Knight Science Journalism Program announces 2021-22 fellows

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT (KSJ) has announced that it has selected a group of 21 distinguished science journalists for its 2021-22 project fellowship class — a cohort that ranges from award-winning freelance writers to staff reporters for outlets such as The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, and MIT Technology Review.

It marks the second year that KSJ will offer the remote project fellowships, which were established in response to the unique challenges and public health concerns presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. The fellowships are designed to support journalists pursuing a diverse range of projects related to science, health, technology, and the environment. Each fellow will receive a stipend and a budget for project-related expenses, as well as access to seminars, workshops, mentoring, and a large offering of online resources at MIT. (KSJ’s traditional in-person fellowships are expected to resume in the 2022-23 academic year.)

The newly selected fellows will pursue in-depth reporting projects probing issues such as globalization in the artificial intelligence industry, inequities in maternal health, animal lab testing, and environmental justice in the Deep South. “It’s an impressive array of projects that really embodies the multitude of ways our lives are touched by science,” says KSJ Associate Director Ashley Smart. “We’re proud to be able to support so much important work — and the talented journalists who are undertaking it.”

“The Knight Science Journalism Program is honored to contribute to the work being done by this talented group of science journalists,” says KSJ Director Deborah Blum. “It’s a pleasure to see such innovative and insightful work across so many platforms — books, documentary films, podcasts, long-form investigative stories — all with such a promise of making a difference.”

Selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, the 2021-22 fellowship class includes authors, reporters, documentary photographers, and multimedia journalists representing every time zone in the contiguous United States. Seven journalists will receive full-year fellowships supported by $40,000 stipends; 14 will receive single-semester fellowships supported by $20,000 stipends, with nine in the fall semester and five in the spring semester.

The Knight Science Journalism Program, supported by a generous endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists. The program’s goal is to foster professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encourage them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest.

Since its founding in 1983, the program has hosted more than 350 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and more. In addition to the fellowship program, KSJ publishes the award-winning digital magazine Undark and administers a national journalism prize, the Victor K. McElheny Award, honoring local and regional science reporting. KSJ’s academic home at MIT is the Program in Science, Technology and Society, which is part of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

2021-22 KSJ Fellows — Full-year fellows

Jessica Camille Aguirre is an award-winning journalist and writer from California. She often covers climate, and is especially interested in how people make and experience extremes. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books Daily, n+1, and many others. Aguirre will be researching and writing about the history of life-support systems.

Rene Ebersole is an award-winning journalist specializing in investigative stories about science, health, and the environment. Ebersole has reported on six continents for publications ranging from National Geographic to Audubon magazine on topics ranging from eel smuggling, health fraud, forensic science, and climate change to suspended animation, microbiomes, and Monsanto's Big Tobacco moment. For her investigative project, Ebersole will examine the troubling legacy of junk science in the criminal justice system.

Lauren Gravitz is an award-winning, independent science journalist based in San Diego whose work has appeared in publications such as The Economist, The Washington Post, Nature, Aeon, and NPR. She writes about everything from cancer to car seats but is particularly interested in neuroscience and the brain, especially memory. For her project, she will be writing about the newly emerging science of forgetting — from molecular biology to cognitive science — and the vital role it plays in our everyday lives.

Karen Hao is the senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, covering the field’s cutting-edge research and its impacts on society. Her work is regularly taught in universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and cited in government reports and by Congress. For her fellowship project, Hao will investigate the global AI supply chain and how it often concentrates power into the hands of wealthy people, companies, and nations while leaving the less fortunate with little privacy, agency, or benefit.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Outside, Wired, Slate, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Some of his work has been anthologized by the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Currently, he is writing a book for Random House about the co-evolution of Earth and life, which will be the focus of his KSJ fellowship.

Asha Stuart is a documentary filmmaker and photographer whose work focuses on sociocultural themes, with a focus on people living in marginalized communities and facing injustice in areas such as inequality, public health, and environmental threats. Her work has appeared on National Geographic, CNN, PBS, TIME, Politico, and many other news outlets. For her project, Stuart will undertake a documentary film project investigating the intersection of racial inequality and environmental injustice on African American communities living in the Deep South.

Emily Willingham is a science journalist and author of “Phallacy: Life Lessons From the Animal Penis” (Avery, 2020) and “The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, A User's Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter” (Basic, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Aeon, and Undark, among others; she is a regular contributor to Scientific American and Medscape who earned a PhD in biology and completed a postdoc in urology, both after taking a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Willingham's project will focus on the science of adolescence.

