Graduate student Shomik Verma writes for Newsweek that “we need systemic change to ensure our individual climate actions aren't going to waste. If you're serious about fighting climate change this year, instead of recycling more, consider shifting focus to policy support and investments.” Verma adds: “if we advocate for change at the federal and state level, we can build an effective bridge between our individual actions and the change we want to see in the world.”
Physics World has selected two research advances by MIT physicists for its Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year for 2024, reports Hamish Johnston for Physics World. Graduate student Andrew Denniston and his colleagues were honored for their work “being the first to unify two distinct descriptions of atomic nuclei,” which Johnston describes as a “major step forward in our understanding of nuclear structure and strong interactions.” MIT researchers were also featured for their work demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, making it “far more likely that quantum computers will become practical problem-solving machines.”
Graduate student William Parker SM '22 has discovered that two geomagnetic storms have “affected the orbits of thousands of satellites, resulting in an unprecedented mass migration,” reports Passant Rabie for Gizmodo. “Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere—a large bubble of magnetic field around our planet—caused by solar wind,” explains Rabie.
New research by graduate student William Parker SM '22 has found that two geomagnetic storms have led to the mass migrations of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, reports Jeff Foust for Space News. “This is a significant impact,” says Parker. “This is critical infrastructure to all of our space operations moving forward, and it will only become more important as time goes on.”
Grist reporter Matt Simon spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds “large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills.” Graduate student Martin Staadecker explains: “Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important. But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have compared 12 large language models (LLMs) against 925 human forecasters for a three-month forecasting tournament to help predict real-world events, including geopolitical events, reports Tomas Gorny for Forbes. "Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments,” the researchers explain.
Research from the Data Provenance Initiative, led by MIT researchers, has “found that many web sources used for training AI models have restricted their data, leading to a rapid decline in accessible information,” reports Gary Drenik for Forbes.
Researchers at MIT have developed a robot capable of assembling “building blocks called voxels to build an object with almost any shape,” reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “You can get furniture-scale objects really fast in a very sustainable way, because you can reuse these modular components and ask a robot to reassemble them into different large-scale objects,” says graduate student Alexander Htet Kyaw.
Three mathematicians, including graduate student Aleksandr Zimin, have disproved the “bunkbed conjecture,” offering “fresh guidance on how to approach related problems in physics about properties of solid materials,” reports Joseph Howlett for Quanta Magazine.
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.”
Graduate student Samantha Hasler and her colleagues have gathered new information on Uranus using the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Horizons spacecraft, reports Jamie Carter for Forbes. "Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing” for future missions, explains Hasler.
Maria Lucchi SM '24 speaks with Andy Gray of Supply Chain 24/7 about her “journey from working the deli counter at her local supermarket to her current role as a Supply Demand Planner at Apple.” Says Lucchi of MIT’s Supply Chain Management Graduate Program: “MIT gave me the opportunity to think about the type of person and co-worker I wanted to become.” She added that: “Our executive director, Dr. Saénz, always talks about a footprint. So I really thought about what kind of footprint I wanted to leave behind.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that “human memories can be distorted by photos and videos edited by artificial intelligence,” reports Matthew Sparkes for New Scientist. “I think the worst part here, that we need to be aware or concerned about, is when the user isn’t aware of it,” says postdoctoral fellow Samantha Chan. “We definitely have to be aware and work together with these companies, or have a way to mitigate these effects. Maybe have sort of a structure where users can still control and say ‘I want to remember this as it was’, or at least have a tag that says ‘this was a doctored photo, this was a changed photo, this was not a real one’.”
Researchers at MIT have developed “AstroAnts,” autonomous, magnetic, robotic rovers roughly the size of a Hot Wheels toy car designed to monitor space vehicles and other hard-to-reach machinery, reports Jesus Diaz for Fast Company. “The idea is that, by constantly watching over the temperature and structural integrity of their cosmic rides, spaceships will be more resilient to the extreme conditions of space and astronauts will be safer,” explains Diaz.
Seonghoon Woo PhD '15, Jongwon Choi PhD '17, Young Suk Jo SM '13, PhD '16, and Hyunho Kim SM '14, PhD '18 have co-founded Amogy – a startup company that is using ammonia produced by renewable energy as a carbon-free way to fuel a tugboat, report Jennifer McDermott and Michael Hill for The Associated Press. “Without solving the problem, it’s not going to be possible to make the planet sustainable,” says Woo. “I don’t think this is the problem of the next generation. This is a really big problem for our generation.”