A breakthrough on “loss and damage,” but also disappointment, at UN climate...
As the 2022 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP27, stretched into its final hours on Saturday, Nov. 19, it was uncertain what kind of agreement might emerge from two weeks of...
View ArticleDecarbonization amid global crises
A global pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation. The first-ever serious challenge to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.Forced to face a seemingly unending series of...
View ArticlePursuing a practical approach to research
Koroush Shirvan, the John Clark Hardwick Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), knows that the nuclear industry has traditionally been wary of...
View ArticlePaper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source
MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human...
View ArticleFive from MIT named 2023 Quad Fellows
Four recent MIT alumni — Udochukwu Eze ’22, William Rodriguez Jimenez ’18, Yotaro Sueoka ’20, and Sreya Vangara ’22 — and Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology doctoral student Jacob White have...
View ArticleMIT scientists contribute to National Ignition Facility fusion milestone
On Monday, Dec. 5, at around 1 a.m., a tiny sphere of deuterium-tritium fuel surrounded by a cylindrical can of gold called a hohlraum was targeted by 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF)...
View ArticleTo decarbonize the chemical industry, electrify it
The chemical industry is the world’s largest industrial energy consumer and the third-largest source of industrial emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2019, the industrial...
View ArticleResponsive design meets responsibility for the planet’s future
MIT senior Sylas Horowitz kneeled at the edge of a marsh, tinkering with a blue-and-black robot about the size and shape of a shoe box and studded with lights and mini propellers.The robot was a...
View ArticlePreparing students for the new nuclear
As nuclear power has gained greater recognition as a zero-emission energy source, the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program has taken notice.Two years ago, LGO began a collaboration with...
View ArticleUsing combustion to make better batteries
For more than a century, much of the world has run on the combustion of fossil fuels. Now, to avert the threat of climate change, the energy system is changing. Notably, solar and wind systems are...
View ArticleStudy: Carbon-neutral pavements are possible by 2050, but rapid policy and...
Almost 2.8 million lane-miles, or about 4.6 million lane-kilometers, of the United States are paved.Roads and streets form the backbone of our built environment. They take us to work or school, take...
View Article3 Questions: Antje Danielson on energy education and its role in climate action
The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world,...
View ArticleWorking to make nuclear energy more competitive
Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for...
View ArticleShrinky Dinks, nail polish, and smelly bacteria
In a lab on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 56, a group of Massachusetts high school students gathered around a device that measures conductivity.Vincent Nguyen, 15, from Saugus, thought of the...
View ArticleMinimizing electric vehicles’ impact on the grid
National and global plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. But some projections show that...
View ArticleHelping the cause of environmental resilience
Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural...
View ArticleMichael Howland gives wind energy a lift
Michael Howland was in his office at MIT, watching real-time data from a wind farm 7,000 miles away in northwest India, when he noticed something odd: Some of the turbines weren’t producing the...
View ArticleAn interdisciplinary approach to fighting climate change through clean energy...
In early 2021, the U.S. government set an ambitious goal: to decarbonize its power grid, the system that generates and transmits electricity throughout the country, by 2035. It’s an important goal in...
View ArticleFlow batteries for grid-scale energy storage
In the coming decades, renewableenergy sources such as solar and wind will increasingly dominate the conventional power grid. Because those sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy,...
View ArticleStudy: Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution
Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these...
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