2021-22 KSJ Fellows — Fall-semester fellows

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, author, and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her books include “Purple Hearts — Back from Iraq,” (Trolley, 2004), “Homeland,” (Trolley, 2008), and “An autobiography of Miss Wish” (2017). Berman’s project, When the Jets Fly, is a multichannel documentary film, photography, and audio report investigating the environmental impact of U.S. military training focusing on Whidbey Island, Washington, and the greater Puget Sound area.

Sam Bloch is a contributing writer at The Counter, where he covers business, environment and culture. He has written for The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, Bloomberg CityLab, and Art in America, among other publications. As a Knight Science Journalism fellow, he will be writing about shade, and its relationship to global warming and inequality, for a book to be published by Random House.

Virginia Gewin is a former soil scientist turned journalist. Based in Portland, Oregon, she writes about food security, land use, climate change, and biodiversity loss for a variety of publications, including Nature, Popular Science, Bloomberg, and Civil Eats. Her reporting has taken her to Malaysia, Peru, Iceland, Scotland, and all over the United States. Her MIT Knight Science Journalism fellowship project will focus on whether the United States is prepared for another Dust Bowl event.

Jeremy Hance is a writer and freelance environmental journalist. He is the author of the 2020 award-winning travel memoir, “Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac.” As a journalist, Hance cut his teeth at Mongabay as a lead writer and editor. A story on the Sumatran rhino for Mongabay was chosen for “Best American Science and Nature Writing” in 2019. Hance will be working on a book about the effort to save one of the world’s most endangered megafauna, the Sumatran rhino.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a freelance journalist in Washington. She writes about science, travel, and animals and is a regular contributor to The Washington Post and National Parks Magazine. Kaplan will embark on a road trip with her beagle Hammy, who spent four years in a testing lab, to explore the use of dogs and other animals in testing across America — a journey that will take them to laboratories, universities, pharmaceutical companies, and the homes of other former lab animals. She plans to share their story in a book.

Tasmiha Khan is a freelance writer from the Midwest. She champions marginalized communities, particularly the Muslim American population, including women and children. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Forbes, The Daily Beast, Vox, and VICE, among others. Her project will be examining the science of ensuring cultural and religious competent care for pregnant and perinatal Muslim women.

Emily Mullin is an award-winning science journalist who writes about how biology is shaping our future. She’s held staff positions covering biotech at Medium’s OneZero and MIT Technology Review and her reporting has also appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, and National Geographic. For her project, Mullin is working on a book on the quest to use animals as a source of organs for people who desperately need transplants.

Natasha Singer is a reporter at The New York Times whose work focuses on the intersection of business, technology, and society. She was part of a team of Times journalists who won a George Polk Award for national reporting in 2019 for their privacy coverage. For her project, Singer will examine the historical parallels and differences between the Cold War push for physics education in U.S. high schools in the 1950s and current efforts by tech companies and nonprofits to normalize computer science education in American public schools.

Jared Whitlock is a freelance health reporter. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Wired Magazine, and Voice of San Diego, with support from USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors. He previously covered biotech and health care as a staff reporter at the San Diego Business Journal, was the associate editor of the Encinitas Advocate, and a staff reporter at The Coast News. His project will cover drug development for rare diseases.

2021-22 KSJ Fellows — Spring-semester fellows

Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning science journalist and author based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is a frequent contributor to Scientific American, Quanta, and The New York Times, and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Boyle is a former newspaper reporter and now writes primarily about astronomy, astrophysics, and astrobiology. She will use her fellowship to pursue a book on the history and biology of darkness, illuminating the nexus among human health, ecological health, and artificial light.

Anna Kuchment is a science reporter at The Dallas Morning News and contributing editor at Scientific American. Previously, she worked as a senior editor at Scientific American and as a staff writer at Newsweek. During her fellowship Kuchment will work on “Shaky Ground: The Untold Story of the Largest Earthquake Surge in Modern History” (University of Chicago Press), about earthquakes and the fracking boom. She is co-writing the book with Boston College historian of science Conevery Bolton Valencius.

Julia Rosen is an independent journalist covering science and the environment from Portland, Oregon. She writes about how the world works and how humans are changing it. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Science, High Country News, and many other publications. Her feature on invasive earthworms was anthologized in the 2021 edition of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing.” Rosen’s project will explore the origins of Earth's grasslands and the threats they face today.

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award-winning reporter and journalism professor at New York University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, PBS/Frontline, HBO, VICE, National Geographic, and The Atlantic. For her fellowship project, Schellmann will report on artificial intelligence and health data in education, and employment for MIT Technology Review and for an upcoming book with Hachette.

Sushma Subramanian is a health and science journalist and author of “How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch.” Her byline has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Elle, Scientific American, Discover, and others. She has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and won a Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award. She will be writing about the ethics behind the commodification of breast milk.

