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      in Energy

      Shrinky Dinks, nail polish, and smelly bacteria

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      In a lab on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 56, a group of Massachusetts high school students gathered around a device that measures conductivity.

      Vincent Nguyen, 15, from Saugus, thought of the times the material on their sample electrode flaked off the moment they took it out of the oven. Or how the electrode would fold weirdly onto itself. The big fails were kind of funny, but discouraging. The students had worked for a month, experimenting with different materials, and 17-year-old Brianna Tong of Malden wondered if they’d finally gotten it right: Would their electrode work well enough to power a microbial fuel cell?

      The students secured their electrode with alligator clips, someone hit start, and the teens watched anxiously as the device searched for even the faintest electrical current.

      Capturing electrons from bacteria

      Last July, Tong, Nguyen, and six other students from Malden Catholic High School commuted between the lab of MIT chemical engineer Ariel L. Furst and their school’s chemistry lab. Their goal was to fashion electrodes for low-cost microbial fuel cells — miniature bioreactors that generate small amounts of electricity by capturing electrons transferred from living microbes. These devices can double as electrochemical sensors.

      Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, uses a mix of electrochemistry, microbial engineering, and materials science to address challenges in human health and clean energy. “The goal of all of our projects is to increase sustainability, clean energy, and health equity globally,” she says.

      Electrochemical sensors are powerful, sensitive detection and measurement tools. Typically, their electrodes need to be built in precisely engineered environments. “Thinking about ways of making devices without needing a cleanroom is important for coming up with inexpensive devices that can be deployed in low-resource settings under non-ideal conditions,” Furst says.

      For 17-year-old Angelina Ang of Everett, the project illuminated the significance of “coming together to problem-solve for a healthier and more sustainable earth,” she says. “It made me realize that we hold the answers to fix our dying planet.”

      With the help of a children’s toy called Shrinky Dinks, carbon-based materials, nail polish, and a certain smelly bacterium, the students got — literally — a trial-by-fire introduction to the scientific method. At one point, one of their experimental electrodes burst into flames. Other results were more promising.

      The students took advantage of the electrical properties of a bacterium — Shewanella oneidensis — that’s been called nature’s microscopic power plant. As part of their metabolism, Shewanella oneidensis generate electricity by oxidizing organic matter. In essence, they spit out electrons. Put enough together, and you get a few milliamps.

      To build bacteria-friendly electrodes, one of the first things the students did was culture Shewanella. They learned how to pour a growth medium into petri dishes where the reddish, normally lake-living bacteria could multiply. The microbes, Furst notes, are a little stinky, like cabbage. “But we think they’re really cool,” she says.

      With the right engineering, Shewanella can produce electric current when they detect toxins in water or soil. They could be used for bioremediation of wastewater. Low-cost versions could be useful for areas with limited or no access to reliable electricity and clean water.

      Next-generation chemists

      The Malden Catholic-MIT program resulted from a fluke encounter between Furst and a Malden Catholic parent.

      Mary-Margaret O’Donnell-Zablocki, then a medicinal chemist at a Kendall Square biotech startup, met Furst through a mutual friend. She asked Furst if she’d consider hosting high school chemistry students in her lab for the summer.

      Furst was intrigued. She traces her own passion for science to a program she’d happened upon between her junior and senior years in high school in St. Louis. The daughter of a software engineer and a businesswoman, Furst was casting around for potential career interests when she came across a summer program that enlisted scientists in academia and private research to introduce high school students and teachers to aspects of the scientific enterprise.

      “That’s when I realized that research is not like a lab class where there’s an expected outcome,” Furst recalls. “It’s so much cooler than that.”

      Using startup funding from an MIT Energy Initiative seed grant, Furst developed a curriculum with Malden Catholic chemistry teacher Seamus McGuire, and students were invited to apply. In addition to Tong, Ang, and Nguyen, participants included Chengxiang Lou, 18, from China; Christian Ogata, 14, of Wakefield; Kenneth Ramirez, 17, of Everett; Isaac Toscano, 17, of Medford; and MaryKatherine Zablocki, 15, of Revere and Wakefield. O’Donnell-Zablocki was surprised — and pleased — when her daughter applied to the program and was accepted.

      Furst notes that women are still underrepresented in chemical engineering. She was particularly excited to mentor young women through the program.

      A conductive ink

      The students were charged with identifying materials that had high conductivity, low resistance, were a bit soluble, and — with the help of a compatible “glue” — were able to stick to a substrate.

