Desirée Plata, the School of Engineering Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named associate dean of engineering, effective July 1. In her new role, Plata will focus on fostering early-stage research initiatives across the school’s faculty and on strengthening entrepreneurial and innovation efforts. She will […]
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There is an estimated $500 billion worth of lithium below the Salton Sea, a large lake in Imperial County, California, and many people are eager to tap into this “white gold mine.” But the sea lies in a region of the Golden State where there are already numerous environmental concerns, and some residents worry that […]
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Rather than blood in the water, sharks are finding drugs in the water. The aquatic predators have tested positive for both legal and illegal drugs in parts of the Bahamas. These substances have the potential to cause behavioral changes in the sharks and indicate that humans have a stronger hand in ecosystem changes than expected, […]
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For the past three summers, MIT master’s students and recently graduated planners have collaborated with cities and community organizations to advance climate, infrastructure, and economic development initiatives. They’re known as the Freedom Summer Fellows, participants in an impact-driven program launched in 2023 by the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), an expression of […]
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We are what we eat. And in the ocean, most life-forms source their food from phytoplankton. These microscopic, plant-like algae are the primary food source for krill, sea snails, some small fish, and jellyfish, which in turn feed larger marine animals that are prey for the ocean’s top predators, including humans. Now MIT scientists are […]
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The concrete cap of a tomb encasing radioactive fallout now has cracks, and what’s beneath can rise from the dead. The U.S. military, in 1958, conducted a nuclear test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands with an 18-kiloton bomb called Cactus. The resulting blast left behind an almost 33-foot deep crater, which later became […]
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We have been trained to view these meetings as dry regulatory disputes over administrative law or the “rational” weighing of economic interests. But what happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death. The committee—composed of the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army, and the […]
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Each spring, river herring populations migrate from Massachusetts coastal waters to begin their annual journey up rivers and streams to freshwater spawning habitat. River herring have faced severe population declines over the past several decades, and their migration is extensively monitored across the region, primarily through traditional visual counting and volunteer-based programs. Monitoring fish movement and […]
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What happened The Trump administration on Monday agreed to pay France’s TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to forgo its leases to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government would reimburse TotalEnergies as the company invested in natural gas and oil projects in […]
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Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in driving up global temperatures. But it doesn’t linger in the atmosphere for long thanks to molecules called hydroxyl radicals, which are known as the “atmosphere’s detergent” for their ability to break down methane. As the planet warms, however, it’s unclear how […]
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Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), which include GPS, are traditionally used for positioning, timing, and mapping information. In an open-access study published Feb. 27 in Geophysical Research Letters, MIT Haystack Observatory scientists report using existing GNSS satellites, in conjunction with 13 stations installed on the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) in Antarctica, to measure atmospheric turbulence above the […]
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Since her first journalism fellowship covering energy and the environment at the NPR station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Madison Goldberg has been drawn to science communication and audio storytelling. Now, after reporting on topics from solar storms to sewer systems to cryptography, she’s bringing her passions to MIT as the new host of the Institute’s climate […]
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What is glyphosate? It’s the world’s most used herbicide, best known in the U.S. as Roundup. American farmers alone spray about 300 million pounds of it on fields annually. Such chemical herbicides have long been opposed by environmental groups and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement, which claims glyphosate […]
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In Australia, the Millennium Drought began in the mid-1990s and then got worse, particularly in the Murray-Darling River Basin, which holds Lake Alexandrina (pictured in 2008). “There were boats lying everywhere on their sides,” recalled Mike Young, an economist and water policy expert at the University of Adelaide. Photograph by Amy Toensing Other issues have […]
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But that doesn’t explain why people so frequently treat the destruction of nature and the suffering of animals as undeserving of legitimate concern. If misery and loss are bad, then these are among the greatest catastrophes taking place today. Around 10 billion chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. Animals […]
