News and Blog Landing | MIT Sustainability

In the grassland steppes of Inner Asia, climate has a major impact on plant growth. Pastoral economies, which depend on grazing livestock like horse and sheep, are affected in turn.
Photo: Bernd Thaller/CC BY-NC 2.0

MIT News Office

December 11, 2020

Case studies show climate variation linked to rise and fall of medieval nomadic empires

Recent virtual lecture explores how paleoclimatology provides important context for examining the activities of past human societies.

"My hope is that competitions like this inspire MIT and the entire world to take a more serious look about how we deal with the resources available to us: from electricity to recyclable waste,” says MIT Technical Associate Sebastia...

MIT News Office

December 8, 2020

MIT labs win top recognition for sustainable practices in cold storage management

Whitehead Institute and MIT named 2020 Organizational Winners in the fourth annual International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories International Laboratory Freezer Challenge.

For the first time since its founding six years ago, MIT EnergyHack was run as an all-virtual event. The MIT Energy Club worked with seven companies and organizations to create problem statements for participating hackers to solve.
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MIT News Office

December 3, 2020

Focusing on innovative solutions to the world’s energy challenges

The MIT Energy Club hosts its sixth annual EnergyHack with 260 participants joining in from around the globe in this all-virtual event.

Fikile Brushett, an MIT associate professor of chemical engineering, leads a group dedicated to developing more efficient ways to store energy, including batteries that could be used to store the energy generated by wind and sola...

MIT News Office

December 1, 2020

Fikile Brushett is looking for new ways to store energy

By developing electrochemical technologies, he hopes to help reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Reflective pavements could reduce the frequency of heat waves in Chicago by around 30 percent over 20 years.
Photo: Jaysin Trevino/Wikimedia Commons

MIT News Office

December 1, 2020

3 Questions: Hessam AzariJafari on mitigating climate change with reflective pavements

MIT postdoc explains how reflective pavements can significantly — and often indirectly — mitigate climate change and extreme heat.

Armoire’s team refers to the company’s typical customer as “Boss Lady” and has created T-shirts to remind employees to stay focused on who they’re helping.
Images: courtesy of Armoire

MIT News Office

November 24, 2020

An antidote to “fast fashion”

The clothing rental service Armoire helps customers sustainably maintain a fresh wardrobe.

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have found a way to stabilize the growth of crystals of several kinds of metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. This image shows two scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs of Cu3HHTT2 an...

MIT News Office

November 23, 2020

Researchers decipher structure of promising battery materials

Family of compounds could someday be useful for fuel cells, supercapacitors, catalysts, and sensors.

In the STRIVE Center, an immersive virtual reality facility overseen by the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division at Lincoln Laboratory, researchers collect data as a user tests a prototype ankle exoskeleton.
Photo...

MIT News Office

November 23, 2020

Lincoln Laboratory establishes Biotechnology and Human Systems Division

Will focus on responding to disasters and humanitarian crises, defending against biothreats, addressing climate change, and improving human health and performance.

“My goal is to create programmable artificial structured topological materials, which can directly be applied as a quantum computer,” says MIT grad student Thanh Nguyen.
Photo: Gretchen Ertl

MIT News Office

November 20, 2020

Cracking the secrets of an emerging branch of physics

In a new realm of materials, PhD student Thanh Nguyen uses neutrons to hunt for exotic properties that could power real-world applications.