Tracing the origins of air pollutants in India

At any moment in Delhi, India, a resident might start their car, releasing exhaust that floats into the atmosphere. In northwest India, a farmer might set fire to his field after the wheat harvest to clear it quickly, releasing smoke that’ll be carried by the wind. A small family might burn wood to light their stove, releasing soot into the sky. Delhi, a city which boasts a population of over 28 million residents, bustles with activity at all hours of the day and night. And as it grows — so does its pollution. 

The pollution, which sometimes manifests as thick smog, respiratory illness, and disease, is the focus of many who hope to identify and eliminate its sources. But to do that accurately, the pollution must be tracked by research-grade air quality monitors that measure pollutants including particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and more, which can cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Low-cost sensors, which have recently begun to be commercialized, offer scientists, policymakers, and the public the opportunity to detect pollution without high overhead costs — but not without some tradeoffs. Jesse Kroll, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical Engineering, researches the instruments and methods used to conduct atmospheric chemistry research. “In terms of nearly every measurement metric — precision, accuracy, sensitivity, interferences, drift, and so on — the low-cost sensors fall far short of what research-grade equipment can deliver,” he says. “This is a major limitation, but it usually isn’t made clear by the sensor manufacturers.” 

As a result, Kroll says, the use of low-cost sensors to detect pollution remains poorly characterized. But the sensors’ lower cost, lower energy consumption, and smaller sizes incentivize their adoption, so their use has expanded significantly over the past few years in countries such as China and India. “The use of these instruments is really outpacing our efforts to understand what their data actually mean,” Kroll says.

The challenge to clarify and expand the capabilities of low-cost sensors in pollution detection inspired a recently published study led by Kroll and graduate student David Hagan that compared the performance of low-cost sensors with research-grade equipment in Delhi — and found a new capability of the devices. 

On the India Institute of Technology’s Delhi campus, research-grade instrumentation already sampled the air from the fourth floor of a building in Hauz Khaz, set up and maintained by Kroll and Hagan’s collaborators, Josh Apte and Lea Hildebrandt of the University of Texas at Austin. “We jumped at the opportunity to be able to co-locate our instruments with theirs to prove how well ours could work,” Hagan says. But it wasn’t easy: In Delhi, he says, the particulate matter levels were so high that their sensors would initially foul easily, and the sensors risked overheating on hot days. “Designing around that is a fun engineering challenge,” Hagan says. 

After overcoming those challenges, the low-cost sensors and research-grade monitors ran simultaneously over a six-week period in winter 2018, sampling the air from the fourth-floor balcony of a laboratory. After analyzing the data captured, the researchers found that the low-cost sensors, which measured both gases and particles, not only captured big-picture air quality and pollutant levels, but also could be used to infer the sources of pollutants, even those that the sensors cannot detect directly.

By applying a type of multivariate analysis called non-negative matrix factorization, the researchers were able to identify, disentangle, and infer the sources that contributed to the total signal detected by the low-cost sensors, and compare those results to the more detailed measurements collected by the research-grade monitors. 

That analysis revealed that the total signal comprised of a combustion factor as well as two other factors, and was characterized by the particles measured from the air. The combustion particles, which constitute a large fraction of the total particulate matter, are too small to be detected by the sensors themselves, but sensor measurements of other co-emitted pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, allowed them to be inferred nonetheless. 

“These low-cost sensors can be used for more than just making routine measurements, and can actually be used to identify sources of pollution that can lead of a better understanding of what we breathe,” Hagan says.

Even further, the data collected by the low-cost sensors captured enough information about ambient Delhi pollution that the researchers could distinguish between primary sources of pollution, or directly-emitted particles, and secondary sources, those particles formed via chemical reactions after emission in the atmosphere. 

Those types of information could make it easier to understand how air quality varies around the world. “One of the strengths of low-cost sensors is that they can provide information about air quality and pollution sources in places that are under-studied — and many of these places, such as cities in the developing world, tend to have some of the worst pollution in the world,” Kroll says. 

“Using these low-cost sensors, we can really understand the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of air pollution and human exposure,” Hagan says. “That is much more relevant to how people actually live their lives.” 

The results have already inspired future studies. “This is a crucial first step in improving urban air quality,” Kroll says. “We’d like to see if we can extend it to other environments and other types of pollution as well. This includes not only other polluted cities, but also relatively clean ones, such as Boston.” 

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Controlling 2-D magnetism with stacking order

Researchers led by MIT Department of Physics Professor Pablo Jarillo-Herrero last year showed that rotating layers of hexagonally structured graphene at a particular “magic angle” could change the material’s electronic properties from an insulating state to a superconducting state. Now researchers in the same group and their collaborators have demonstrated that in a different ultra-thin material that also features a honeycomb-shaped atomic structure — chromium trichloride (CrCl₃) — they can alter the material’s magnetic properties by shifting the stacking order of layers.

The researchers peeled away two-dimensional (2-D) layers of chromium trichloride using tape in the same way researchers peel away graphene from graphite. Then they studied the 2-D chromium trichloride’s magnetic properties using electron tunneling. They found that the magnetism is different in 2-D and 3-D crystals due to different stacking arrangements between atoms in adjacent layers.

At high temperatures, each chromium atom in chromium trichloride has a magnetic moment that fluctuates like a tiny compass needle. Experiments show that as the temperature drops below 14 kelvins (-434.47 degrees Fahrenheit), deep in the cryogenic temperature range, these magnetic moments freeze into an ordered pattern, pointing in opposite directions in alternating layers (antiferromagnetism). The magnetic direction of all the layers of chromium trichloride can be aligned by applying a magnetic field. But the researchers found that in its 2-D form, this alignment needs a magnetic force 10 times stronger than in the 3-D crystal. The results were recently published online in Nature Physics.

“What we’re seeing is that it’s 10 times harder to align the layers in the thin limit compared to the bulk, which we measure using electron tunneling in a magnetic field,” says MIT physics graduate student Dahlia R. Klein, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and one of the paper’s lead authors. Physicists call the energy required to align the magnetic direction of opposing layers the interlayer exchange interaction. “Another way to think of it is that the interlayer exchange interaction is how much the adjacent layers want to be anti-aligned,” fellow lead author and MIT postdoc David MacNeill suggests.

The researchers attribute this change in energy to the slightly different physical arrangement of the atoms in 2-D chromium chloride. “The chromium atoms form a honeycomb structure in each layer, so it’s basically stacking the honeycombs in different ways,” Klein says. “The big thing is we’re proving that the magnetic and stacking orders are very strongly linked in these materials.”

"Our work highlights how the magnetic properties of 2-D magnets can differ very substantially from their 3-D counterparts,” says senior author Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics. “This means that we have now a new generation of highly tunable magnetic materials, with important implications for both new fundamental physics experiments and potential applications in spintronics and quantum information technologies."

Layers are very weakly coupled in these materials, known as van der Waals magnets, which is what makes it easy to remove a layer from the 3-D crystal with adhesive tape. “Just like with graphene, the bonds within the layers are very strong, but there are only very weak interactions between adjacent layers, so you can isolate few-layer samples using tape,” Klein says.

MacNeill and Klein grew the chromium chloride samples, built and tested nanoelectronic devices, and analyzed their results. The researchers also found that as chromium trichloride is cooled from room temperature to cryogenic temperatures, 3-D crystals of the material undergo a structural transition that the 2-D crystals do not. This structural difference accounts for the higher energy required to align the magnetism in the 2-D crystals.

The researchers measured the stacking order of 2-D layers through the use of Raman spectroscopy and developed a mathematical model to explain the energy involved in changing the magnetic direction. Co-author and Harvard University postdoc Daniel T. Larson says he analyzed a plot of Raman data that showed variations in peak location with the rotation of the chromium trichloride sample, determining that the variation was caused by the stacking pattern of the layers. “Capitalizing on this connection, Dahlia and David have been able to use Raman spectroscopy to learn details about the crystal structure of their devices that would be very difficult to measure otherwise,” Larson explains. “I think this technique will be a very useful addition to the toolbox for studying ultra-thin structures and devices.” Department of Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Qian Song carried out the Raman spectroscopy experiments in the lab of MIT assistant professor of physics Riccardo Comin. Both also are co-authors of the paper.

“This research really highlights the importance of stacking order on understanding how these van der Waals magnets behave in the thin limit,” Klein says.

MacNeill adds, “The question of why the 2-D crystals have different magnetic properties had been puzzling us for a long time. We were very excited to finally understand why this is happening, and it’s because of the structural transition.”

This work builds on two years of prior research into 2-D magnets in which Jarillo-Herrero’s group collaborated with researchers at the University of Washington, led by Professor Xiaodong Xu, who holds joint appointments in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and others. Their work, which was published in a Nature letter in June 2017, showed for the first time that a different material with a similar crystal structure — chromium triiodide (CrI₃) — also behaved differently in the 2-D form than in the bulk, with few-layer samples showing antiferromagnetism unlike the ferromagnetic 3-D crystals.

Jarillo-Herrero’s group went on to show in a May 2018 Science paper that chromium triiodide exhibited a sharp change in electrical resistance in response to an applied magnetic field at low temperature. This work demonstrated that electron tunneling is a useful probe for studying magnetism of 2-D crystals. Klein and MacNeill were also the first authors of this paper.

