Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, speaks with Abby Acone of FOX 13 about the environmental impacts of generative AI, and the benefits and challenges posed by increasing use of AI tools. Bashir emphasizes that the use of generative AI should be “very judicious, not a blind application of AI for all applications.”
A study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere has proposed an alternative scenario to how life survived “Snowball Earth,” a “super ice age that froze the entire planet from poles to the equator” during the Cryogenian period, reports David Bressan for Forbes. “The scientists found that lifeforms could have survived the global freeze by thriving in watery oases on the surface,” explains Bressan.
Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto about the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance. “A great amount of innovation happens in academia. We have a longer view into the future,” says Chandrakasan. He adds that while companies like GE Vernova have “the ability to get products out quickly to scale up, to manufacture, we have the ability to think past the short-term. ... It’s super smart of them to surround themselves with this incredible talent in academia. That will allow us to make the kind of breakthroughs that will keep U.S. competitiveness at its peak.”
Berly McCoy and Sushmita Pathak of NPR’s Short Wave spotlight research by postdoctoral associate Funing Li and his team on tornado occurrence. The researchers used “historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere,” explains McCoy.
MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”
“A breakthrough from MIT researchers and AgZen, a spinoff company, is making agricultural spraying more efficient—cutting pesticide waste, lowering costs, and reducing environmental impact,” reports Rural Radio Network. “The technology works with existing sprayers, eliminating the need for costly equipment changes. In field tests, it doubled product retention on crops like soybeans and kale. AgZen’s spray-monitoring system, RealCoverage, has already helped farmers reduce pesticide use by 30 to 50 percent, and the new coating could improve efficiency even further.”
Inspired by his daily walks, Prof. Elfatih Eltahir and his colleagues have developed a new way to measure how climate change is likely to impact the number of days when it is comfortable to be outdoors, reports Maddie Browning for WBUR. “I find people walking, jogging, cycling and enjoying the outdoors,” says Eltahir. “That's what motivated me to start looking at how climate change could really constrain some of those activities.”
Postdoctoral associate Stewart Isaacs SM ’19 PhD ’24 speaks with Physics Today reporter Toni Feder about his passion for the sport of jump roping, research into solar-powered egg incubators for use in West Africa, and his work at MIT focused on addressing climate change and social inequities through the development of clean energy systems. “In jump rope, you have the basic building blocks of tricks. You need to combine them in ways that look interesting and are creative and fun to do. In engineering, you have the basic building blocks of physics. When you need to solve a problem, you need to come up with a creative solution to get there,” says Isaacs of the intersection between jump roping and scientific research. “And jump rope is hard. To be really good at it takes a lot of effort. The habits of working hard and problem-solving are also very useful in engineering.”
Researchers at MIT have found that “more than 98% of prisons in the United States experienced at least ten days that were hotter than every previous summer, with the worst of the heat-exposed prisons concentrated in the Southwest,” reports Minnah Arshad for USA Today. s
MIT researchers developed a new method to model how climate change will impact the number of “outdoor days” and found that Southern states in the U.S. will lose a significant number of outdoor days, reports Kristin Toussaint for Fast Company. Prof. Elfatih Eltahir explains that the concept of outdoor days is, “an attempt for me to bring the issue of climate change home. When someone tells you global temperatures are going to increase by 3 degrees, that’s one thing. If someone tells you that your outdoor days will be dropping by 20% or 30%, that’s another thing.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Associated Press reporter Terry Spencer about Tampa Bay’s vulnerability to incoming hurricanes. “It’s a huge population,” explains Emanuel. “It’s very exposed, very inexperienced and that’s a losing proposition. I always thought Tampa would be the city to worry about most.”
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Washington Post reporters Sarah Kaplan, Shannon Osaka and Dan Stillman about the future of hurricane forecasting. “This is one thing that scares me, if these things can intensify more rapidly,” says Emanuel. “We’re going to have cases where forecasters go to bed with a tropical storm and wake up with a Category 5 when it’s too late to evacuate people.”
Writing for Forbes, Peter Evans PhD '05 identifies used electric vehicle (EV) batteries as the next billion-dollar circular marketplace, noting the possibility of significant search, bargaining and enforcement cost savings. Given large volumes of used batteries won’t be available soon, he acknowledges risk, but “creating a successful national circular EV battery marketplace can be not only a billion-dollar opportunity but an important step toward a more sustainable and resource-efficient future,” he argues.
Alum Brian Ketcham, “an engineer and influential environmentalist who promoted mass transit and favored bridge tolls, bus lanes, limits on parking and other curbs on vehicular traffic,” has died at age 85, reports Sam Roberts for The New York Times. As a long-time city official and consultant, “no one in New York City or anywhere accomplished as much as Brian in reducing the societal harms of urban auto use,” says former city environmental analyst Charles Komanoff.
Prof. Asegun Henry has been named a 2024 Grist honoree for his work developing a “sun in a box,” a new cost-effective system for storing renewable energy, reports Grist. Based on his research, Prof. Henry has founded Fourth Power, a startup working to build a prototype system that will hopefully “allow us to decarbonize electricity,” says Henry.