Prof. Kerry Emanuel and First Street Foundation have found that based on warming climate conditions and patterns, future storms will increase in intensity and travel farther north up the East Coast, reports Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston for Bloomberg.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with CNN reporters Ella Nilsen and Renée Rigdon about future hurricane trends. “The bottom line is the models that are being used by the existing [catastrophe] modeling industry are based strictly on historical statistics,” says Emanuel. “The historical record isn’t very long, and it isn’t very good when you get back to before 1970.”
Visiting scientist Judah Cohen speaks with Boston.com reporter Eli Curwin about how a combination of more accurate data collection, precise weather models, and accessible forecast predictions make it unlikely that Massachusetts residents would be surprised again by a storm like the infamous Blizzard of ‘78. “The satellites, the ships, the weather stations, weather balloons used to integrate and assimilate all that data are much better than they used to be,” says Cohen.
Forbes reporter Jeff McMahon spotlights visiting scientist Judah Cohen for his research examining the connection between Arctic snow cover and sea ice to cold air intrusions in the United States during the month of February. “December has certainly been warming if you look at the U.S.,” sayscCohen. But “February, going back to 1979—so quite a few years now—we're actually seeing in the center of the U.S. a very distinctive cooling trend.”
Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner spotlights Boston as a potential leader in climate technology for their “incubator spaces like Greentown Labs in Somerville and The Engine in Cambridge.”
Prof. Steven Barrett speaks with New York Times reporter Paige McClanahan about the pressing need to make air travel more sustainable and his research exploring the impact of contrails on the planet’s temperature. “Eliminating contrails is quite a big lever on mitigating the climate impact of aviation,” said Barrett.
Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi spotlights Sublime Systems, an MIT startup developing new technology to produce low-carbon cement. “Sublime’s solution involves splitting the cement-making process into two steps,” explains Rathi. “The first step is to make calcium—the key element in limestone—in a form that’s ready to chemically react with silicon—the key element in sand. Sublime reduces energy use and carbon emissions in this step by avoiding limestone and using electricity, rather than coal-fired heat.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Emeritus Ernest Moniz writes that the National Ignition Facility’s fusion energy advancement “is exciting because when the journey from science demonstration to a commercially viable power plant is completed, the electricity grid will be revolutionized.” Moniz continues, “To meet widely accepted climate objectives, we must double the clock speed of the clean energy innovation process.”
Forbes has named Commonwealth Fusion Systems one of the biggest tech innovations and breakthroughs of 2022, reports Bernard Marr. “Commonwealth Fusion Systems is now working with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center on plans to build a factory that can mass-produce components for the first commercial fusion reactors,” writes Marr.
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with Bloomberg reporter Kyle Stock about the carbon impact of electric vehicles. “On average, your emissions are substantially lower if you go for the full electric [vehicle],” says Trancik. “But we could probably think of extreme edge cases where a hybrid is just as good.”
Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights how The Engine has “backed a number of promising climate-tech startups” and has “helped attract many other investors to climate tech.” Additionally “three-quarters of startups backed by The Engine had a founder or chief executive from an underrepresented minority group, and 44 percent had a woman in one of those roles,” Pressman notes. “From our point of view, it is unacceptable not to believe that people of very diverse backgrounds should be the next founders,” says Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner of The Engine.
Prof. Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, speaks with NPR host Rob Schmitz about fusion energy and its impact on climate and energy sustainability. “So in fusion, what you're doing is literally fusing or pushing together these hydrogen atoms,” explains Whyte. “They turn into helium. This is what happens in our sun as well, too. And when that happens, that can release large amounts of net energy.”
Research Scientist Josué Velázquez Martínez speaks with Allyson Chiu from The Washington Post about how online and in-store shopping can impact the climate. “In general, anybody that is in logistics and supply chains agree that having one or two or three days more to deliver is always better,” Velázquez Martínez says. More time for deliveries makes planning, inventory replenishment and distribution “way more efficient, which in turn also reduces the amount of fuel and energy that you require to serve your customers.”
Physics World has named two research advances by MIT researchers to its list of the Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year. Prof. Gang Chen and his colleagues were selected for their work “showing that cubic boron arsenide is one of the best semiconductors known to science.” Prof. Asegun Henry, grad student Alina LaPotin and their colleagues were nominated for “constructing a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell with an efficiency of more than 40%.”
Quaise Energy, an MIT spinout, is developing a millimeter wave drill to “vaporize enough rock to create the world’s deepest holes and harvest geothermal energy at scale to satisfy human energy consumption without the need for fossil fuels,” reports Tim Newcomb for Popular Mechanics.