University of Washington Professor Xiaodong Xu says of the latest findings, “The work presents a very clever approach, namely the combined tunneling measurements with polarization resolved Raman spectroscopy. The former is sensitive to the interlayer antiferromagnetism, while the latter is a sensitive probe of crystal symmetry. This approach gives a new method to allow others in the community to uncover the magnetic properties of layered magnets.”

“This work is in concert with several other recently published works,” Xu says. “Together, these works uncover the unique opportunity provided by layered van der Waals magnets, namely engineering magnetic order via controlling stacking order. It is useful for arbitrary creation of new magnetic states, as well as for potential application in reconfigurable magnetic devices.”

Other authors contributing to this work include Efthimious Kaxiras, the John Hasbrouck Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics at Harvard University; Harvard graduate student Shiang Fang; Iowa State University Distinguished Professor (Condensed Matter Physics) Paul C. Canfield; Iowa State graduate student Mingyu Xu; and Raquel A. Ribeiro, of Iowa State University and the Federal University of ABC, Santo André, Brazil. This work was supported in part by the Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences Program, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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MIT.nano awards inaugural NCSOFT seed grants for gaming technologies

MIT.nano has announced the first recipients of NCSOFT seed grants to foster hardware and software innovations in gaming technology. The grants are part of the new MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming program, with inaugural funding provided by video game developer NCSOFT, a founding member of the MIT.nano Consortium.

The newly awarded projects address topics such as 3-D/4-D data interaction and analysis, behavioral learning, fabrication of sensors, light field manipulation, and micro-display optics. 

“New technologies and new paradigms of gaming will change the way researchers conduct their work by enabling immersive visualization and multi-dimensional interaction,” says MIT.nano Associate Director Brian W. Anthony. “This year’s funded projects highlight the wide range of topics that will be enhanced and influenced by augmented and virtual reality.”

In addition to the sponsored research funds, each awardee will be given funds specifically to foster a community of collaborative users of MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.

The MIT.nano Immersion Lab is a new, two-story immersive space dedicated to visualization, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and the depiction and analysis of spatially related data. Currently being outfitted with equipment and software tools, the facility will be available starting this semester for use by researchers and educators interested in using and creating new experiences, including the seed grant projects. 

The five projects to receive NCSOFT seed grants are:

Stefanie Mueller: connecting the virtual and physical world

Virtual game play is often accompanied by a prop — a steering wheel, a tennis racket, or some other object the gamer uses in the physical world to create a reaction in the virtual game. Build-it-yourself cardboard kits have expanded access to these props by lowering costs; however, these kits are pre-cut, and thus limited in form and function. What if users could build their own dynamic props that evolve as they progress through the game?

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Professor Stefanie Mueller aims to enhance the user’s experience by developing a new type of gameplay with tighter virtual-physical connection. In Mueller’s game, the player unlocks a physical template after completing a virtual challenge, builds a prop from this template, and then, as the game progresses, can unlock new functionalities to that same item. The prop can be expanded upon and take on new meaning, and the user learns new technical skills by building physical prototypes.

Luca Daniel and Micha Feigin-Almon: replicating human movements in virtual characters

Athletes, martial artists, and ballerinas share the ability to move their body in an elegant manner that efficiently converts energy and minimizes injury risk. Professor Luca Daniel, EECS and Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Micha Feigin-Almon, research scientist in mechanical engineering, seek to compare the movements of trained and untrained individuals to learn the limits of the human body with the goal of generating elegant, realistic movement trajectories for virtual reality characters.

In addition to use in gaming software, their research on different movement patterns will predict stresses on joints, which could lead to nervous system models for use by artists and athletes.

Wojciech Matusik: using phase-only holograms

Holographic displays are optimal for use in augmented and virtual reality. However, critical issues show a need for improvement. Out-of-focus objects look unnatural, and complex holograms have to be converted to phase-only or amplitude-only in order to be physically realized. To combat these issues, EECS Professor Wojciech Matusik proposes to adopt machine learning techniques for synthesis of phase-only holograms in an end-to-end fashion. Using a learning-based approach, the holograms could display visually appealing three-dimensional objects.

“While this system is specifically designed for varifocal, multifocal, and light field displays, we firmly believe that extending it to work with holographic displays has the greatest potential to revolutionize the future of near-eye displays and provide the best experiences for gaming,” says Matusik.

Fox Harrell: teaching socially impactful behavior

Project VISIBLE — Virtuality for Immersive Socially Impactful Behavioral Learning Enhancement — utilizes virtual reality in an educational setting to teach users how to recognize, cope with, and avoid committing microaggressions. In a virtual environment designed by Comparative Media Studies Professor Fox Harrell, users will encounter micro-insults, followed by major micro-aggression themes. The user’s physical response drives the narrative of the scenario, so one person can play the game multiple times and reach different conclusions, thus learning the various implications of social behavior.

Juejun Hu: displaying a wider field of view in high resolution

Professor Juejun Hu from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering seeks to develop high-performance, ultra-thin immersive micro-displays for AR/VR applications. These displays, based on metasurface optics, will allow for a large, continuous field of view, on-demand control of optical wavefronts, high-resolution projection, and a compact, flat, lightweight engine. While current commercial waveguide AR/VR systems offer less than 45 degrees of visibility, Hu and his team aim to design a high-quality display with a field of view close to 180 degrees.

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This flat structure morphs into shape of a human face when temperature changes

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have designed 3-D printed mesh-like structures that morph from flat layers into predetermined shapes, in response to changes in ambient temperature. The new structures can transform into configurations that are more complex than what other shape-shifting materials and structures can achieve.

As a demonstration, the researchers printed a flat mesh that, when exposed to a certain temperature difference, deforms into the shape of a human face. They also designed a mesh embedded with conductive liquid metal, that curves into a dome to form an active antenna, the resonance frequency of which changes as it deforms.

The team’s new design method can be used to determine the specific pattern of flat mesh structures to print, given the material’s properties, in order to make the structure transform into a desired shape.

The researchers say that down the road, their technique may be used to design deployable structures, such as tents or coverings that automatically unfurl and inflate in response to changes in temperature or other ambient conditions.

Such complex, shape-shifting structures could also be of use as stents or scaffolds for artificial tissue, or as deformable lenses in telescopes. Wim van Rees, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, also sees applications in soft robotics.

“I’d like to see this incorporated in, for example, a robotic jellyfish that changes shape to swim as we put it in water,” says van Rees. “If you could use this as an actuator, like an artificial muscle, the actuator could be any arbitrary shape that transforms into another arbitrary shape. Then you’re entering an entirely new design space in soft robotics.”

Van Rees and his colleagues are publishing their results this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His co-authors are J. William Boley of Boston University; Ryan Truby, Arda Kotikian, Jennifer Lewis, and L. Mahadevan of Harvard University; Charles Lissandrello of Draper Laboratory; and Mark Horenstein of Boston University.

Gift wrap’s limit

Two years ago, van Rees came up with a theoretical design for how to transform a thin flat sheet into a complex shape such as a human face. Until then, researchers in the field of 4-D materials — materials designed to deform over time — had developed ways for certain materials to change, or morph, but only into relatively simple structures.

“My goal was to start with a complex 3-D shape that we want to achieve, like a human face, and then ask, ‘How do we program a material so it gets there?’” van Rees says. “That’s a problem of inverse design.”

He came up with a formula to compute the expansion and contraction that regions of a bilayer material sheet would have to achieve in order to reach a desired shape, and developed a code to simulate this in a theoretical material. He then put the formula to work, and visualized how the method could transform a flat, continuous disc into a complex human face.

But he and his collaborators quickly found that the method wouldn’t apply to most physical materials, at least if they were trying to work with continuous sheets. While van Rees used a continuous sheet for his simulations, it was of an idealized material, with no physical constraints on the amount of expansion and contraction it could achieve. Most materials, in contrast, have very limited growth capabilities. This limitation has profound consequences on a property known as double curvature, meaning a surface that can curve simultaneously in two perpendicular directions — an effect that is described in an almost 200-year-old theorem by Carl Friedrich Gauss called the Theorema Egregium, Latin for “Remarkable Theorem.”

If you’ve ever tried to gift wrap a soccer ball, you’ve experienced this concept in practice: To transform paper, which has no curvature at all, to the shape of a ball, which has positive double curvature, you have to crease and crumple the paper at the sides and bottom to completely wrap the ball. In other words, for the paper sheet to adapt to a shape with double curvature, it would have to stretch or contract, or both, in the necessary places to wrap a ball uniformly.

To impart double curvature to a shape-shifting sheet, the researchers switched the basis of the structure from a continuous sheet to a lattice, or mesh. The idea was twofold: first, a temperature-induced bending of the lattice’s ribs would result in much larger expansions and contractions of the mesh nodes, than could be achieved in a continuous sheet. Second, the voids in the lattice can easily accommodate large changes in surface area when the ribs are designed to grow at different rates across the sheet.

The researchers also designed each individual rib of the lattice to bend by a predetermined degree in order to create the shape of, say, a nose rather than an eye-socket.

For each rib, they incorporated four skinnier ribs, arranging two to line up atop the other two. All four miniribs were made from carefully selected variations of the same base material, to calibrate the required different responses to temperature.