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3 Questions: David Kaiser and Julie Shah on social and ethical responsibilities of computing

David Kaiser and Julie Shah are on a mission to prepare students and facilitate research to address the broad challenges and opportunities associated with computing. As associate deans of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, Kaiser and Shah are advancing a number of initiatives they hope will get students and faculty to reflect on the potential social, ethical, and policy implications of new technologies.

To help guide their efforts, Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics, and Shah, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, have developed a teaching, research, and engagement framework for SERC that includes case studies, active learning projects, and building a community of scholars. Here, they discuss projects that are taking shape and how they are tapping into the expertise of colleagues across a wide range of fields to help inform the activities of SERC.

Q: Weaving social and ethical aspects of computing into the curricula is a key mandate of SERC. How are you approaching this challenge and what are some efforts underway?

Kaiser: Every semester we bring together a number of interdisciplinary faculty groups that we call SERC Dean’s Action Groups. Each group consists of eight to 12 members from across MIT. The idea is for them to work together, discuss common research interests, and craft original content that can be embedded into a wide variety of courses and materials, across all levels of instruction, such as new questions for existing assignments and new final projects.

The action groups are modeled on successful workshops organized by MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory. To date we’ve launched five action groups in three focal areas: active learning projects; AI and public policy; and computing, data, and anti-racism.

Over the past academic year, several faculty members — including Dwai Banerjee and Will Deringer from the Program in Science, Technology, and Society; In Song Kim from the Department of Political Science; and Catherine D’Ignazio from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; as well as Jacob Andreas, Frédo Durand, Daniel Jackson, Kimberly Koile, and Arvind Satyanarayan in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — created and incorporated new SERC materials for their respective courses, which was a direct result of their work in recent Action Groups for Active Learning Projects.

Shah: In addition, a team of advanced graduate students — from EECS and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Philosophy; and History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) — worked together to redesign each of the 12 weekly labs for the course 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning), taught by EECS Professor Leslie Kaebling, to highlight SERC content. 6.036 is a really popular class, with 600 students enrolled last semester, so we managed to reach nearly 15 percent of the undergraduate population as a result.

These are the kinds of steps that will help us towards meeting our goal of prompting responsible ways of thinking in computing education as well as in research and implementation. It’s also part of SERC’s broader mission to incorporate humanist, social science, social considerations, and policy/civic perspectives into everything we do.

Q: In February, SERC published a new series of case studies. How can the cases help students and researchers better understand social, economic, and other implications of the systems they’re designing in a holistic manner?

Kaiser: We interpret ‘social and ethical responsibilities of computing’ broadly on purpose. While some cases focus closely on particular technologies, others look at trends across technological platforms. Still others examine social, historical, philosophical, legal, and cultural facets that are essential for thinking critically about present-day efforts in computing and data science. In curating the series, we made special attempts to solicit cases on topics ranging beyond the United States and that highlight perspectives of people who are affected by various technologies, in addition to perspectives of designers and engineers.

The case studies are brief and modular by design, primarily to be appropriate for undergraduate education, and for users to be able to mix and match the content to fit a variety of pedagogical needs. Each case, which is based on original research and is peer-reviewed, is supported by scholarly apparatus of notes and references, but we don’t intend to stick to any particular format. The main goal of the series is to present important material in engaging ways for students across a range of classes and fields of study.

Our first series of cases were well received and we’re looking forward to publishing the second series in August. We’re also excited to share many of the novel active learning projects and homework assignments that our colleagues and students have developed on a companion website that we’re preparing with MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). Like the case studies site, all of the materials on the new SERC OCW site will be available for free, anywhere in the world.

Q: Many students and researchers are seeking to understand the societal and ethical consequences of technological advancements, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. How can they get involved?

Shah: The SERC Scholars Program is a new initiative that we just launched to provide avenues for students and postdocs to deepen their engagement in SERC and advance SERC efforts in the college. We’re working from emerging models of students’ participation so far, to design undergraduate pathways, graduate-student pathways, and an expanded postdoctoral program. For each group, the goal is to craft sustainable-level effort over a semester that can build over time. There has also been a focus on designing avenues for engagement so that these are not undertaken as individual efforts but intersect to build and further grow a community.

For example, we’re collaborating with campus partners to offer additional opportunities for SERC Scholars, such as engaging in research projects through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and internships that advance computing in the public interest through the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center. We’re also working with MIT student groups, including the Ethical Technology Initiative, AI Ethics Reading Group, and Science Policy Initiative, to organize extracurricular and social activities for scholars.

The program is open to students across MIT. These are hourly funded positions with selective and limited yearly enrollment. Many opportunities within each group's pathway have varying levels of time commitment. We hope that this variety of options will allow a broad range of students and postdocs to participate and help in attracting scholars from diverse backgrounds.