      Furst showed the Malden Catholic crew Shrinky Dinks — a common polymer popularized in the 1970s as a craft material that, when heated in a toaster oven, shrinks to a third of its size and becomes thicker and more rigid. Electrodes based on Shrinky Dinks would cost pennies, making it an ideal, inexpensive material for microbial fuel cells that could monitor, for instance, soil health in low- and middle-income countries.

      “Right now, monitoring soil health is problematic,” Furst says. “You have to collect a sample and bring it back to the lab to analyze in expensive equipment. But if we have these little devices that cost a couple of bucks each, we can monitor soil health remotely.”

      After a crash course in conductive carbon-based inks and solvent glues, the students went off to Malden Catholic to figure out what materials they wanted to try.

      Tong rattled them off: carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers, graphite powder, activated carbon. Potential solvents to help glue the carbon to the Shrinky Dinks included nail polish, corn syrup, and embossing ink, to name a few. They tested and retested. When they hit a dead end, they revised their hypotheses.

      They tried using a 3D printed stencil to daub the ink-glue mixture onto the Shrinky Dinks. They hand-painted them. They tried printing stickers. They worked with little squeegees. They tried scooping and dragging the material. Some of their electro-materials either flaked off or wouldn’t stick in the heating process.

      “Embossing ink never dried after baking the Shrinky Dink,” Ogata recalls. “In fact, it’s probably still liquid! And corn syrup had a tendency to boil. Seeing activated carbon ignite or corn syrup boiling in the convection oven was quite the spectacle.”

      “After the electrode was out of the oven and cooled down, we would check the conductivity,” says Tong, who plans to pursue a career in science. “If we saw there was a high conductivity, we got excited and thought those materials worked.”

      The moment of truth came in Furst’s MIT lab, where the students had access to more sophisticated testing equipment. Would their electrodes conduct electricity?

      Many of them didn’t. Tong says, “At first, we were sad, but then Dr. Furst told us that this is what science is, testing repeatedly and sometimes not getting the results we wanted.” Lou agrees. “If we just copy the data left by other scholars and don’t collect and figure it out by ourselves, then it is difficult to be a qualified researcher,” he says.

      Some of the students plan to continue the project one afternoon a week at MIT and as an independent study at Malden Catholic. The long-term goal is to create a field-based soil sensor that employs a bacterium like Shewanella.

      By chance, the students’ very first electrode — made of graphite powder ink and nail polish glue — generated the most current. One of the team’s biggest surprises was how much better black nail polish worked than clear nail polish. It turns out black nail polish contains iron-based pigment — a conductor. The unexpected win took some of the sting out of the failures.

      “They learned a very hard lesson: Your results might be awesome, and things are exciting, but then nothing else might work. And that’s totally fine,” Furst says.

      This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Environment

      Celebrating a decade of a more sustainable MIT, with a focus on the future

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      When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members representing 67 different departments, labs, and centers — demonstrating the breadth of engagement across MIT.

      Held on Feb. 14 and hosting more than 100 staff, students, faculty, and researchers, the event was a forum on the future of sustainability leadership at MIT, designed to reflect on the work that had brought MIT to its present moment — focused on a net-zero future by 2026 and elimination of direct campus emissions by 2050 — and to plan forward.

      Director of Sustainability Julie Newman kicked off the day by reflecting on some of the questions that influenced the development of the MITOS framework, including: “How can MIT be a game-changing force for campus sustainability in the 21st century?” and “What are we solving for?” Newman shared that while these questions still drive the work of the office, considerations of the impact of this work have evolved. “We are becoming savvier at asking the follow-up question to these prompts,” she explained. “Are our solutions causing additional issues that we were remiss to ask, such as the impact on marginalized communities, unanticipated human health implications, and new forms of extraction?” Newman then encouraged attendees to think about these types of questions when envisioning and planning for the next decade of sustainability at MIT.