When the four miniribs were bonded together in the printing process to form one larger rib, the rib as a whole could curve due to the difference in temperature response between the materials of the smaller ribs: If one material is more responsive to temperature, it may prefer to elongate. But because it is bonded to a less responsive rib, which resists the elongation, the whole rib will curve instead.

The researchers can play with the arrangement of the four ribs to “preprogram” whether the rib as a whole curves up to form part of a nose, or dips down as part of an eye socket.

Shapes unlocked

To fabricate a lattice that changes into the shape of a human face, the researchers started with a 3-D image of a face — to be specific, the face of Gauss, whose principles of geometry underly much of the team’s approach. From this image, they created a map of the distances a flat surface would require to rise up or dip down to conform to the shape of the face. Van Rees then devised an algorithm to translate these distances into a lattice with a specific pattern of ribs, and ratios of miniribs within each rib.

The team printed the lattice from PDMS, a common rubbery material which naturally expands when exposed to an increase in temperature. They adjusted the material’s temperature responsiveness by infusing one solution of it with glass fibers, making it physically stiffer and more resistant to a change in temperature. After printing lattice patterns of the material, they cured the lattice in a 250-degree-Celsius oven, then took it out and placed it in a saltwater bath, where it cooled to room temperature and morphed into the shape of a human face.

Courtesy of the researchers

The team also printed a latticed disc made from ribs embedded with a liquid metal ink — an antenna of sorts, that changed its resonant frequency as the lattice transformed into a dome.

Van Rees and his colleagues are currently investigating ways to apply the design of complex shape-shifting to stiffer materials, for sturdier applications, such as temperature-responsive tents and self-propelling fins and wings.

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, and Draper Laboratory.

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Delivery system can make RNA vaccines more powerful

Vaccines made from RNA hold great potential as a way to treat cancer or prevent a variety of infectious diseases. Many biotech companies are now working on such vaccines, and a few have gone into clinical trials.

One of the challenges to creating RNA vaccines is making sure that the RNA gets into the right immune cells and produces enough of the encoded protein. Additionally, the vaccine must stimulate a strong enough response that the immune system can wipe out the relevant bacteria, viruses, or cancer cells when they are subsequently encountered.

MIT chemical engineers have now developed a new series of lipid nanoparticles to deliver such vaccines. They showed that the particles trigger efficient production of the protein encoded by the RNA, and they also behave like an “adjuvant,” further boosting the vaccine effectiveness. In a study of mice, they used this RNA vaccine to successfully inhibit the growth of melanoma tumors.

“One of the key discoveries of this paper is that you can build RNA delivery lipids that can also activate the immune system in important ways,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Anderson is the senior author of the study, which appears in the Sept. 30 issue of Nature Biotechnology. The lead authors of the study are former postdocs Lei Miao and Linxian Li and former research associate Yuxuan Huang. Other MIT authors include Derfogail Delcassian, Jasdave Chahal, Jinsong Han, Yunhua Shi, Kaitlyn Sadtler, Wenting Gao, Jiaqi Lin, Joshua C. Doloff, and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute.

Vaccine boost

Most traditional vaccines are made from proteins produced by infectious microbes, or from weakened forms of the microbes themselves. In recent years, scientists have explored the idea of making vaccines using DNA that encodes microbial proteins. However, these vaccines, which have not been approved for use in humans, have so far failed to produce strong enough immune responses.

RNA is an attractive alternative to DNA in vaccines because unlike DNA, which has to reach the cell nucleus to become functional, RNA can be translated into protein as soon as it gets into the cell cytoplasm. It can also be adapted to target many different diseases.

“Another advantage of these vaccines is that we can quickly change the target disease,” he says. “We can make vaccines to different diseases very quickly just by tinkering with the RNA sequence.” 

For an RNA vaccine to be effective, it needs to enter a type of immune cell called an antigen-presenting cell. These cells then produce the protein encoded by the vaccine and display it on their surfaces, attracting and activating T cells and other immune cells.

Anderson’s lab has previously developed lipid nanoparticles for delivering RNA and DNA for a variety of applications. These lipid particles form tiny droplets that protect RNA molecules and carry them to their destinations. The researchers’ usual approach is to generate libraries of hundreds or thousands of candidate particles with varying chemical features, then screen them for the ones that work the best.

“In one day, we can synthesize over 1,000 lipid materials with multiple different structures,” Miao says. “Once we had that very large library, we could screen the molecules and see which type of structures help RNA get delivered to the antigen-presenting cells.”

They discovered that nanoparticles with a certain chemical feature — a cyclic structure at one end of the particle — are able to turn on an immune signaling pathway called stimulator of interferon genes (STING). Once this pathway is activated, the cells produce interferon and other cytokines that provoke T cells to leap into action.

“Broad applications”

The researchers tested the particles in two different mouse models of melanoma. First, they used mice with tumors engineered to produce ovalbumin, a protein found in egg whites. The researchers designed an RNA vaccine to target ovalbumin, which is not normally found in tumors, and showed that the vaccine stopped tumor growth and significantly prolonged survival.

Then, the researchers created a vaccine that targets a protein naturally produced by melanoma tumors, known as Trp2. This vaccine also stimulated a strong immune response that slowed tumor growth and improved survival rates in the mice.

Anderson says he plans to pursue further development of RNA cancer vaccines as well as vaccines that target infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, or Ebola.

“We think there could be broad applications for this,” he says. “A particularly exciting area to think about is diseases where there are currently no vaccines.”

The research was funded by Translate Bio and JDRF.

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How to dismantle a nuclear bomb

How do weapons inspectors verify that a nuclear bomb has been dismantled? An unsettling answer is: They don’t, for the most part. When countries sign arms reduction pacts, they do not typically grant inspectors complete access to their nuclear technologies, for fear of giving away military secrets.

Instead, past U.S.-Russia arms reduction treaties have called for the destruction of the delivery systems for nuclear warheads, such as missiles and planes, but not the warheads themselves. To comply with the START treaty, for example, the U.S. cut the wings off B-52 bombers and left them in the Arizona desert, where Russia could visually confirm the airplanes’ dismemberment.

It’s a logical approach but not a perfect one. Stored nuclear warheads might not be deliverable in a war, but they could still be stolen, sold, or accidentally detonated, with disastrous consequences for human society.

“There’s a real need to preempt these kinds of dangerous scenarios and go after these stockpiles,” says Areg Danagoulian, an MIT nuclear scientist. “And that really means a verified dismantlement of the weapons themselves.”

Now MIT researchers led by Danagoulian have successfully tested a new high-tech method that could help inspectors verify the destruction of nuclear weapons. The method uses neutron beams to establish certain facts about the warheads in question — and, crucially, uses an isotopic filter that physically encrypts the information in the measured data.

A paper detailing the experiments, “A physically cryptographic warhead verification system using neutron induced nuclear resonances,” is being published today in Nature Communications. The authors are Danagoulian, who is the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, and graduate student Ezra Engel. Danagoulian is the corresponding author.

High-stakes testing

The experiment builds on previous theoretical work, by Danagoulian and other members of his research group, who last year published two papers detailing computer simulations of the system. The testing took place at the Gaerttner Linear Accelerator (LINAC) Facility on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, using a 15-meter long section of the facility’s neutron-beam line.

Nuclear warheads have a couple of characteristics that are central to the experiment. They tend to use particular isotopes of plutonium — varieties of the element that have different numbers of neutrons. And nuclear warheads have a distinctive spatial arrangement of materials.

The experiments consisted of sending a horizontal neutron beam first through a proxy of the warhead, then through a lithium filter scrambling the information. The beam’s signal was then sent to a glass detector, where a signature of the data, representing some of its key properties, was recorded. The MIT tests were performed using molybdenum and tungsten, two metals that share significant properties with plutonium and served as viable proxies for it.

The test works, first of all, because the neutron beam can identify the isotope in question.

“At the low energy range, the neutrons’ interactions are extremely isotope-specific,” Danagoulian says. “So you do a measurement where you have an isotopic tag, a signal which itself embeds information about the isotopes and the geometry. But you do an additional step which physically encrypts it.”

That physical encryption of the neutron beam information alters some of the exact details, but still allows scientists to record a distinct signature of the object and then use it to perform object-to-object comparisons. This alteration means a country can submit to the test without divulging all the details about how its weapons are engineered.

“This encrypting filter basically covers up the intrinsic properties of the actual classified object itself,” Danagoulian explains.

It would also be possible just to send the neutron beam through the warhead, record that information, and then encrypt it on a computer system. But the process of physical encryption is more secure, Danagoulian notes: “You could, in principle, do it with computers, but computers are unreliable. They can be hacked, while the laws of physics are immutable.”

The MIT tests also included checks to make sure that inspectors could not reverse-engineer the process and thus deduce the weapons information countries want to keep secret.

To conduct a weapons inspection, then, a host country would present a warhead to weapons inspectors, who could run the neutron-beam test on the materials. If it passes muster, they could run the test on every other warhead intended for destruction as well, and make sure that the data signatures from those additional bombs match the signature of the original warhead.

For this reason, a country could not, say, present one real nuclear warhead to be dismantled, but bamboozle inspectors with a series of identical-looking fake weapons. And while many additional protocols would have to be arranged to make the whole process function reliably, the new method plausibly balances both disclosure and secrecy for the parties involved.