During the previous academic year, we were able to work with three terrific groups of undergraduates through MIT’s Experiential Learning Opportunities initiative. With generous support from the Patrick W. McGovern Foundation, we can now build upon that experience and expand our programs for undergraduate and graduate students. We’re also focusing on building up a postdoc program, designed in collaboration with selectees based on their interests. Each postdoctoral appointment will be based in the scholar’s home unit, which could be the college or one of the other schools or departments at MIT. The SERC portion of their appointment will be dedicated to advancing particular teaching, research, and broader engagement efforts.

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Mapping the cellular circuits behind spitting

For over a decade, researchers have known that the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans can detect and avoid short-wavelength light, despite lacking eyes and the light-absorbing molecules required for sight. As a graduate student in the Horvitz lab, Nikhil Bhatla proposed an explanation for this ability. He observed that light exposure not only made the worms wriggle away, but it also prompted them to stop eating. This clue led him to a series of studies that suggested that his squirming subjects weren’t seeing the light at all — they were detecting the noxious chemicals it produced, such as hydrogen peroxide. Soon after, the Horvitz lab realized that worms not only taste the nasty chemicals light generates, they also spit them out.

Now, in a study published in eLife, a team led by recent graduate student Steve Sando PhD '20 reports the mechanism that underlies spitting in C. elegans. Individual muscle cells are generally regarded as the smallest units that neurons can independently control, but the researchers’ findings question this assumption. In the case of spitting, they determined that neurons can direct specialized subregions of a single muscle cell to generate multiple motions — expanding our understanding of how neurons control muscle cells to shape behavior.

“Steve made the remarkable discovery that the contraction of a small region of a particular muscle cell can be uncoupled from the contraction of the rest of the same cell,” says H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and senior author of the study. “Furthermore, Steve found that such subcellular muscle compartments can be controlled by neurons to dramatically alter behavior.”

Roundworms are like vacuum cleaners that wiggle around hoovering up bacteria. The worm’s mouth, also known as the pharynx, is a muscular tube that traps the food, chews it, and then transfers it to the intestines through a series of “pumping” contractions.

Researchers have known for over a decade that worms flee from UV, violet, or blue light. But Bhatla discovered that this light also interrupts the constant pumping of the pharynx, because the taste produced by the light is so nasty that the worms pause feeding. As he looked closer, Bhatla noticed the worms’ response was actually quite nuanced. After an initial pause, the pharynx briefly starts pumping again in short bursts before fully stopping — almost like the worm was chewing for a bit even after tasting the unsavory light. Sometimes, a bubble would escape from the mouth, like a burp.

After he joined the project, Sando discovered that the worms were neither burping nor continuing to munch. Instead, the “burst pumps” were driving material in the opposite direction, out of the mouth into the local environment, rather than further back into the pharynx and intestine. In other words, the bad-tasting light caused worms to spit. Sando then spent years chasing his subjects around the microscope with a bright light and recording their actions in slow motion, in order to pinpoint the neural circuitry and muscle motions required for this behavior.

“The discovery that the worms were spitting was quite surprising to us, because the mouth seemed to be moving just like it does when it’s chewing,” Sando says. “It turns out that you really needed to zoom in and slow things down to see what’s going on, because the animals are so small and the behavior is happening so quickly.”  

To analyze what’s happening in the pharynx to produce this spitting motion, the researchers used a tiny laser beam to surgically remove individual nerve and muscle cells from the mouth and discern how that affected the worm’s behavior. They also monitored the activity of the cells in the mouth by tagging them with specially-engineered fluorescent "reporter" proteins.

They saw that while the worm is eating, three muscle cells toward the front of the pharynx called pm3s contract and relax together in synchronous pulses. But as soon as the worm tastes light, the subregions of these individual cells closest to the front of the mouth become locked in a state of contraction, opening the front of the mouth and allowing material to be propelled out. This reverses the direction of the flow of the ingested material and converts feeding into spitting.

The team determined that this “uncoupling” phenomenon is controlled by a single neuron at the back of the worm’s mouth. Called M1, this nerve cell spurs a localized influx of calcium at the front end of the pm3 muscle likely responsible for triggering the subcellular contractions.

M1 relays important information like a switchboard. It receives incoming signals from many different neurons, and transmits that information to the muscles involved in spitting. Sando and his team suspect that the strength of the incoming signal can tune the worm’s behavior in response to tasting light. For instance, their findings suggest that a revolting taste elicits a vigorous rinsing of the mouth, while a mildly unpleasant sensation causes the worm spit more gently, just enough to eject the contents.