      While the event focused broadly on connecting the sustainability community at MIT, the day’s sessions tracked closely to the climate action plans that guided the office, 2015’s A Plan for Action on Climate Change and the current Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade. Both plans call for using the campus as a test bed, and at “A Model for Change: Field Reports from Campus as a Test Bed,” panelists Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, director of the Urban Risk Lab, and MITOS Faculty Fellow; Ken Strzepek, MITOS Faculty Fellow and research scientist at the MIT Center for Global Change Science; and Ippolyti Dellatolas graduate student and MITOS Climate Action Sustainability researcher shared ways in which they utilize the MIT campus as a test bed to design, study, and implement solutions related to flood risk, campus porosity, emissions reductions, and climate policy — efforts that can also inform work beyond MIT. Dellatolas reflected on success in this space. “With a successful campus as a test bed project, there is either output: we achieved these greenhouse gas emissions reductions or we learned something valuable in the process, so even if it fails, we understand why it failed and we can lend that knowledge to the next project,” she explained.

      Later in the morning, an “On the Horizon” panel focused on what key areas of focus, partnerships, and evolutions will propel the campus forward — anchored in the intersectional topics of decarbonization, climate justice, and experiential learning. To kick off the discussion, panelists John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative and professor of architecture; Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship; Susy Jones, senior sustainability project manager; and Kate Trimble, senior associate dean for experiential learning shared which elements of their work have shifted in the last five years. Higgins commented on exciting progress being made in the space of renewables, electrification, smart thermostats, offshore wind, and other advances both at MIT and the municipal level. “You take this moment, and you think, these things weren’t in the moment five years ago when we were here on this stage. It brings a sense of abundance and optimism,” he concluded.

      Jones, for her part, shared how thinking about food and nutrition evolved over this period. “We’ve developed a lot of programming around nutrition. In the past few years, this new knowledge around the climate impact of our food system has joined the conversation,” she shared. “I think it’s really important to add that to the many years and decades of work that have been going on around food justice and food access and bring that climate conversation into that piece and acknowledge that, yes, the food system is accountable for about a quarter of global greenhouse gases.”

      Throughout the event, attendees were encouraged to share their questions and ideas for the future. In the closing workshop, “The Future of Sustainability at MIT,” attendees responded to questions such as, “What gives you hope?” and “What are we already doing well at MIT, what could we do more of?” The answers and ideas — which ranged from fusion to community co-design to a continued focus on justice — will inform MITOS’s work going forward, says Newman. “This is an activity we did within our core team, and the answers were so impactful and candid that we thought to bring it to the larger community to learn even more,” she says.

      That larger community was also recognized for their contributions with the first-ever Sustainability Awards, which honored nominated staff and students from departments across MIT for their contributions to building a more sustainable MIT. “This year we had a special opportunity to spotlight some of those individuals and teams leading transformative change at MIT,” explained Newman. “But everyone in the room and everyone working on sustainability at MIT in some way are our partners in this work. Our office could not do what we do without them.” More

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      in Security

      Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Finding a road to impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Weeding out farming challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Energy

      Working to make nuclear energy more competitive

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      Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for an aircraft electric propulsion system, Halimi had to read a chart that compared the energy density of various fuel sources. He was floored to see that the value for uranium was orders of magnitude higher than the rest. “Just a fuel pellet the size of my fingertip can generate as much energy as a ton of coal or 150 gallons of oil,” Halimi points out.

      Having grown up in Algeria, in an economy dominated by oil and gas, Halimi was always aware of energy’s role in fueling growth. But here was a source that showed enormous potential. “The more I read about nuclear, the more I saw its direct relationship with climate change and how nuclear energy can potentially replace the carbonized economy,” Halimi says. “The problem we’re dealing with right now is that the source of energy is not clean. Nuclear [presented itself] as an answer, or at least as a promise that you can dig into,” he says. “I was also seeing the electrification of systems and the economy evolving.”

      A tectonic shift was brewing, and Halimi wanted in.

      Then an electrical engineering major at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (INSA Lyon), Halimi added nuclear engineering as a second major. Today, the second-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) has expanded on his early curiosity in the field and researches methods of improving the design of small modular reactors. Under Professor Koroush Shirvan’s advisement, Halimi also studies high burnup fuel so we can extract more energy from the same amount of material.

      A foot in two worlds

      The son of a computer engineer father and a mother who works as a judge, Halimi was born in Algiers and grew up in Cherchell, a small town near the capital. His interest in science grew sharper in middle school; Halimi remembers being a member of the astronomy club. As a middle and high schooler, Halimi traveled to areas with low light pollution to observe the night skies.

      As a teenager, Halimi set his goals high, enrolling in high school in both Algeria and France. Taking classes in Arabic and French, he found a fair amount of overlap between the two curricula. The divergence in the nonscientific classes gave Halimi a better understanding of the cultural perspectives. After studying the French curriculum remotely, Halimi graduated with two diplomas. He remembers having to take two baccalaureate exams, which didn’t bother him much, but he did have to miss viewing parts of the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament.