The human element

Danagoulian believes putting the new method through the testing stage has been a significant step forward for his research team.

“Simulations capture the physics, but they don’t capture system instabilities,” Danagoulian says. “Experiments capture the whole world.”

In the future, he would like to build a smaller-scale version of the testing apparatus, one that would be just 5 meters long and could be mobile, for use at all weapons sites.

“The purpose of our work is to create these concepts, validate them, prove that they work through simulations and experiments, and then have the National Laboratories to use them in their set of verification techniques,” Danagoulian says, referring to U.S. Department of Energy scientists.

Karl van Bibber, a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, who has read the group’s papers, says “the work is promising and has taken a large step forward,” but adds that “there is yet a ways to go” for the project. More specifically, van Bibber notes, in the recent tests it was easier to detect fake weapons based on the isotopic characteristics of the materials rather than their spatial arrangements. He believes testing at the relevant U.S. National Laboratories — Los Alamos or Livermore — would help further assess the verification techniques on sophisticated missile designs.

Overall, van Bibber adds, speaking of the researchers, “their persistence is paying off, and the treaty verification community has got to be paying attention.”

Danagoulian also emphasizes the seriousness of nuclear weapons disarmament. A small cluster of several modern nuclear warheads, he notes, equals the destructive force of every armament fired in World War II, including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. and Russia possess about 13,000 nuclear weapons between them.

“The concept of nuclear war is so big that it doesn’t [normally] fit in the human brain,” Danagoulian says. “It’s so terrifying, so horrible, that people shut it down.”

In Danagoulian’s case, he also emphasizes that, in his case, becoming a parent greatly increased his sense that action is needed on this issue, and helped spur the current research project.

“It put an urgency in my head,” Danagoulian says. “Can I use my knowledge and my skill and my training in physics to do something for society and for my children? This is the human aspect of the work.”

The research was supported, in part, by a U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration Award.

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MIT community members invited to attend campus-wide forums

As MIT continues to map a path forward following recent revelations regarding its association with the late Jeffrey Epstein, President L. Rafael Reif and other senior leaders will participate in three forums over the next two weeks, each focused on a different part of the Institute community.

The forums were announced Friday via separate email invitations to MIT students and employees:

• Student forum — Tuesday, Oct. 1, 7 p.m., Room 10-250: At this forum, hosted by the Undergraduate Association (UA) and Graduate Student Council (GSC), President Reif will hear the concerns and ideas of undergraduate and graduate students. Also attending this forum will be leaders of the UA and GSC, Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson, the deans of at least three of MIT’s schools, and a number of MIT department heads.

• Staff forum — Monday, Oct. 7, 4 p.m., Wong Auditorium (Tang Center, Building E51): The Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer has invited employees to attend this forum, where President Reif will field questions from MIT staff. He will be joined by Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz.

• Research staff forum — Friday, Oct. 11, 10 a.m., Morss Hall (Walker Memorial, Building 50): The Office of the Vice President for Research has organized this forum for postdocs and research staff, including staff from Lincoln Laboratory. President Reif will be joined by Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.

To ensure that there is enough space and an opportunity for all members of the MIT community to share their views openly with President Reif, each of these forums will be open only to members of the invited group. An MIT ID will be required for entry.

“It is very important to me right now to hear from as many members of our community as I can — to learn how our faculty, students, staff, and alumni think we should address the challenges that MIT is facing together,” President Reif says. “This is the beginning of an important conversation. I’m reexamining my calendar for this whole academic year, recognizing that I need to invest my time here, at home, attending to our community and reconnecting with the wisdom and experiences of the people of MIT. I believe we can emerge from this first round of dialog with a sense of the values we share and the culture we aspire to, together.”

On Friday, President Reif attended the annual meeting of the Alumni Leadership Conference (ALC), held on campus, addressing some 650 alumni who play leadership roles within the 139,000-member MIT Alumni Association (MITAA). In a conversation with MITAA President R. Erich Caulfield SM ’01, PhD ’06 before the assembled alumni, President Reif addressed questions from the full group.

“I appreciated President Reif speaking directly with our dedicated volunteers, as they represent the spectrum of perspectives of our alumni and alumnae on this important issue,” Caulfield says. “It was something that the community was very interested in seeing because it offered an assurance to those who needed to hear directly from him on MIT’s commitment to addressing this matter head-on.”

At last Wednesday’s regularly scheduled faculty meeting, President Reif spoke at length before taking questions and listening to comments from some two dozen members of the faculty and student leaders. He continues to engage faculty on this issue in smaller settings.

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First Student Organization Leadership Summit hosts more than 300 student leaders

MIT’s Division of Student Life (DSL) held their first Student Organization Leadership Summit, where more than 300 representatives from student clubs and activities gathered in the La Sala de Puerto Rico (W20-202) on Saturday, Sept. 21.

Throughout the day, student leaders participated in workshops and important dialogues to improve the management of their organizations. Points of focus within the sessions were organizational process, interpersonal engagement, and diversity and inclusion.

The summit was a product of collaboration between the Student Organization Leadership Committee, composed of DSL staff and student leaders. The goal of the summit was to implement training programs for campus organizations so that students in leadership roles can retain members by building their group’s identity and community. The first Student Organization Leadership Summit gave students the opportunity to participate in an impactful discourse about the clubs that these leaders dedicate so much of their time to. 

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MIT Sounding 2019-20 explores far-reaching musical frontiers

Now in its eighth year, 2019-20 MIT Sounding presents another season of wide-ranging musical offerings that have found a vibrant home at MIT.

“The program feeds the hunger of a diverse audience for music at MIT,” says Evan Ziporyn, faculty director of the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and curator of the series. “We try to give students a sense of exploration, while also developing a larger-scale dialogue with local audiences.”  

The eclectic journey continues with Boston premieres of music from New York, Czechia, and Nepal, as well as returning artists who have wowed local audiences and who continue to push new musical boundaries. Add a septet of turntable artists, a multimedia score by Tod Machover, and a virtual reality-enhanced, dataset-driven “space opera” by artist Matthew Ritchie, and you have an abundant season of MIT Sounding.  

Glenn Branca: New York’s enfant terrible 

The year started with a bang with “Branca Lives: The Glenn Branca Ensemble/Ambient Orchestra," an all-too-rare performance of music by the proto-punk legend, who passed away in 2018.

“Branca’s symphonies for multiple guitars — sometimes up to 100 at a time — were Brutalism in musical form,” says Ziporyn. “He embraced the energy of noise, distortion, and feedback, but in a carefully organized way, activating overtones and microtones to create amazing, almost hallucinogenic textures. He was thinking orchestrally, building out from the sound of the electric guitar rather than from classical instruments. Then he began to write for acoustic orchestra and found ways to get the same effects.”

“Branca Lives" presents the composer’s eponymous guitar ensemble, led by his longtime concertmaster and collaborator, Reg Bloor. Their set will include Branca’s “The Light (for David),” a tribute to David Bowie. Ziporyn and the Ambient Orchestra will open the concert with Boston premieres of two of Branca’s rarely performed orchestral works — “Symphony No. 14 (2,000,000,000 Light Years from Home)” and “Freeform.”

“It’s brilliant and surprising music that deserves to be known,” adds Ziporyn.

Lochan Rijal shares music of Nepal

Despite an ever-shrinking global culture, many musical traditions remain overlooked, including the music of Nepal. “काँचो आवाज (Raw Sounds),” a program that celebrates Nepal’s unique musical heritage, seeks to address that oversight.

“काँचो आवाज (Raw Sounds)” features Lochan Rijal, the award-winning Nepali multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter, performing new and traditional compositions based on his own musical narrative of everyday life in Nepal. The head of Kathmandu University’s Department of Music, Rijal will play the sarangi, a traditional short-necked fiddle, and the Gandharva lute arbaja, recently discovered in Rijal’s research in Nepal. 

During his residency, Rijal will discuss a temple restoration project and Nepal’s musical traditions in a public lecture.

Iva Bittová with MITSO

Legendary Czech vocalist/violinist Iva Bittová is a familiar force of nature at MIT, having performed with the improvisational trio EVIYAN, and collaborated with the Festival Jazz Ensemble and Pilobolus Dance for MIT One World.

Bittová returns this October as composer to launch the MIT Symphony Orchestra’s (MITSO) 2019-20 season in “The Heart is a Bell.” The concert pairs two pieces by 20th century Czech female composers: Bittová’s “Zvon” and Vítězslava Kapralova’s “Suita Rustica.” Composed 75 years apart, both works draw on Czech and Slovak folk culture, seen through a modern lens.

At once personal and avant-garde, “Zvon” features Bittova’s voice, jazz combo, elements of world music and cabaret, and improvisation by members of the orchestra. “We’re widening the orchestral landscape,” says Ziporyn, who steps in as acting MITSO director this academic year.

Additional projects and performances

What happens when seven DJs gather, challenged to make music together rather than as solo acts? Audiences will find out this January, in “the wave function collapses.” The unique program features “harbanger” (pronounced “harbinger”), a turntable septet with visiting artist DJ Rob Swift, who is known for his work with Public Enemy and The Source magazine. “The wave function collapses” is the culmination of a two-week workshop facilitated by Eran Egozy, professor of the practice in music technology at MIT and co-founder and CTO of Harmonix Music Systems. The 2020 Independent Activities Period (IAP) offering includes two courses: a history of DJ culture by Hip Hop activist and self-described “Media Assassin” Harry Allen, and hands-on DJ instruction by DJ Swift.   