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Biodegradable plastics could help alleviate the plastic waste crisis that is polluting the environment and harming our health. But how long plastics take to degrade and how environmental bacteria work together to break them down is still largely unknown. Understanding how plastics are broken down by microbes could help scientists create more sustainable materials and […]
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The Reagan administration, whose environmental policy was helmed by James Watt, a millenarian Christian who opposed most environmental regulation because Jesus was just about to come back anyway, did not care about acid rain. But when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, ran for president in 1988, he needed a swing issue to appeal to […]
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Joseph Paradiso thinks that the most engaging research questions usually span disciplines. Paradiso was trained as a physicist and completed his PhD in experimental high-energy physics at MIT in 1981. His father was a photographer and filmmaker working at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation, so he grew up in a house where artists, […]
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In some parts of the deep ocean, it can look like it’s snowing. This “marine snow” is the dust and detritus that organisms slough off as they die and decompose. Marine snow can fall several kilometers to the deepest parts of the ocean, where the particles are buried in the seafloor for millennia. Now, researchers […]
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To avoid the worst effects of climate change, many billions of metric tons of industrially generated carbon dioxide will have to be captured and stored away by the end of this century. One place to store such an enormous amount of greenhouse gas is in the Earth itself. If carbon dioxide were pumped into the […]
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Plant growth is supported by millions of tiny soil microbes competing and cooperating with each other as they perform important roles at the plant root, including improving access to nutrients and protecting against pathogens. As a byproduct of their metabolism, soil microbes can also produce nitrous oxide, or N2O, a potent greenhouse gas that has […]
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Like coal pollution, any damage from glyphosate will hit rural areas hardest. The chemical’s heaviest use is in agriculture, and a 2022 study of its geographical concentration by NBC News found that the U.S. county with the highest glyphosate usage rate was Nueces County, Texas, which voted overwhelmingly for the current president, as well as […]
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In a narrow strip of land along the Andes mountain range in central Chile, an Indigenous community has long celebrated the bark of a rare tree for its medicinal properties. Modern science only recently caught up to the tradition, finding the so-called soapbark tree contains potent compounds for boosting the human immune system. The molecules […]
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Volcanoes and wildfires can inject millions of tons of gases and aerosol particles into the air, affecting temperatures on a global scale. But picking out the specific impact of individual events against a background of many contributing factors is like listening for one person’s voice from across a crowded concourse. MIT scientists now have a way to […]
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And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be […]
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In many academic circles, innovation is imagined as a lab-to-market pipeline that travels through patent filings, venture rounds, and coastal research hubs. But a growing movement inside U.S. universities is pushing students toward a different frontier: solving real engineering problems alongside rural communities whose challenges directly shape national food security. A compelling example of this […]
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Oxygen is a vital and constant presence on Earth today. But that hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t until around 2.3 billion years ago that oxygen became a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, during a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), which set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life as we […]
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Rather than blood in the water, sharks are finding drugs in the water. The aquatic predators have tested positive for both legal and illegal drugs in parts of the Bahamas. These substances have the potential to cause behavioral changes in the sharks and indicate that humans have a stronger hand in ecosystem changes than expected, […]
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Our planet may be heading to a point of no return. Scientists predict that a domino effect of damage is on the horizon if there is no intervention, including “hothouse” level warming. Climate change is likely to worsen, especially with relaxed emissions regulations, which will lead to irreparable harm to the ecosystem and human health. […]
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What happened Eight people were killed in an avalanche near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and one person is missing and presumed dead, California authorities said Wednesday. The other six people on the three-day backcountry skiing trek in the Sierra Nevada mountains were rescued alive, including one of the four guides. The avalanche, near Castle Peak, […]
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The deep, blue sea is becoming deeper — in color, that is. Climate change, along with human development, has reduced how much light can filter through the water. Reduced light can significantly disrupt the marine food chain as well as lead to the large-scale worsening of climate change. Zoning issues Ocean darkening occurs when “changes […]
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