      A multidisciplinary approach to engineering

      After high school, Halimi moved to France to study engineering at INSA Lyon. He elected for a major in electrical engineering and, ever the pragmatist, also signed up for a bachelor’s degree in math and economics. “You can build a lot of amazing things, but you have to take costs into account to make sure you’re proposing something feasible that can make it in the real world,” Halimi says, explaining his motivation to study economics.

      Wrapping up his bachelor’s in math and economics in two short years, Halimi decided to pursue a double curriculum in electrical and nuclear engineering during his final year of engineering studies. Since his school in Lyon did not offer the double curriculum, Halimi had to move to Paris to study at The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), part of the University of Paris-Saclay. The summer before he started, he traveled to Japan and toured the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

      Halimi first conducted research at MIT NSE as part of an internship in nuclear engineering when he was still a student in France. He remembers wanting to explore work on reactor design, when an advisor at CEA recommended interning with Shirvan.

      Pragmatism in nuclear energy adoption

      Halimi’s work at MIT NSE focuses on high burnup fuel assessment and small modular reactor (SMR) design.

      Existing nuclear plants have faced stiff competition during the last decade. Improving the fuel efficiency (high burnup) is a potential way of improving the economic competitiveness of the existing reactor fleet. One challenge is that materials degrade when you keep them longer in the reactor. Halimi evaluates fuel performance and safety features of more efficient fuel operation using advanced computer simulation tools. At the 2022 TopFuel Light Water Reactor Fuel Performance Conference, Halimi presented a paper describing strategies to achieve higher burnups. He is now working on journal paper about this work.

      Halimi’s research on SMR design is motivated by the industry’s move to smaller plants that take less time to construct. The challenge, he says, is that if you simply make the reactors smaller, you lose the advantages of economies of scale and might end up with a more expensive economic proposal. Halimi’s goal is to analyze how smaller reactors can compensate for economies of scale by improving their technical design. Other advantages stacked in favor of smaller reactors is that they can be constructed faster and in series.

      Halimi analyzes the fuel performance, core design, thermal hydraulics, and safety of these small reactors. “One efficient way that I particularly assess to improve their economics is high power density operation,” he says. In late 2021 Halimi published a paper on the relationship between cost and reactor power density in Nuclear Engineering and Design Journal. The research has been featured in other conference papers.

      When he’s not working, Halimi makes time to play soccer and hopes to get back into astronomy. “I sold all my gear when I moved from Europe so I need to buy new ones at some point,” he says.

      Halimi is convinced that nuclear power will be a serious contender in the energy landscape. “You have to propose something that will make everyone happy,” Halimi laughs when he describes work in nuclear science and engineering.

      The work ahead is daunting — “Nuclear power is safe, sustainable, and reliable; now we need to be on time and on budget [to achieve] climate goals” he says — but Halimi is ready. By addressing both the competitiveness of the existing reactors through high burnup fuels and designing the next generation of nuclear plants, he is adopting a dual-pronged approach to make nuclear energy an economical and viable alternative to carbon-based fuels. More

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      in Environment

      Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: Antje Danielson on energy education and its role in climate action

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      The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next generation of energy innovators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. Here, she discusses new initiatives in MITEI’s education program and how they are preparing students to take an active role in climate action.

      Q: What role are MITEI’s education efforts playing in climate action initiatives at MIT, and what more could we be doing?

      A: This is a big question. The carbon emissions from energy are such an important factor in climate mitigation; therefore, what we do in energy education is practically synonymous with climate education. This is well illustrated in a 2018 Nature Energy paper by Fuso Nerini, which outlines that affordable, clean energy is related to many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — not just SDG 7, which specifically calls for “affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all” by 2030. There are 17 SDGs containing 169 targets, of which 113 (65 percent) require actions to be taken concerning energy systems.

      Now, can we equate education with action? The answer is yes, but only if it is done correctly. From the behavioral change literature, we know that knowledge alone is not enough to change behavior. So, one important part of our education program is practice and experience through research, internships, stakeholder engagement, and other avenues. At a minimum, education must give the learner the knowledge, skills, and courage to be ready to jump into action, but ideally, practice is a part of the offering. We also want our learners to go out into the world and share what they know and do. If done right, education is an energy transition accelerator.

