Agriculture

Popular Mechanics reporter Dave Grossman writes that MIT researchers are “utilizing plants' natural abilities of sensory detection and attempting to co-join them with modern tech.”

Verge reporter Angela Chen spotlights Prof. Michael Strano’s work using nanobionics to engineer plants. “It’s long overdue that we start to look at plants as the starting point of technology,” explains Strano. “As an engineering platform, they have a number of untapped advantages.”

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights how MIT alumnus Josh Lessing has co-founded a company that is “developing technology to solve some of the most enduring challenges in agriculture — a sector that has long struggled with labor shortages, seasonal schedules, and compressed harvesting periods.”

A study by MIT researcher provides evidence that large-scale corn production in the U.S. impacts weather patterns, reports Eric J. Wallace for Atlas Obscura. “By increasing yields,” writes Wallace, “farmers have unintentionally created weather patterns that seem to be protecting their crops and helping them grow more corn.”

In an article for NBC News about how climate change could make life unsustainable in the countries along the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Charlene Gubash highlights an MIT study showing that temperatures there and in southwest Asia, “will exceed the threshold for human survival if nations fail to reign in emissions.”

An MIT study finds that rising temperatures due to climate change will make the North China Plain uninhabitable by the end of the century, reports Newsweek’s Brendan Cole. The area could experience heat and humidity that is “so strong that it is impossible for the human body to cool itself,” Cole explains.

Axios reporter Andrew Freedman examines a new study by researchers at MIT and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology showing that China’s breadbasket, the North China Plain, could face severe heat waves. Big picture, writes Freedman, “such heat waves could both threaten lives and dampen economic output in the region, where 400 million people live.”

CNN reporter Bard Wilkinson writes that a study by MIT researchers finds that by the end of the century China’s North Plain region will experience heatwaves that could kill healthy people within six hours. Wilkinson explains that the findings are, “worrying because many of the region's 400 million people are farmers exposed to climactic conditions.”

New research by Prof. Elfatih Eltahir finds that the North China Plain could face deadly heat waves by the end of the century unless measures are taken to curb carbon emissions, reports Damian Carrington for The Guardian. Eltahir found that there already has been a, “substantial increase in extreme heatwaves on the plain in the past 50 years.”

A new study by led by Prof. Elfatih Eltahir finds that climate change could cause the North China Plain, China’s most populous agricultural region, to face deadly heatwaves by 2100, reports Isabelle Gerretsen for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “The intensity of those heatwaves means that survival of humans would be questionable,” says Eltahir.

Researchers utilized weather data from the region between Texas, North Dakota, and Ohio to see if an increase in crop growth had an effect on area climate change. Kimberly Hickok writes for Science that there is "strong indication" that the regional changes in climate in the late 20^th century can be attributed to “agriculture, and not changing sea surface temperature."

In this video, Reuters spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new sensor that can be applied to plant leaves and can identify when a plant is experiencing a water shortage.  Prof. Michael Strano explains that the sensor allows users to, “detect the onset of water stress long before the tissue starts to be harmed.” 

Prof. Michael Strano has developed “a sensor that can be “printed” onto a plant’s leaf and transmit data from the plant itself about if it’s experiencing water stress,” writes Kristin Toussaint for metro.

MIT researchers have developed a new sensor that can be applied to the leaf of a plant and could be used to help predict droughts, reports Alyssa Meyers for The Boston Globe. Prof. Michael Strano explains that in the future, “One of the most useful ways of using this sensor is to design more stress-tolerant crops.”

The Economist highlights a study by MIT researchers that shows climate change could cause the flow of the Nile River to become more variable, increasing strain on regional water conflicts. The researchers found that while output could increase by up to 15%, variability would also increase, resulting in, “more (and worse) floods and droughts.”