In the future, Sando thinks the worm could be used as a model to study how neurons trigger subregions of muscle cells to constrict and shape behavior — a phenomenon they suspect occurs in other animals, possibly including humans.

“We’ve essentially found a new way for a neuron to move a muscle,” Sando says. “Neurons orchestrate the motions of muscles, and this could be a new tool that allows them to exert a sophisticated kind of control. That’s pretty exciting.”

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Vapor-collection technology saves water while clearing the air

About two-fifths of all the water that gets withdrawn from lakes, rivers, and wells in the U.S. is used not for agriculture, drinking, or sanitation, but to cool the power plants that provide electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear power. Over 65 percent of these plants use evaporative cooling, leading to huge white plumes that billow from their cooling towers, which can be a nuisance and, in some cases, even contribute to dangerous driving conditions.

Now, a small company based on technology recently developed at MIT by the Varanasi Research Group is hoping to reduce both the water needs at these plants and the resultant plumes — and to potentially help alleviate water shortages in areas where power plants put pressure on local water systems.

The technology is surprisingly simple in principle, but developing it to the point where it can now be tested at full scale on industrial plants was a more complex proposition. That required the real-world experience that the company’s founders gained from installing prototype systems, first on MIT’s natural-gas-powered cogeneration plant and then on MIT’s nuclear research reactor.

In these demanding tests, which involved exposure to not only the heat and vibrations of a working industrial plant but also the rigors of New England winters, the system proved its effectiveness at both eliminating the vapor plume and recapturing water. And, it purified the water in the process, so that it was 100 times cleaner than the incoming cooling water. The system is now being prepared for full-scale tests in a commercial power plant and in a chemical processing plant.

“Campus as a living laboratory”

The technology was originally envisioned by professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi to develop efficient water-recovery systems by capturing water droplets from both natural fog and plumes from power plant cooling towers. The project began as part of doctoral thesis research of Maher Damak PhD ’18, with funding from the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, to improve the efficiency of fog-harvesting systems like the ones used in some arid coastal regions as a source of potable water. Those systems, which generally consist of plastic or metal mesh hung vertically in the path of fogbanks, are extremely inefficient, capturing only about 1 to 3 percent of the water droplets that pass through them.

Varanasi and Damak found that vapor collection could be made much more efficient by first zapping the tiny droplets of water with a beam of electrically charged particles, or ions, to give each droplet a slight electric charge. Then, the stream of droplets passes through a wire mesh, like a window screen, that has an opposite electrical charge. This causes the droplets to be strongly attracted to the mesh, where they fall away due to gravity and can be collected in trays placed below the mesh.

Lab tests showed the concept worked, and the researchers, joined by Karim Khalil PhD ’18, won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in 2018 for the basic concept. The nascent company, which they called Infinite Cooling, with Damak as CEO, Khalil as CTO, and Varanasi as chairperson, immediately went to work setting up a test installation on one of the cooling towers of MIT’s natural-gas-powered Central Utility Plant, with funding from the MIT Office of Sustainability. After experimenting with various configurations, they were able to show that the system could indeed eliminate the plume and produce water of high purity.

Professor Jacopo Buongiorno in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering immediately spotted a good opportunity for collaboration, offering the use of MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory research facility for further testing of the system with the help of NRL engineer Ed Block. With its 24/7 operation and its higher-temperature vapor emissions, the plant would provide a more stringent real-world test of the system, as well as proving its effectiveness in an actual operating reactor licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an important step in “de-risking” the technology so that electric utilities could feel confident in adopting the system.

After the system was installed above one of the plant’s four cooling towers, testing showed that the water being collected was more than 100 times cleaner than the feedwater coming into the cooling system. It also proved that the installation — which, unlike the earlier version, had its mesh screens mounted vertically, parallel to the vapor stream — had no effect at all on the operation of the plant. Video of the tests dramatically illustrates how as soon as the power is switched on to the collecting mesh, the white plume of vapor immediately disappears completely.

The high temperature and volume of the vapor plume from the reactor’s cooling towers represented “kind of a worst-case scenario in terms of plumes,” Damak says, “so if we can capture that, we can basically capture anything.”

Working with MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, Varanasi says, “has been quite an important step because it helped us to test it at scale. … It really both validated the water quality and the performance of the system.” The process, he says, “shows the importance of using the campus as a living laboratory. It allows us to do these kinds of experiments at scale, and also showed the ability to sustainably reduce the water footprint of the campus.”

Far-reaching benefits

Power plant plumes are often considered an eyesore and can lead to local opposition to new power plants because of the potential for obscured views, and even potential traffic hazards when the obscuring plumes blow across roadways. “The ability to eliminate the plumes could be an important benefit, allowing plants to be sited in locations that might otherwise be restricted,” Buongiorno says. At the same time, the system could eliminate a significant amount of water used by the plants and then lost to the sky, potentially alleviating pressure on local water systems, which could be especially helpful in arid regions.