      At MITEI, our learners are not just MIT students. We are creating online offerings based on residential MIT courses to train global professionals, policymakers, and students in research methods and tools to support and accelerate the energy transition. These are free and open to learners worldwide. We have five courses available now, with more to come.

      Our latest program is a collaboration with MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR): Climate Action through Education, or CATE. This is a teach-the-teacher program for high school curriculum and is a part of the MIT Climate Action Plan. The aim is to develop interdisciplinary, solutions-focused climate change curricula for U.S. high school teachers with components in history/social science, English/language arts, math, science, and computer science.

      We are rapidly expanding our programming. In the online space, for our global learners, we are bundling courses for professional development certificates; for our undergraduates, we are redesigning the energy studies minor to reflect what we have learned over the past 12 years; and for our graduate students, we are adding a new program that allows them to garner industry experience related to the energy transition. Meanwhile, CATE is creating a support network for the teachers who adopt the curriculum. We are also working on creating an energy and climate alliance with other universities around the world.

      On the Institute level, I am a member of the Climate Education Working Group, a subgroup of the Climate Nucleus, where we discuss and will soon recommend further climate action the Institute can take. Stay tuned for that.

      Q: You mentioned that you are leading an effort to create a consortium of energy and climate education programs at universities around the world. How does this effort fit into MITEI’s educational mission?

      A: Yes, we are currently calling it the “Energy and Climate Education Alliance.” The background to this is that the problem we are facing — transitioning the entire global energy system from high carbon emissions to low, no, and negative carbon emissions — is global, huge, and urgent. Following the proverbial “many hands make light work,” we believe that the success of this very complex task is accomplished quicker with more participants. There is, of course, more to this as well. The complexity of the problem is such that (1) MIT doesn’t have all the expertise needed to accomplish the educational needs of the climate and energy crisis, (2) there is a definite local and regional component to capacity building, and (3) collaborations with universities around the world will make our mission-driven work more efficient. Finally, these collaborations will be advantageous for our students as they will be able to learn from real-world case studies that are not U.S.-based and maybe even visit other universities abroad, do internships, and engage in collaborative research projects. Also, students from those universities will be able to come here and experience MIT’s unique intellectual environment.

      Right now, we are very much in the beginning stages of creating the alliance. We have signed a collaboration agreement with the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and are engaged in talks with other European and Southeast Asian universities. Some of the collaborations we are envisioning relate to course development, student exchange, collaborative research, and course promotion. We are very excited about this collaboration. It fits well into MIT’s ambition to take climate action outside of the university, while still staying within our educational mission.

      Q: It is clear to me from this conversation that MITEI’s education program is undertaking a number of initiatives to prepare MIT students and interested learners outside of the Institute to take an active role in climate action. But, the reality is that despite our rapidly changing climate and the immediate need to decarbonize our global economy, climate denialism and a lack of climate and energy understanding persist in the greater global population. What do you think must be done, and what can MITEI do, to increase climate and energy literacy broadly?

      A: I think the basic problem is not necessarily a lack of understanding but an abundance of competing issues that people are dealing with every day. Poverty, personal health, unemployment, inflation, pandemics, housing, wars — all are very immediate problems people have. And climate change is perceived to be in the future.

      The United States is a very bottom-up country, where corporations offer what people buy, and politicians advocate for what voters want and what money buys. Of course, this is overly simplified, but as long as we don’t come up with mechanisms to achieve a monumental shift in consumer and voter behavior, we are up against these immediate pressures. However, we are seeing some movement in this area due to rising gas and heating oil prices and the many natural disasters we are encountering now. People are starting to understand that climate change will hit their pocketbook, whether or not we have a carbon tax. The recent Florida hurricane damage, wildfires in the west, extreme summer temperatures, frequent droughts, increasing numbers of poisonous and disease-carrying insects — they all illustrate the relationship between climate change, health, and financial damage. Fewer and fewer people will be able to deny the existence of climate change because they will either be directly affected or know someone who is.

      The question is one of speed and scale. The more we can help to make the connections even more visible and understood, the faster we get to the general acceptance that this is real. Research projects like CEEPR’s Roosevelt Project, which develops action plans to help communities deal with industrial upheaval in the context of the energy transition, are contributing to this effect, as are studies related to climate change and national security. This is a fast-moving world, and our research findings need to be translated as we speak. A real problem in education is that we have the tendency to teach the tried and true. Our education programs have to become much nimbler, which means curricula have to be updated frequently, and that is expensive. And of course, the speed and magnitude of our efforts are dependent on the funding we can attract, and fundraising for education is more difficult than fundraising for research.

