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Channel: Environment – MIT Spectrum
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Allies of Nature

Audrey Buyrn and Alan Phillips — backpackers who have cherished the Earth’s beauty for 40 years — often hike at Yosemite National Park and over time have become alarmed. In the past 20 years, they say,...

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Turning the Political Tide

Judith Layzer is an anomaly at MIT. Although she shares her colleagues’ curiosity about aquatic systems, it’s her approach that makes this professor of environmental policy stand apart from the...

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Water Wisdom

James Wescoat, MIT’s new Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture, speaks often of the need for wisdom in contemporary water management studies. “Wisdom is about looking at water within wider...

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Measuring Moisture

Soil moisture is of interest to scientists, weather forecasters, and the Department of Defense, among others. Yet currently it’s not practical to make direct measurements of the variable over all...

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Wee Denizens of the Sea

Respect the microbes, says Prof. Martin Polz. “They’ve been on Earth longest, and they run the show.” He notes that there are some one million bacteria per milliliter of seawater — or about 237 million...

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Water: An Urgent Challenge for the 21st Century

“MIT is the greatest problem-solving institution in the world,” says Philip S. Khoury, associate provost and Ford International Professor of History, adding that this is why more than 50 faculty from...

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A Letter from the President

In a city like Boston, our relationship with water is as easy and unconsidered as turning on the tap – until, as we saw for a few days in May, a breach in the city’s water supply left 2 million...

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Data-Driven Decisions

Michael Greenstone — a pillar in the nascent field of environmental economics — is developing a scientific method for calculating the costs and benefits of environmental measures, and he’s using the...

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The Power Generation

David Danielson founded the MIT Energy Club in 2004 with one friend over a pizza. “I never expected it to grow like this. It never crossed my mind,” he says of the 3,500-member club — the largest,...

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Nano-Repellents

When a device like an enormous inverted funnel failed to capture the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, mechanical engineer Kripa K. Varanasi saw it as an interface problem: crystals of...

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Carbon-Capturing Enzymes

The students in Catherine Drennan’s chemistry classes are silent with attention when she says the word “energy.” They listen more intensely when she couples energy with the environment and pollution....

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Campus Energy Effort Saves Millions

A new era of energy efficiency and sustainability was ushered in five years ago, when the MIT Energy Initiative’s Campus Energy Task Force facilitated the development of a campus program to reduce...

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Cookstoves and Biomass

Some of MIT’s most important energy-related research involves the most mundane of objects: the cookstove. In January 2008, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) launched the Energy Research Seed Fund...

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Building Wise

“Ancient buildings were greener than new buildings today,” says John Ochsendorf, adding that buildings in the U.S. now consume 40% of all energy. Old buildings were built to the natural environment....

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Power From Nature

From a multi-million dollar center focused on a hot new field in solar energy to a project on a novel way to store the sun’s energy, federal funding is helping MIT researchers not only explore the...

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The Future of Natural Gas

Since its release last year, an MIT study on the future of natural gas has generated nearly 17,000 unique page hits on its website. Not bad for a 287-page technical report. Among its conclusions:...

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Going With the Flow

Losing the flow is a drag — literally. When a submersible or ship turns, or the current shifts, water flowing along one side of its hull pulls away. The resulting flow that looks like a large rotating...

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Trickle Down Effect

Geoscientist Ruben Juanes takes the notion of “trickle down” farther than most — thousands of meters farther. Juanes, ARCO associate professor of energy studies, looks at how fluids interact in...

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Energy for the Future

Since the creation of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) five years ago the world’s energy landscape has changed, from the lows of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the highs of a game-changing source...

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A Letter from the President

When I arrived at MIT more than seven years ago, I began by listening – and I heard, from every quarter, the clear, unambiguous message that it was time for the Institute to step up and do some truly...

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