The system is essentially a distillation process, and the pure water it produces could go into power plant boilers — which are separate from the cooling system — that require high-purity water. That might reduce the need for both fresh water and purification systems for the boilers.

What’s more, in many arid coastal areas power plants are cooled directly with seawater. This system would essentially add a water desalination capability to the plant, at a fraction of the cost of building a new standalone desalination plant, and at an even smaller fraction of its operating costs since the heat would essentially be provided for free.

Contamination of water is typically measured by testing its electrical conductivity, which increases with the amount of salts and other contaminants it contains. Water used in power plant cooling systems typically measures 3,000 microsiemens per centimeter, Khalil explains, while the water supply in the City of Cambridge is typically around 500 or 600 microsiemens per centimeter. The water captured by this system, he says, typically measures below 50 microsiemens per centimeter.

Thanks to the validation provided by the testing on MIT’s plants, the company has now been able to secure arrangements for its first two installations on operating commercial plants, which should begin later this year. One is a 900-megawatt power plant where the system’s clean water production will be a major advantage, and the other is at a chemical manufacturing plant in the Midwest.

In many locations power plants have to pay for the water they use for cooling, Varanasi says, and the new system is expected to reduce the need for water by up to 20 percent. For a typical power plant, that alone could account for about a million dollars saved in water costs per year, he says.

“Innovation has been a hallmark of the U.S. commercial industry for more than six decades,” says Maria G. Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, who was not involved in the research. “As the changing climate impacts every aspect of life, including global water supplies, companies across the supply chain are innovating for solutions. The testing of this innovative technology at MIT provides a valuable basis for its consideration in commercial applications.”

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Making voting easier for previously incarcerated people

In March 2020, 83,000 New Jersey residents who had been ineligible to vote became eligible when a new law took effect restoring voting rights for people on parole or probation who had previously been convicted of felonies.

Ariel White, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science and an MIT Governance Lab faculty associate, is one of several researchers working with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) to inform these people of their eligibility.

NJISJ spearheaded the effort to get the law passed, and worked throughout 2020 to register people to vote before the presidential election. Now, White and her colleagues are gathering more information about the barriers making it more difficult for previously incarcerated people to vote, as well as what messaging might convince people to register. 

People vote infrequently after being incarcerated, and the criminal legal system disproportionately incarcerates people of color. White has been studying this issue for several years, focusing in particular on situations where people legally can vote, but don’t manage to. Now, she’s trying to find ways to address this inequality. “I got sick of writing the ‘this is a problem’ papers,” she says. “I wanted to see what could be done about it.” 

Increasing political participation among previously incarcerated people

In the first stage of their research in New Jersey, the researchers are interviewing previously incarcerated people. They’re talking with active voters to better understand what motivates them to participate in the political process. They’re also asking people who aren’t voting why they’re reluctant to do so, and seeing what arguments for voting might resonate with them. 

Some people are hesitant to vote because they’re simply not sure if they’re eligible, and don’t want to get in trouble. Others feel like their votes don’t make a difference, or that their voice isn’t valued. “This is something they have learned through personal experience with a system that doesn’t generally reward speaking up and making your opinion known,” says White. “The criminal legal system is both scary and disempowering to interact with.”

White and her colleagues have attended NJISJ organizing meetings to learn from a group that has a lot of experience mobilizing people to vote. “We’ve gotten to learn about what they’re already doing, what kinds of things are working for them, what kinds of messages they think are resonating,” she says. 

This work is in line with MIT GOV/LAB’s engaged scholarship approach, which promotes collaborating with partners to gain valuable insights from people living these issues and to make research more valuable to decision-makers.

Adding to the voter mobilization literature 

Early interviews have suggested that particularly convincing messaging might focus on the importance of local politics, as well as how it might be meaningful to someone’s friends and family that they vote.

White says that while the existing literature has shown that these and other strategies are effective at increasing turnout among people who are already registered, “there is actually a lot less published work on how you register people who are not currently registered.” There is also little evidence specifically on increasing turnout among people who have had contact with the criminal legal system. 

Once interviews are completed, the researchers will put their findings to the test by reaching out to people via mail before New Jersey’s state and municipal elections this November. They’ll try some different messages for convincing people that their votes matter and collect data on which are most effective at getting people registered and voting. 

This project comes on the heels of similar research White and other researchers conducted in North Carolina and Texas leading up to the 2020 presidential election. In this instance, the research team wanted to see if mailing certain pieces of information to people with criminal records increased registration and turnout. “Does it matter whether you include, for example, the registration form itself, or is it more just the information about eligibility,” White explains. Results from this project are forthcoming.