Virtuoso violinist Johnny Gandelsman performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s "Sonatas and Partitas" as part of MIT Sounding’s 2015 season. The adventurous soloist returns this spring to perform “Bach’s Cello Suites” on the violin — which can be challenging, given the two instruments’ very different voicings. But this isn’t reinvention for its own sake, says Ziporyn. It’s simply “to get the most from the music, in an enthralling way.”  

This March brings composer Tod Machover’s "City Symphonies" to Boston for the first time. Rich in visuals and sense of place, “Moving Images: MITSO and Film” is part of the MIT Symphony Orchestra’s 2019-20 season. “It’s time to present this music on Tod’s home turf,” notes Ziporyn, who will conduct the ensemble. Audiences can expect a unique evening of music and film, including work developed by Machover and his team in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab.

The season closes with a new transmedia work, “The Invisible College,” created by 2018–20 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist Matthew Ritchie. The project refers to the multitude of interactions and collaborations that take place behind the scenes within the university, and brings together a multidisciplinary team of MIT artists, faculty, and students. Based on datasets representing scales of the universe — from nanoparticles to dark energy — “The Invisible College” encompasses a site-specific installation, virtual reality experience, and a May “Dark Energy: A Space Opera,” a collaboration between Ritchie, Ziporyn, and Christine Southworth.

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HubWeek 2019 celebrates five years of connecting MIT, Boston, and the world

HubWeek’s Fall Festival is back for its fifth installment. From Oct. 1 to 3, more than 50 speakers and dozens of curated experiences will take center stage in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood, as part of Greater Boston’s annual festival of ideas, arts, technology, and innovation.

After five years of startup pitch competitions and innovation challenges, policy “hackathons” and interactive conversations with change makers both seasoned and just starting out, HubWeek has succeeded beyond its planners’ dreams.

“HubWeek has always been about the idea that the future is being created here, at the intersection of art, science, and technology,” says Kathleen Kennedy, formerly director of special projects at MIT and now executive director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. “We wanted to elevate that message and celebrate the people that are architecting the future.”

Kennedy has been helping to guide the gathering’s evolution since 2014, when MIT joined Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and The Boston Globe to jointly launch the festival, which has since become a widely anticipated fixture on the city’s calendar.

Their premise was that Boston’s role as one of the world’s great hubs of creative problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and intellectual exploration deserved a dedicated spotlight. Their objective was to highlight and connect the people who power the city’s innovation ecosystem.

A diverse roster of thinkers and doers from the MIT community has been deeply involved in HubWeek programming from the start, and this year is no different.

On Oct. 2, Ariel Ekblaw, founding director of the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, will describe her groundbreaking work developing self-assembling space habitat prototypes as part of “Bodies in Space,” a panel discussion on the future of space exploration. Another event will feature a discussion of the latest advances in robotics with Professor Russ Tedrake, who heads the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

This year’s iteration also represents an evolution of HubWeek’s novel approach to civic engagement: It has grown from one discrete, ideas-packed week into a series of conversations spread throughout the year.

A key feature of HubWeek has long been its “Open Doors” events. As part of this series over the years, MIT has welcomed the broader public into many of its signature ventures and programs.

Now, “Open Doors” events take place throughout the year. Each month it moves to a different neighborhood. These gatherings function like a roving town square, fostering serendipitous encounters and spontaneous conversations. September’s gathering took place in Dudley Square; November’s will happen in Allston/Brighton.

“With this new, year-round ‘Open Doors’ model, we’re able to connect with a range of fascinating people in a range of neighborhoods around Boston,” says Jessie Schlosser Smith, director of open space programming at MIT and a member of the HubWeek board. “Each ‘Open Doors’ is a little different than the last, depending on where it takes place, the programming, and who shows up.”

“We wanted to expand the number of opportunities,” says Kennedy. “HubWeek is all about activating the community. We can provide HubWeek’s distinctive convening function at multiple levels and scales, in different communities, and not just once every fall but throughout the year.”

This past July, for instance, Open Doors came to Kendall Square, where participants toured the new state-of-the-art lab space of MIT.nano and learned about how nanotechnology research (much of it taking place at MIT) will change just about everything. They mixed and mingled in a sold out speed-mentoring event, with MIT leaders like David Nuñez, director of technology and digital strategy at the MIT Museum, and Ritu Raman, founder of the Women in STEM Database at MIT (WiSDM). A session at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard had MIT experts giving talks on advances in synthetic biology and genome sequencing.

“In these Open Doors events, the learning goes both ways,” says Smith. “It’s a mechanism for connecting. In July, MIT was sharing its own incredible work, but MIT people were also connecting and learning about other amazing work that’s happening around Boston.”

This kind of evolution, says Kennedy, is part and parcel of the experimental ethos of HubWeek, and was largely based on feedback from participants. “It’s a lesson of the past four years of HubWeek: People wanted more and wanted to spread things out throughout the year. We’ll continue to listen to our community, and continue to expand those opportunities.”

Over the past five years, HubWeek has also catalyzed dozens of ventures, many of them conceived and led by MIT students and alumni.

For example, the Demo Day pitch competition, which brings together aspiring entrepreneurs and expert judges for a grand business plan pitch competition, has always had a strong showing from the MIT community. The winner of the 2017 competition was You Wu PhD ’18, who launched a venture based on his mechanical engineering PhD research that used robotics to locate and fix leaking urban water pipes.

Another unexpected boon has been the connections forged between people and programs within MIT itself, as a result of participating in HubWeek over the years.

“I am so thankful for the great people I’ve worked with and the fantastic relationships we’ve built with all the partners within MIT,” says Kennedy.

“In Boston, everyone often has their heads down, focused on building things,” she notes. HubWeek gives them a chance to look up, and look around and what everyone else is building.

“It’s a little bit outside of everyone’s normal job,” Kennedy says, “but it’s something that people are really attracted to. People love what we’re building.”

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Lincoln Laboratory's new artificial intelligence supercomputer is the most powerful at a university

The new TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) has been ranked as the most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer at any university in the world. The ranking comes from TOP500, which publishes a list of the top supercomputers in various categories biannually. The system, which was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, combines traditional high-performance computing hardware — nearly 900 Intel processors — with hardware optimized for AI applications — 900 Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators.

"We are thrilled by the opportunity to enable researchers across Lincoln and MIT to achieve incredible scientific and engineering breakthroughs," says Jeremy Kepner, a Lincoln Laboratory fellow who heads the LLSC. "TX-GAIA will play a large role in supporting AI, physical simulation, and data analysis across all laboratory missions."

TOP500 rankings are based on a LINPACK Benchmark, which is a measure of a system's floating-point computing power, or how fast a computer solves a dense system of linear equations. TX-GAIA's TOP500 benchmark performance is 3.9 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or petaflops (though since the ranking was announced in June 2019, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has updated the system's benchmark to 4.725 petaflops). The June TOP500 benchmark performance places the system No. 1 in the Northeast, No. 20 in the United States, and No. 51 in the world for supercomputing power. The system's peak performance is more than 6 petaflops.

But more notably, TX-GAIA has a peak performance of 100 AI petaflops, which makes it No. 1 for AI flops at any university in the world. An AI flop is a measure of how fast a computer can perform deep neural network (DNN) operations. DNNs are a class of AI algorithms that learn to recognize patterns in huge amounts of data. This ability has given rise to "AI miracles," as Kepner puts it, in speech recognition and computer vision; the technology is what allows Amazon's Alexa to understand questions and self-driving cars to recognize objects in their surroundings. The more complex these DNNs grow, the longer it takes for them to process the massive datasets they learn from. TX-GAIA's Nvidia GPU accelerators are specially designed for performing these DNN operations quickly.

TX-GAIA is housed in a new modular data center, called an EcoPOD, at the LLSC’s green, hydroelectrically powered site in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It joins the ranks of other powerful systems at the LLSC, such as the TX-E1, which supports collaborations with the MIT campus and other institutions, and TX-Green, which is currently ranked 490th on the TOP500 list.

Kepner says that the system's integration into the LLSC will be completely transparent to users when it comes online this fall. "The only thing users should see is that many of their computations will be dramatically faster," he says.

Among its AI applications, TX-GAIA will be tapped for training machine learning algorithms, including those that use DNNs. It will more quickly crunch through terabytes of data — for example, hundreds of thousands of images or years' worth of speech samples — to teach these algorithms to figure out solutions on their own. The system's compute power will also expedite simulations and data analysis. These capabilities will support projects across the laboratory's R&D areas, such as improving weather forecasting, accelerating medical data analysis, building autonomous systems, designing synthetic DNA, and developing new materials and devices.

TX-GAIA, which is also ranked the No. 1 system in the U.S. Department of Defense, will also support the recently announced MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator. The partnership will combine the expertise and resources of MIT, including those at the LLSC, and the U.S. Air Force to conduct fundamental research directed at enabling rapid prototyping, scaling, and application of AI algorithms and systems.

