Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based. This growing emphasis comes at a time when the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming; its embodied and operational […]
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Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl […]
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Average crop yields in Africa are consistently far below those expected, and one significant reason is the prevalence of counterfeit seeds whose germination rates are far lower than those of the genuine ones. The World Bank estimates that as much as half of all seeds sold in some African countries are fake, which could help […]
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Three MIT-led teams are among 16 nationwide to receive funding awards to address sustainable materials for global challenges through the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. Launched in 2019, the program targets solutions to especially compelling societal or scientific challenges at an accelerated pace, by incorporating a multidisciplinary research approach. “Solutions for today’s national-scale societal […]
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White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi (left) and former Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a … [+] fireside chat at Stanford University. Sarah Weaver Solutions to the world’s converging environmental crises may not always align, the Biden Administration’s climate czar said last week. “There are a lot of hard conversations around the clean energy […]
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In the United States, an estimated 15 million tons of textiles end up in landfills or are burned every year. This waste, amounting to 85 percent of the textiles produced in a year, is a growing environmental problem. In 2022, Massachusetts became the first state to enact a law banning the disposal of textiles in […]
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This week’s Current Climate, which every Saturday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week. Sound Agriculture Since 2020, California-based Sound Agriculture has been selling its crop additive called Source, which mimics a signal that naturally occurs in plants to attract microbes. Those […]
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Lightship’s L1 trailer in its collapsed mode. Lightship In 2020, San Francisco-based entrepreneur Ben Parker toiled away as a battery engineer at Tesla before getting wrapped up in a pet project: Electrifying food trucks, where he dreamed of ditching the noisy, exhaust-coughing generators that sat behind them. This quickly morphed into a broader idea to […]
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Volkswagen’s ID. 2ALL, due in 2026, will have a base price of around $26,000 and travel up to 270 miles per charge. Volkswagen AG Elon Musk has teased the idea that Tesla would sell a widely affordable battery-powered model since 2006. He finally came close to announcing one this month, but still hasn’t shared details. […]
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It’s easier than ever to view maps of any place you’d like to go — by car, that is. By foot is another matter. Most cities and towns in the U.S. do not have sidewalk maps, and pedestrians are usually left to fend for themselves: Can you walk from your hotel to the restaurants on […]
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National and global plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. But some projections show that these trends might require costly new power plants to meet peak loads in the evening when cars are plugged in after the workday. What’s more, overproduction of […]
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Envision Festival is a celebration, a message, and a movement. With a mission to create an eye-opening experience that turns attendees onto a new form of living and a new way to be inspired, Envision Festival provides the tools that can be integrated into the life we’re living to blossom into our higher selves. Also… […]
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This week’s Current Climate, which every Saturday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week. Alisha Fredriksson GUERIN BLASK FOR FORBES This week, Forbes launched its annual 30 Under 30 Europe list, and as always, there were lots of talented young people already […]
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Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed […]
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In a lab on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 56, a group of Massachusetts high school students gathered around a device that measures conductivity. Vincent Nguyen, 15, from Saugus, thought of the times the material on their sample electrode flaked off the moment they took it out of the oven. Or how the electrode […]
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When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members […]
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There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers. Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem […]
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Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for an aircraft electric propulsion system, Halimi had to read a chart that compared the energy density of various fuel […]
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Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that […]
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The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]
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MIT senior Aviva Intveld has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K. Intveld will join the other 23 U.S. citizens selected for the 2023 class of scholars. Intveld, from Los Angeles, is majoring in earth, […]
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Startups are aiming to solve big problems for agriculture, including labor and water shortages, climate-driven headaches and declining bee populations, by deploying artificial intelligence, autonomous driving technology and robotics. If the vast farms of the Midwest are America’s breadbasket, California is its produce department. But the country’s biggest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables is […]
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Modern fabrication tools such as 3D printers can make structural materials in shapes that would have been difficult or impossible using conventional tools. Meanwhile, new generative design systems can take great advantage of this flexibility to create innovative designs for parts of a new building, car, or virtually any other device. But such “black box” […]
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Science Surfaces, a capsule collection of body coverings and accessories, serve as canvases for digital prints of ideas inspired by award-winning biomedical images produced by life science research labs at MIT. The exhibition, now on display in the Koch Institute Public Galleries, is the result of the inaugural Peers + Pros Project, a Boston Fashion […]
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Evolving views on food are challenging traditional diets — and not just for humans. Innovative dining options are also being added to the menus of our pets. Startups have proposed numerous new ways to satiate their appetites. The UK’s Bella and Duke, for instance, caters to animals on raw diets, while Sweden’s Buddy Pet Foods […]
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Brick-and-mortar shopping has made an impressive comeback since the end of lockdown, but e-commerce is still retail’s dominant new force. This year alone, online shopping is predicted to bring in over $6.3 trillion in revenue, representing more than a fifth of all worldwide sales. Fast forward to 2026, and these figures will accelerate to over […]
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Climate policies are typically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activities and drive climate change. The largest source of these emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels, which increases atmospheric concentrations of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other air pollutants that pose public health risks. While climate policies may result […]
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Many will recognize Dr. Larry Brilliant as CNN’s resident COVID expert, but the epidemiologist is most famous for leading the World Health Organization team that eradicated smallpox. He’s also stewarded the philanthropic efforts of both Google and Salesforce and has been a mentor to many tech leaders, including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. But before […]
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Almost 2.8 million lane-miles, or about 4.6 million lane-kilometers, of the United States are paved. Roads and streets form the backbone of our built environment. They take us to work or school, take goods to their destinations, and much more. However, a new study by MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) researchers shows that the annual […]
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If you were presented a mystery list of cities leading the world in innovative transportation, Los Angeles — with its endless traffic and maddeningly minimal light rail service — would probably not come to mind. But would you think of the flourishing desert oasis, Dubai? Home to the world’s tallest skyscraper and vast swaths of […]
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Phosphorus is an essential ingredient in thousands of products, including herbicides, lithium-ion batteries, and even soft drinks. Most of this phosphorus comes from an energy-intensive process that contributes significantly to global carbon emissions. In an effort to reduce that carbon footprint, MIT chemists have devised an alternative way to generate white phosphorus, a critical intermediate […]
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