People rarely vote after being incarcerated

Voting rates are low not only among people who have served longer sentences for felonies, but also among people who have served shorter sentences for misdemeanors. In a 2019 paper, White found that jail time for a first-time misdemeanor offense actually made it less likely that someone would vote after they were released.

White explains that fewer people vote after a misdemeanor conviction because even the shortest jail stint can turn someone’s life upside down. “Going to jail for a couple weeks could mean that you lose your job, it could mean that you lose your housing,” she says. People can also lose custody of their children. “You’re likely to have a lot of other stuff on your plate that could just make it really unlikely that you manage to vote,” says White.

While incarceration didn’t affect voting among white people in the study, voting dropped significantly among Black people, who were more than twice as likely to have voted before being incarcerated, a difference White suggests could be attributable to racial disparities in policing and the criminal legal system. 

White says that a lot of research on incarceration and voting has focused on legal restrictions on voting, like felony disenfranchisement laws. “These [legal restrictions] are important for a whole range of reasons,” she says. “But there are millions of people who pass through the criminal legal system with their voting rights intact, but who do not manage to exercise those rights.” 

She also points out that we should incarcerate fewer people to begin with. But there will need to continue to be efforts to increase voting among previously incarcerated people. “We have this system that incarcerates an enormous number of people who have this intense personal knowledge, this particularly intimate understanding of how that system works,” she says. “But they are rarely involved in electing the people who could potentially change the way the system works.”

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A comprehensive study of technological change

The societal impacts of technological change can be seen in many domains, from messenger RNA vaccines and automation to drones and climate change. The pace of that technological change can affect its impact, and how quickly a technology improves in performance can be an indicator of its future importance. For decision-makers like investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, predicting which technologies are fast improving (and which are overhyped) can mean the difference between success and failure.

New research from MIT aims to assist in the prediction of technology performance improvement using U.S. patents as a dataset. The study describes 97 percent of the U.S. patent system as a set of 1,757 discrete technology domains, and quantitatively assesses each domain for its improvement potential.

“The rate of improvement can only be empirically estimated when substantial performance measurements are made over long time periods,” says Anuraag Singh SM ’20, lead author of the paper. “In some large technological fields, including software and clinical medicine, such measures have rarely, if ever, been made.”

A previous MIT study provided empirical measures for 30 technological domains, but the patent sets identified for those technologies cover less than 15 percent of the patents in the U.S. patent system. The major purpose of this new study is to provide predictions of the performance improvement rates for the thousands of domains not accessed by empirical measurement. To accomplish this, the researchers developed a method using a new probability-based algorithm, machine learning, natural language processing, and patent network analytics.

Overlap and centrality

A technology domain, as the researchers define it, consists of sets of artifacts fulfilling a specific function using a specific branch of scientific knowledge. To find the patents that best represent a domain, the team built on previous research conducted by co-author Chris Magee, a professor of the practice of engineering systems within the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Magee and his colleagues found that by looking for patent overlap between the U.S. and international patent-classification systems, they could quickly identify patents that best represent a technology. The researchers ultimately created a correspondence of all patents within the U.S. patent system to a set of 1,757 technology domains.

To estimate performance improvement, Singh employed a method refined by co-authors Magee and Giorgio Triulzi, a researcher with the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) within IDSS and an assistant professor at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Their method is based on the average “centrality” of patents in the patent citation network. Centrality refers to multiple criteria for determining the ranking or importance of nodes within a network.

“Our method provides predictions of performance improvement rates for nearly all definable technologies for the first time,” says Singh.

Those rates vary — from a low of 2 percent per year for the “Mechanical skin treatment — Hair removal and wrinkles” domain to a high of 216 percent per year for the “Dynamic information exchange and support systems integrating multiple channels” domain. The researchers found that most technologies improve slowly; more than 80 percent of technologies improve at less than 25 percent per year. Notably, the number of patents in a technological area was not a strong indicator of a higher improvement rate.

“Fast-improving domains are concentrated in a few technological areas,” says Magee. “The domains that show improvement rates greater than the predicted rate for integrated chips — 42 percent, from Moore’s law — are predominantly based upon software and algorithms.”

TechNext Inc.

The researchers built an online interactive system where domains corresponding to technology-related keywords can be found along with their improvement rates. Users can input a keyword describing a technology and the system returns a prediction of improvement for the technological domain, an automated measure of the quality of the match between the keyword and the domain, and patent sets so that the reader can judge the semantic quality of the match.