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Photovoltaic-powered sensors for the “internet of things”

By 2025, experts estimate the number of “internet of things” devices — including sensors that gather real-time data about infrastructure and the environment — could rise to 75 billion worldwide. As it stands, however, those sensors require batteries that must be replaced frequently, which can be problematic for long-term monitoring.  

MIT researchers have designed photovoltaic-powered sensors that could potentially transmit data for years before they need to be replaced. To do so, they mounted thin-film perovskite cells — known for their potential low cost, flexibility, and relative ease of fabrication — as energy-harvesters on inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

The cells could power the sensors in both bright sunlight and dimmer indoor conditions. Moreover, the team found the solar power actually gives the sensors a major power boost that enables greater data-transmission distances and the ability to integrate multiple sensors onto a single RFID tag.

“In the future, there could be billions of sensors all around us. With that scale, you’ll need a lot of batteries that you’ll have to recharge constantly. But what if you could self-power them using the ambient light? You could deploy them and forget them for months or years at a time,” says Sai Nithin Kantareddy, a PhD student in the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory. “This work is basically building enhanced RFID tags using energy harvesters for a range of applications.”

In a pair of papers published in the journals Advanced Functional Materials and IEEE Sensors, MIT Auto-ID Laboratory and MIT Photovoltaics Research Laboratory researchers describe using the sensors to continuously monitor indoor and outdoor temperatures over several days. The sensors transmitted data continuously at distances five times greater than traditional RFID tags — with no batteries required. Longer data-transmission ranges mean, among other things, that one reader can be used to collect data from multiple sensors simultaneously.

Depending on certain factors in their environment, such as moisture and heat, the sensors can be left inside or outside for months or, potentially, years at a time before they degrade enough to require replacement. That can be valuable for any application requiring long-term sensing, indoors and outdoors, including tracking cargo in supply chains, monitoring soil, and monitoring the energy used by equipment in buildings and homes.

Joining Kantareddy on the papers are: Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) postdoc Ian Matthews, researcher Shijing Sun, chemical engineering student Mariya Layurova, researcher Janak Thapa, researcher Ian Marius Peters, and Georgia Tech Professor Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, who are all members of the Photovoltaics Research Laboratory; Rahul Bhattacharyya, a researcher in the AutoID Lab; Tonio Buonassisi, a professor in MechE; and Sanjay E. Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Combining two low-cost technologies

In recent attempts to create self-powered sensors, other researchers have used solar cells as energy sources for internet of things (IoT) devices. But those are basically shrunken-down versions of traditional solar cells — not perovskite. The traditional cells can be efficient, long-lasting, and powerful under certain conditions “but are really infeasible for ubiquitous IoT sensors,” Kantareddy says.

Traditional solar cells, for instance, are bulky and expensive to manufacture, plus they are inflexible and cannot be made transparent, which can be useful for temperature-monitoring sensors placed on windows and car windshields. They’re also really only designed to efficiently harvest energy from powerful sunlight, not low indoor light.

Perovskite cells, on the other hand, can be printed using easy roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques for a few cents each; made thin, flexible, and transparent; and tuned to harvest energy from any kind of indoor and outdoor lighting.

The idea, then, was combining a low-cost power source with low-cost RFID tags, which are battery-free stickers used to monitor billions of products worldwide. The stickers are equipped with tiny, ultra-high-frequency antennas that each cost around three to five cents to make.

RFID tags rely on a communication technique called “backscatter,” that transmits data by reflecting modulated wireless signals off the tag and back to a reader. A wireless device called a reader — basically similar to a Wi-Fi router — pings the tag, which powers up and backscatters a unique signal containing information about the product it’s stuck to.

Traditionally, the tags harvest a little of the radio-frequency energy sent by the reader to power up a little chip inside that stores data, and uses the remaining energy to modulate the returning signal. But that amounts to only a few microwatts of power, which limits their communication range to less than a meter.

The researchers’ sensor consists of an RFID tag built on a plastic substrate. Directly connected to an integrated circuit on the tag is an array of perovskite solar cells. As with traditional systems, a reader sweeps the room, and each tag responds. But instead of using energy from the reader, it draws harvested energy from the perovskite cell to power up its circuit and send data by backscattering RF signals.

Efficiency at scale

The key innovations are in the customized cells. They’re fabricated in layers, with perovskite material sandwiched between an electrode, cathode, and special electron-transport layer materials. This achieved about 10 percent efficiency, which is fairly high for still-experimental perovskite cells. This layering structure also enabled the researchers to tune each cell for its optimal “bandgap,” which is an electron-moving property that dictates a cell’s performance in different lighting conditions. They then combined the cells into modules of four cells.

In the Advanced Functional Materials paper, the modules generated 4.3 volts of electricity under one sun illumination, which is a standard measurement for how much voltage solar cells produce under sunlight. That’s enough to power up a circuit — about 1.5 volts — and send data around 5 meters every few seconds. The modules had similar performances in indoor lighting. The IEEE Sensors paper primarily demonstrated wide‐bandgap perovskite cells for indoor applications that achieved between 18.5 percent and 21. 4 percent efficiencies under indoor fluorescent lighting, depending on how much voltage they generate. Essentially, about 45 minutes of any light source will power the sensors indoors and outdoors for about three hours.  

The RFID circuit was prototyped to only monitor temperature. Next, the researchers aim to scale up and add more environmental-monitoring sensors to the mix, such as humidity, pressure, vibration, and pollution. Deployed at scale, the sensors could especially aid in long-term data-collection indoors to help build, say, algorithms that help make smart buildings more energy efficient.

“The perovskite materials we use have incredible potential as effective indoor-light harvesters. Our next step is to integrate these same technologies using printed electronics methods, potentially enabling extremely low-cost manufacturing of wireless sensors," Mathews says.

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Using math to blend musical notes seamlessly

In music, “portamento” is a term that’s been used for hundreds of years, referring to the effect of gliding a note at one pitch into a note of a lower or higher pitch. But only instruments that can continuously vary in pitch — such as the human voice, string instruments, and trombones — can pull off the effect.

Now an MIT student has invented a novel algorithm that produces a portamento effect between any two audio signals in real-time. In experiments, the algorithm seamlessly merged various audio clips, such as a piano note gliding into a human voice, and one song blending into another. His paper describing the algorithm won the “best student paper” award at the recent International Conference on Digital Audio Effects.

The algorithm relies on “optimal transport,” a geometry-based framework that determines the most efficient ways to move objects — or data points — between multiple origin and destination configurations. Formulated in the 1700s, the framework has been applied to supply chains, fluid dynamics, image alignment, 3-D modeling, computer graphics, and more.

In work that originated in a class project, Trevor Henderson, now a graduate student in computer science, applied optimal transport to interpolating audio signals — or blending one signal into another. The algorithm first breaks the audio signals into brief segments. Then, it finds the optimal way to move the pitches in  each segment to pitches in the other signal, to produce the smooth glide of the portamento effect. The algorithm also includes specialized techniques to maintain the fidelity of the audio signal as it transitions.

“Optimal transport is used here to determine how to map pitches in one sound to the pitches in the other,” says Henderson, a classically trained organist who performs electronic music and has been a DJ on WMBR 88.1, MIT’s radio station. “If it’s transforming one chord into a chord with a different harmony, or with more notes, for instance, the notes will split from the first chord and find a position to seamlessly glide to in the other chord.”

According to Henderson, this is one of the first techniques to apply optimal transport to transforming audio signals. He has already used the algorithm to build equipment that seamlessly transitions between songs on his radio show. DJs could also use the equipment to transition between tracks during live performances. Other musicians might use it to blend instruments and voice on stage or in the studio.

Henderson’s co-author on the paper is Justin Solomon, an X-Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Solomon — who also plays cello and piano — leads the Geometric Data Processing Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and is a member of the Center for Computational Engineering.

Henderson took Solomon’s class, 6.838 (Shape Analysis), which tasks students with applying geometric tools like optimal transport to real-world applications. Student projects usually focus on 3-D shapes from virtual reality or computer graphics. So Henderson’s project came as a surprise to Solomon. “Trevor saw an abstract connection between geometry and moving frequencies around in audio signals to create a portamento effect,” Solomon says. “He was in and out of my office all semester with DJ equipment. It wasn’t what I expected to see, but it was pretty entertaining.”

For Henderson, it wasn’t too much of a stretch. “When I see a new idea, I ask, ‘Is this applicable to music?’” he says. “So, when we talked about optimal transport, I wondered what would happen if I connected it to audio spectra.”

A good way to think of optimal transport, Henderson says, is finding “a lazy way to build a sand castle.” In that analogy, the framework is used to calculate the way to move each grain of sand from its position in a shapeless pile into a corresponding position in a sand castle, using as little work as possible. In computer graphics, for instance, optimal transport can be used to transform or morph shapes by finding the optimal movement from each point on one shape into the other.

Applying this theory to audio clips involves some additional ideas from signal processing. Musical instruments produce sound through vibrations of components, depending on the instrument. Violins use strings, brass instruments use air inside hollow bodies, and humans use vocal cords. These vibrations can be captured as audio signals, where the frequency and amplitude (peak height) represent different pitches. 

Conventionally, the transition between two audio signals is done with a fade, where one signal is reduced in volume while the other rises. Henderson’s algorithm, on the other hand, smoothly slides frequency segments from one clip into another, with no fading of volume.