      However, let me pivot: You alluded to the fact that this is a global problem. The immediate pressures of poverty and hunger are a matter of survival in many parts of the world, and when it comes to surviving another day, who cares if climate change will render your fields unproductive in 20 years? Or if the weather turns your homeland into a lake, will you think about lobbying your government to reduce carbon emissions, or will you ask for help to rebuild your existence? On the flip side, politicians and government authorities in those areas have to deal with extremely complex situations, balancing local needs with global demands. We should learn from them. What we need is to listen. What do these areas of the world need most, and how can climate action be included in the calculations? The Global Commission to End Energy Poverty, a collaboration between MITEI and the Rockefeller Foundation to bring electricity to the billion people across the globe who currently live without it, is a good example of what we are already doing. Both our online education program and the Energy and Climate Education Alliance aim to go in this direction.

      The struggle and challenge to solve climate change can be pretty depressing, and there are many days when I feel despondent about the speed and progress we are making in saving the future of humanity. But, the prospect of contributing to such a large mission, even if the education team can only nudge us a tiny bit away from the business-as-usual scenario, is exciting. In particular, working on an issue like this at MIT is amazing. So much is happening here, and there don’t seem to be intellectual limits; in fact, thinking big is encouraged. It is very refreshing when one has encountered the old “you can’t do this” too often in the past. I want our students to take this attitude with them and go out there and think big. More

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      in Environment

      Creating the steps to make organizational sustainability work

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      Sustainability is a hot topic. Companies throw around their carbon or recycling initiatives, and competing executives feel the need to follow suit. But aside from the external pressure, there are also bottom-line benefits. Becoming more efficient can save money. Creating a new product might make money; customers care about a company’s practices and will spend their money based on that.

      The work is in getting there, because becoming sustainable can seem simple: Establish a goal for five years down the road, and everything will fall into place — but it’s easy for things to get upended. “There is so much confusion and noise in this space,” says Jason Jay, senior lecturer and director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

      His work is to help companies break through the confusion and figure out what they want to actually do, not merely what sounds good. It means doing research and listening to science. Mostly, it requires discipline, and because something new — be it a product, process or technology — is being asked for, it also takes ambition. “It’s a tricky dance,” he says, but one that can result in “doing well and doing good at the same time.”

      Play video

      It’s about taking steps

      Three steps, to be exact. The first, which is the crux, Jay says, is for a company to focus on a small set of issues that it can take the lead on. It sounds obvious, but it’s often missed. The problem is that companies will do either one of two things. They’ll take an outside-in approach in which they end up listening to too many stakeholders, “get pulled in a million different directions,” and try to solve all of society’s problems, which means solving none of them, he says.

      Or they’ll go inside-out and have one executive in charge of sustainability who will do some internal research and come up with an initiative. It might be a good idea, but it doesn’t take into account how it will affect the facilities, supply chains, and the people who work with them. And without that consideration, “It’s going to be very difficult to get the necessary traction inside the company,” Jay says.

      What’s needed is a combination of the two — outside perspectives coupled with insider knowledge — in order to find an initiative that resonates for that company. It starts with looking at what the company already does. That might show where it’s making a negative impact and, in turn, where it could make a positive one. It also involves the C-suite executives asking themselves, “What do we want this company to stand for?” and then, “What do I want my legacy to be?”

      Still, it can be hard to envision what change can look like or what actions might have an impact. Jay says this is where a simulation tool like En-ROADS, developed by MIT Sloan and Climate Interactive, can help explore scenarios.

      But it’s ultimately about making a commitment and allowing an iterative process to play out. A company then discovers its true focus might be something less flashy. Nike early on, for example, found that a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions was sulfur hexafluoride gas in the Nike Air bladder. When they re-engineered it, they ended up with inert nitrogen and a stronger material that was aesthetically cool and lightweight for the athlete. That didn’t come in one brainstorming meeting. It meant doing research and looking at what the science says is possible. It’s not quick, but it also shouldn’t be, if the goal is to take real, measurable action.

      “Cheap talk leads to cheap things,” Jay says. 