Moving forward, the researchers have founded a new MIT spinoff called TechNext Inc. to further refine this technology and use it to help leaders make better decisions, from budgets to investment priorities to technology policy. Like any inventors, Magee and his colleagues want to protect their intellectual property rights. To that end, they have applied for a patent for their novel system and its unique methodology.

“Technologies that improve faster win the market,” says Singh. “Our search system enables technology managers, investors, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to quickly look up predictions of improvement rates for specific technologies.”

Adds Magee: “Our goal is to bring greater accuracy, precision, and repeatability to the as-yet fuzzy art of technology forecasting.”

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Amy Watterson: Model engineer

“I love that we are doing something that no one else is doing.”

Amy Watterson is excited when she talks about SPARC, the pilot fusion plant being developed by MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CSF). Since being hired as a mechanical engineer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) two years ago, Watterson has found her skills stretching to accommodate the multiple needs of the project.

Fusion, which fuels the sun and stars, has long been sought as a carbon-free energy source for the world. For decades researchers have pursued the “tokamak,” a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber where hot plasma can be contained by magnetic fields and heated to the point where fusion occurs. Sustaining the fusion reactions long enough to draw energy from them has been a challenge.

Watterson is intimately aware of this difficulty. Much of her life she has heard the quip, “Fusion is 50 years away and always will be.” The daughter of PSFC research scientist Catherine Fiore, who headed the PSFC’s Office of Environment, Safety and Health, and Reich Watterson, an optical engineer working at the center, she had watched her parents devote years to making fusion a reality. She determined before entering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that she could forgo any attempt to follow her parents into a field that might not produce results during her career.

Working on SPARC has changed her mindset. Taking advantage of a novel high-temperature superconducting tape, SPARC’s magnets will be compact while generating magnetic fields stronger than would be possible from other mid-sized tokamaks, and producing more fusion power. It suggests a high-field device that produces net fusion gain is not 50 years away. SPARC is scheduled to be begin operation in 2025.

An education in modeling

Watterson’s current excitement, and focus, is due to an approaching milestone for SPARC: a test of the Toroidal Field Magnet Coil (TFMC), a scaled prototype for the HTS magnets that will surround SPARC’s toroidal vacuum chamber. Its design and manufacture have been shaped by computer models and simulations. As part of a large research team, Waterson has received an education in modeling over the past two years.

Computer models move scientific experiments forward by allowing researchers to predict what will happen to an experiment — or its materials — if a parameter is changed. Modeling a component of the TFMC, for example, researchers can test how it is affected by varying amounts of current, different temperatures or different materials. With this information they can make choices that will improve the success of the experiment.

In preparation for the magnet testing, Watterson has modeled aspects of the cryogenic system that will circulate helium gas around the TFMC to keep it cold enough to remain superconducting. Taking into consideration the amount of cooling entering the system, the flow rate of the helium, the resistance created by valves and transfer lines and other parameters, she can model how much helium flow will be necessary to guarantee the magnet stays cold enough. Adjusting a parameter can make the difference between a magnet remaining superconducting and becoming overheated or even damaged.

Watterson and her teammates have also modeled pressures and stress on the inside of the TFMC. Pumping helium through the coil to cool it down will add 20 atmospheres of pressure, which could create a degree of flex in elements of the magnet that are welded down. Modeling can help determine how much pressure a weld can sustain.

“How thick does a weld need to be, and where should you put the weld so that it doesn’t break — that’s something you don’t want to leave until you’re finally assembling it,” says Watterson.

Modeling the behavior of helium is particularly challenging because its properties change significantly as the pressure and temperature change.

“A few degrees or a little pressure will affect the fluid's viscosity, density, thermal conductivity, and heat capacity,” says Watterson. “The flow has different pressures and temperatures at different places in the cryogenic loop. You end up with a set of equations that are very dependent on each other, which makes it a challenge to solve.”

Role model

Watterson notes that her modeling depends on the contributions of colleagues at the PSFC, and praises the collaborative spirit among researchers and engineers, a community that now feels like family. Her teammates have been her mentors. “I’ve learned so much more on the job in two years than I did in four years at school,” she says.

She realizes that having her mother as a role model in her own family has always made it easier for her to imagine becoming a scientist or engineer. Tracing her early passion for engineering to a middle school Lego robotics tournament, her eyes widen as she talks about the need for more female engineers, and the importance of encouraging girls to believe they are equal to the challenge.

“I want to be a role model and tell them ‘I'm a successful engineer, you can be too.’ Something I run into a lot is that little girls will say, ‘I can't be an engineer, I'm not cut out for that.’ And I say, ‘Well that's not true. Let me show you. If you can make this Lego robot, then you can be an engineer.’ And it turns out they usually can.”

Then, as if making an adjustment to one of her computer models, she continues.

“Actually, they always can.”

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