To do so, the algorithm splits any two audio clips into windows of about 50 milliseconds. Then, it runs a Fourier transform, which turns each window into its frequency components. The frequency components within a window are lumped together into individual synthesized “notes.” Optimal transport then maps how the notes in one signal’s window will move to the notes in the other.

Then, an “interpolation parameter” takes over. That’s basically a value that determines where each note will be on the path from its starting pitch in one signal to its ending pitch in the other. Manually changing the parameter value will sweep the pitches between the two positions, producing the portamento effect. That single parameter can also be programmed into and controlled by, say, a crossfader, a slider component on a DJ’s mixing board that smoothly fades between songs. As the crossfader slides, the interpolation parameter changes to produce the effect.

Behind the scenes are two innovations that ensure a distortion-free signal. First, Henderson used a novel application of a signal-processing technique, called “frequency reassignment,” that lumps the frequency bins together to form single notes that can easily transition between signals. Second, he invented a way to synthesize new phases for each audio signal while stitching together the 50-millisecond windows, so neighboring windows don’t interfere with each other.

Next, Henderson wants to experiment with feeding the output of the effect back into its input. This, he thinks, could automatically create another classic music effect, “legato,” which is a smooth transition between distinct notes. Unlike a portamento — which plays all notes between a start and end note — a legato seamlessly transitions between two distinct notes, without capturing any notes in between.

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Learning from MIT, learning from the field

As project manager for an organization charged with improving conditions in austere and hostile environments in developing countries, Robert Rains MS ’19 has seen his share of high stakes, risky projects — responding to the Ebola outbreak in Africa, monitoring a ceasefire in South Sudan, and launching counter-poaching efforts in Tanzania and Democratic Republic of the Congo. He’s also a former member of the U.S. military, having served time in Iraq. 

His work in the field, as a member of the military and as a civilian, has prepared him well for the difficult conditions he faces every day in international development. “In the military, we made our living by being tough and durable,” he said. 

It was his work on the Ebola response that really impressed employers and helped him to land his first project manager role. 

At that point in his career, he joined a room full of project managers with long resumes — many of them with degrees and credentials in supply chain management. 

Motivated to add these qualifications to his resume as well, Rains sought further training through the MITx MicroMasters program in supply chain management. He felt that this would give him a competitive edge in securing projects, as well as prepare him for the more challenging ones in the future. 

Importantly, the program also allowed Rains the flexibility of time and geography to continue working across Africa.

“The online program was very helpful in making sure that I could complete the bulk of that course work on my own schedule, which was very hectic,” Rains says. “Not only was I based in Africa at the time, but I moved countries almost every week. I had to study around different time zones and shifting work schedules.”

The world’s first-ever MicroMaster’s program, the supply chain management credential is a rigorously assessed online educational pathway consisting of a series of courses that culminate in a digitally-delivered credential. The credential is recognized by employers and institutions as commensurate with one semester of graduate-level coursework at MIT. Successful credential earners must complete a demanding sequence of MITx massive open online courses (MOOCs) that demonstrates their mastery of the concepts and skills necessary for a strong foundation in the supply chain management profession.

For Rains, the courses mirrored much of what he sees at work every day. When a community needed help getting proper nutrition, Rains applied the analytical and forecasting tools he learned in the courses to develop a nutrition program. 

“There’s always a supply chain component to the projects and programs we support, as much of the supplies that we bring in are not procured locally” he says. “We need to think carefully about what goes into sustaining something that we’re putting on the ground. We need to be sure that the life cycle extends beyond our putting things on the ground.”

In late 2017, Rains successfully earned his credential — and decided that he wasn’t ready to stop there. With support from his employer, he took a six-month leave of absence from work to spend time on the MIT campus as a graduate student, earning his full master’s degree in supply chain management last May. 

The in-person experience, he says, was invaluable. 

“MIT really makes the most of the time on campus,” Rains says. “I appreciated the time we had to work together in teams, which was an important complement to the independent work we did online.”

Now back at work in Africa, Rains is taking his experience in online and on-campus classrooms back to the field. 

“Pursuing this program put me in a position to advocate for solutions better,” he says. He explained that, using the systems-thinking strategies and project management tools he studied, “Now, I’m not just a field guy. I can advocate for things with a mix of my experience in the field and from a rigorous academic program.”

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Technique can image individual proteins within synapses

Our brains contain millions of synapses — the connections that transmit messages from neuron to neuron. Within these synapses are hundreds of different proteins, and dysfunction of these proteins can lead to conditions such as schizophrenia and autism.

Researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have now devised a new way to rapidly image these synaptic proteins at high resolution. Using fluorescent nucleic acid probes, they can label and image an unlimited number of different proteins. They demonstrated the technique in a new study in which they imaged 12 proteins in cellular samples containing thousands of synapses.

“Multiplexed imaging is important because there’s so much variability between synapses and cells, even within the same brain,” says Mark Bathe, an MIT associate professor of biological engineering. “You really need to look simultaneously at proteins in the sample to understand what subpopulations of different synapses look like, discover new types of synapses, and understand how genetic variations impact them.”

The researchers plan to use this technique next to study what happens to synapses when they block the expression of genes associated with specific diseases, in hopes of developing new treatments that could reverse those effects.

Bathe and Jeff Cottrell, director of translational research at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the paper are former postdocs Syuan-Ming Guo and Remi Veneziano, former graduate student Simon Gordonov, and former research scientist Li Li.

Imaging with DNA

Synaptic proteins have a variety of functions. Many of them help to form synaptic scaffolds, which are involved in secreting neurotransmitters and processing incoming signals. While synapses contain hundreds of these proteins, conventional fluorescence microscopy is limited to imaging at most four proteins at a time.

To boost that number, the MIT team developed a new technique based on an existing method called DNA PAINT. Using this method, originally devised by Ralf Jungmann of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, researchers label proteins or other molecules of interest with a DNA-antibody probe. Then, they image each protein by delivering a fluorescent DNA “oligo” that binds to the DNA-antibody probes.

The DNA strands have an inherently low affinity for each other, so they bind and unbind periodically, creating a blinking fluorescence can be imaged using super-resolution microscopy. However, imaging each protein takes about half an hour, making it impractical for imaging many proteins in a large sample.

Bathe and his colleagues set out to create a faster method that would allow them to analyze a huge number of samples in a short period of time. To achieve that, they altered the DNA-dye imaging probe so that it would bind more tightly to the DNA-antibody, using what are called locked nucleic acids. This gives a much brighter signal, so the imaging can be done more quickly, but at slightly lower resolution.

“When we do 12 or 15 colors on a single well of neurons, the whole experiment takes an hour, compared with overnight for the super-resolution equivalent,” Bathe says.

The researchers used this technique to label 12 different proteins found in the synapse, including scaffolding proteins, proteins associated with the cytoskeleton, and proteins that are known to mark excitatory or inhibitory synapses. One of the proteins they looked at is shank3, a scaffold protein that has been linked to both autism and schizophrenia.

By analyzing protein levels in thousands of neurons, the researchers were able to determine groups of proteins that tend to associate with each other more often than others, and to learn how different synapses vary in the proteins they contain. That kind of information could be used to help classify synapses into subtypes that might help to reveal their functions.

“Inhibitory and excitatory are the canonical synapse types, but it is speculated that there are numerous different subtypes of synapses, without any real consensus around what those are,” Bathe says.

Understanding disease

The researchers also showed that they could measure changes in synaptic protein levels that occur after neurons are treated with a compound called tetrodotoxin (TTX), which strengthens synaptic connections.

“Using conventional immunofluorescence, you can typically extract information from three or four targets within the same sample, but with our technique, we were able to expand that number to 12 different targets within the same sample. We applied this method to examine synaptic remodeling that occurs following treatment with TTX, and our finding corroborated previous work that revealed a coordinated upregulation of synaptic proteins following TTX treatment,” says Eric Danielson, an MIT senior postdoc who is an author of the study.

The researchers are now using this technique, called PRISM, to study how the structure and composition of synapses are affected by knocking down a set of genes reported previously to confer genetic risk for development of psychiatric disorders. Sequencing the genomes of people with disorders such as autism and schizophrenia has revealed hundreds of disease-linked gene variants, and for most of those variants, scientists have no idea how they contribute to disease.

“With this approach, we expect to provide a more detailed overview of the changes in synaptic organization and shared disease effects associated with these genes,” says Karen Perez de Arce, a Broad Institute research scientist and an author of the study.

“Understanding how genetic variation impacts neurons’ development in the brain, and their synaptic structure and function, is a huge challenge in neuroscience and in understanding how these diseases arise,” Bathe adds.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Simons Faculty Scholars Program, the Open Philanthropy Project, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Award, and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research.

Other authors of the paper include MIT research scientist Demian Park, former MIT graduate student Anthony Kulesa, and MIT postdoc Eike-Christian Wamhoff. Paul Blainey, an associate professor of biological engineering and a member of the Broad Institute, and Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and an associate professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences, are also authors of the study.

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Helping lower-income households reap the benefits of solar energy

Rooftop solar panels are a great way for people to invest in renewable energy while saving money on electricity. Unfortunately, the rooftop solar industry only serves a fraction of society.