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      The next two

      Deciding what matters is key, but nothing materializes without establishing concrete goals. This is where a company “shows the world you’re serious.” But it’s a place where companies slip up. They either set weak goals, ones they know they can easily reach, so there’s no challenge, no accomplishment, “no stretch,” Jay says. Or they set goals that are too ambitious and/or aren’t backed by science. It could be, “We’re going to be net zero by 2050,” but how exactly is never answered.

      Jay says it’s about finding the sweet spot of having a reasonable amount of goals — like two to four — and then have those goals feel like a reach, yet possible. When that balance is right, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People stay motivated because they experience progress. But if it’s off, it won’t happen.

      “You need that optimal creative tension,” he says.

      And then there’s the third step. Companies need to find partners to make their sustainability programs succeed. It’s the one part that’s most overlooked because executives continually believe that they can do it alone. But they can’t, because big initiatives require help and expertise outside of a company’s realm.

      Maersk, the global shipping company, has a goal of replacing fossil fuel with green fuels for ocean freight, Jay says. It discovered that green ammonia could make that happen, and it was Yara, a fertilizer company, which best understood ammonia production. But it could also be a startup that’s working on a promising technology. Sometimes, as with moving to electric cars, what’s needed are political partners to enact policy and offer tax breaks and incentives. And it might be that the answer is collaborating with activists who have been pushing a company to change its ways.

      “There are strange bedfellows all around,” Jay says.

      Know how to tap the brake

      All the steps circle back to the essential point that becoming sustainable takes a committed investment of time, money, and patience. Starting small helps, especially in a corporate culture that tends to move slowly. Jay says there’s nothing wrong with going from zero projects to one, even if it’s a small one in a specific department. It allows people to become accustomed to the idea of change. It also lets the company establish a framework, analyze results, and build momentum, making it easier to ramp up.

      The patience part can be hard since there’s a rightful sense of urgency involved. Companies want to show that they’re doing something, and want to affect climate change sooner rather than later. But Jay likens it to building a skyscraper. The desire is to get it up fast, but if the foundation is shaky, everything will crumble.

      “What we’re trying to do is strengthen that foundation so it can reach the height we need,” he says. More

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      in Environment

      Aviva Intveld named 2023 Gates Cambridge Scholar

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      MIT senior Aviva Intveld has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K. Intveld will join the other 23 U.S. citizens selected for the 2023 class of scholars.

      Intveld, from Los Angeles, is majoring in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, and minoring in materials science and engineering with concentrations in geology, geochemistry, and archaeology. Her research interests span the intersections among those fields to better understand how the natural environments of the past have shaped human movement and decision-making.

      At Cambridge, Intveld will undertake a research MPhil in earth sciences at the Godwin Lab for Paleoclimate Research, where she will investigate the impact of past climate on the ancient Maya in northwest Yucatán via cave sediment records. She hopes to pursue an impact-oriented research career in paleoclimate and paleoenvironment reconstruction and ultimately apply the lessons learned from her research to inform modern climate policy. She is particularly passionate about sustainable mining of energy-critical elements and addressing climate change inequality in her home state of California.

      Intveld’s work at Cambridge will build upon her extensive research experience at MIT. She currently works in the McGee Lab reconstructing the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene paleoclimate of northeastern Mexico to provide a climatic background to the first peopling of the Americas. Previously, she explored the influence of mountain plate tectonics on biodiversity in the Perron Lab. During a summer research position at the University of Haifa in Israel she analyzed the microfossil assemblage of an offshore sediment core for paleo-coastal reconstruction.

      Last summer, Intveld interned at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Homer, Alaska, to identify geologic controls on regional groundwater chemistry. She has also interned with the World Wildlife Fund and with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. During her the spring semester of her junior year, Intveld studied abroad through MISTI at Imperial College London’s Royal School of Mines and completed geology field work in Sardinia, Italy.

      Intveld has been a strong presence on MIT’s campus, serving as the undergraduate representative on the EAPS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. She leads tours for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is a member of and associate advisor for the Terrascope Learning Community, and is a participant in the Addir Interfaith Dialogue Fellowship.

      Inveld was advised in her application by Kim Benard, associate dean of the Distinguished Fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, who says, “Aviva’s work is at a fascinating crossroads of archeology, geology, and sustainability. She has already done extraordinary work, and this opportunity will prepare her even more to be influential in the fight for climate mitigation.”

      Established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship provides full funding for talented students from outside the United Kingdom to pursue postgraduate study in any subject at Cambridge University. Since the program’s inception in 2001, there have been 33 Gates Cambridge Scholars from MIT. More