for this. They see the big drone with the big tank and they’re in.”Bercu envisions Guardian’s drones helping with a number of other tasks like ship-to-ship logistics, delivering supplies to offshore oil rigs, mining, and other areas where helicopters and small aircraft are currently flown through difficult terrain. But for now, the company is focused on starting with agriculture.“Agriculture is such an important and foundational aspect of our country,” says Guardian Ag chief operating officer Ashley Ferguson MBA ’19. “We work with multigenerational farming families, and when we talk to them, it’s clear aerial spray has taken hold in the industry. But there’s a large shortage of pilots, especially for agriculture applications. So, it’s clear there’s a big opportunity.”Seven years since founding Guardian, Bercu remains grateful that MIT’s community opened its doors for him when he moved to Cambridge.“Without the MIT community, this company wouldn’t be possible,” Bercu says. “I was never able to go to college, but I’d love to one day apply to MIT and do my engineering undergrad or go to the Sloan School of Management. I’ll never forget MIT’s openness to me. It’s a place I hold near and dear to my heart.” More