Many Americans are unable to invest in rooftop solar; they may be renters or lack the upfront money required for installations or live in locations that don’t get enough sun. Some states have tried to address these limitations with community solar programs, which allow residents to invest in portions of large, remote solar projects and enjoy savings on their electricity bills each month.

But as community solar projects have exploded in popularity in the last few years, higher-income households have been the main beneficiaries. That’s because most developers of community solar arrays require residents to have high credit scores and sign long-term contracts.

Now the community solar startup Solstice is changing the system. The company recruits and manages customers for community solar projects while pushing developers for simpler, more inclusive contract terms. Solstice has also developed the EnergyScore, a proprietary customer qualification metric that approves a wider pool of residents for participation in community solar projects, compared to the credit scores typically used by developers.

“We’re always pushing our developer partners to be more inclusive and customer-friendly,” says Solstice co-founder Sandhya Murali MBA ’15, who co-founded the company with Stephanie Speirs MBA ’17. “We want them to design contracts that will be appealing to the customer and kind of a no-brainer.”

To date, Solstice has helped about 6,400 households sign up for community solar projects. The founders say involving a more diverse pool of residents will be essential to continue the industry’s breakneck growth.

“We think it’s imperative that we figure out how to make this model of residential solar, which can save people money and has the power to impact millions of people across the country, scale quickly,” Murali says.

A more inclusive system

In 2014, Speirs had been working on improving access to solar energy in Pakistan and India as part of a fellowship with the global investment firm Acumen. But she realized developing countries weren’t the only areas that dealt with energy inequalities.

“There are problems with solar in America,” Speirs says. “Eighty percent of people are locked out of the solar market because they can’t put solar on their rooftop. People who need solar savings the most in this country, low- to moderate-income Americans, are the least likely to get it.”

Speirs was planning to come to MIT’s Sloan School of Management to pursue her MBA the following year, so she used a Sloan email list to see if anyone was interested in joining the early-stage venture. Murali agreed to volunteer, and although she graduated in 2015 as Speirs entered Sloan, Murali spent a lot of time on campus helping Speirs get the company off the ground.

“Steph’s time at Sloan was focused on Solstice, so we kind of became an MIT startup,” Murali says. “I would say MIT sort of adopted Solstice, and we’ve grown since then with support from the school.”

Community solar is an effective way to include residents in solar projects who might not have the resources to invest in traditional rooftop solar panels. Speirs says there are no upfront costs associated with community solar projects, and residents can participate by investing in a portion of the planned solar array whether they own a home or not.

When a developer has enough resident commitments for a project, they build a solar array in another location and the electricity it generates is sent to the grid. Residents receive a credit on their monthly electric bills for the solar power produced by their portion of the project.

Still, there are aspects of the community solar industry that discourage many lower-income residents from participating. Solar array developers have traditionally required qualified customers to sign long contracts, sometimes lasting 30 years, and to agree to cancellation fees if they leave the contract prematurely.

Solstice, which began as a nonprofit to improve access to solar energy for low-income Americans, advocates for customers, working with developers to reduce contract lengths, lower credit requirements, and eliminate cancellation fees.

As they engaged with developers, Solstice’s founders realized the challenges associated with recruiting and managing customers for community solar projects were holding the industry back, so they decided to start a for-profit arm of the company to work with customers of all backgrounds and income levels.

“Solstice’s obsession is how do we make it so easy and affordable to sign up for community solar such that everyone does it,” Speirs says. 

In 2016, Solstice was accepted into The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s delta v accelerator, where the founders began helping developers find customers for large solar projects. The founders also began developing a web-based customer portal to make participation in projects as seamless as possible.

But they realized those solutions didn’t directly address the biggest factor preventing lower-income Americans from investing in solar power.

“To get solar in this country, you either have to be able to afford to put solar on your rooftop, which costs $10,000 to $30,000, or you have to have the right FICO score for community solar,” Speirs says, referring to a credit score used by community solar developers to qualify customers. “Your FICO score is your destiny in this country, yet FICO doesn’t measure whether you pay your utility bills on time, or your cell phone bills, or rental bills.”

With this in mind, the founders teamed up with data scientists from MIT and Stanford University, including Christopher Knittle, the George P. Shultz Professor at MIT Sloan, to create a new qualification metric, the EnergyScore. The EnergyScore uses a machine learning system trained on data from nearly 875,000 consumer records, including things like utility payments, to predict payment behavior in community solar contracts. Solstice says it predicts future payment behavior more accurately than FICO credit scores, and it qualifies a larger portion of low-to-moderate income customers for projects.

Driving change

Last year, Solstice began handling the entire customer experience, from the initial education and sales to ongoing support during the life of contracts. To date, the company has helped find customers for solar projects that have a combined output of 100 megawatts of electricity in New York and Massachusetts.

And later this year, Solstice will begin qualifying customers with its EnergyScore, enabling a whole new class of Americans to participate in community solar projects. One of the projects using the EnergyScore will put solar arrays on the rooftops of public housing buildings in New York City in partnership with the NYC Housing Authority.

Ultimately, the founders believe including a broader swath of American households in community solar projects isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also an essential part of the fight against climate change.

“[Community solar] is a huge, untapped market, and we’re unnecessarily restricting ourselves by creating some of these contract barriers that make community solar remain in the hands of the wealthy,” Murali says. “We’re never going to scale community solar and make the impact on climate change we need to make if we don’t figure out how to make this form of solar work for everyone.”

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First-year students encouraged to “reuse, refill, replenish”

During the week of Aug. 26, MIT welcomed its Class of 2023. Participating in the usual orientation activities, they learned about research opportunities, course options, and important resources to help them navigate the Institute. Breaking for lunch each day, new MIT students poured into Kresge Oval where they could picnic under a large tent propped over the grass, providing much-needed shade on these hot August days. New to Kresge Oval this year was a mobile filling station full of cool, fresh, locally sourced water provided by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Next to the filling station, free reusable water bottles were being given out to all MIT students.

These bottles were more than just swag. They were part of a collaborative effort of MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS), the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), MIT Dining, the Office of the First Year, and the MIT Water Club to encourage sustainable water use practices across MIT’s campus and reduce waste by advocating for the regular use of reusable bottles and other serviceware throughout campus. Only students who took a pledge to use their bottle at least 10 times were allowed to take one away.

The idea for the bottle giveaway was first raised by the Sustainability Leadership Steering Committee, co-chaired by Julie Newman, the Institute’s director of sustainability, and David McGee, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. When welcoming new students, they wanted to introduce them to MIT’s commitment to building a sustainable future and educate them about the benefits of choosing tap water over single-use plastic bottles. J-WAFS, ESI, MIT Dining, and the MIT Water Club joined the effort to help spread this message and expose incoming students to their sustainability work at MIT.

Students who wanted a bottle were asked to take a pledge to use it at least 10 times. Why 10? MITOS, along with Greg Norris, director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise at MIT, helped articulate that using the stainless steel bottle just 10 times would provide a better environmental performance than a typical single-use water bottle, and the positive impact would continue to grow with future use. When one first-year was asked if he could commit to using the bottle 10 times, he replied, “Oh, heck yeah!” With the water trailer right there, students could fill their bottles right away, bringing them one-tenth of the way to fulfilling their pledge.

The bottles were branded with the reminder: “Reuse, refill, replenish.” They were designed by MIT architecture senior and MITOS student fellow Effie Jia to encourage students to incorporate reusable bottles use as well as other sustainable practices into their lives, such as using their own reusable serviceware for takeout and using reusable bags instead of disposable plastic or paper. The bottles are insulated for hot and cold beverages to make them even more flexible. “The perfect size for tea and coffee,” remarked one student. Staff members from MITOS, ESI, and J-WAFS also distributed bookmarks with information about drinking fountains on campus, advice to ask if local cafés offer discounts for bringing refillable bottles, and a reminder to always wash out their reusables to keep them clean and safe.

To analyze the potential impact of the water bottle giveaway, event organizers will be conducting a pair of followup surveys with the over 600 bottle recipients to test the persistence of the bottle use and potential changes in awareness. “We are experimenting to determine if we can statistically articulate some impacts associated with the giveaway,” said MITOS director Julie Newman. “It is important with all our initiatives to try to measure success (or failure) so we can test our effectiveness.”

While the event was about arming MIT students with sustainable tools, it was also focused on educating them about local water. Andrew Bouma and Patricia Stathatou, this year’s co-presidents of the MIT Water Club, shared information about the quality of Cambridge, Massachusetts, water, giving even more reason to choose tap water over bottled. The Water Club has run similar education events in the past, and has demonstrated that the taste of tap water, recycled water, and bottled water is virtually indistinguishable in a blind taste test. Educating incoming students about the high quality of Cambridge tap water, and the energy, cost, and waste that is saved by choosing to reuse, they hoped to further support sustainable behavior change among the incoming class members.

Over the two days in which the water bottles were distributed, the turnout was remarkable. “We were thrilled with the outcome of the event,” said MITOS Sustainability Project Manager Steven Lanou. “Not only did we get to engage directly with over 600 first-year students to share information, we were also so encouraged by their enthusiasm and commitment to help MIT take this small step towards advancing sustainability on campus. ESI, J-WAFS, MIT Dining, MIT Water Club and Office of the First Year couldn’t have been better partners in this activity, and we look forward to many more collaborations in the future.”

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