In 2013, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Managing Director Bill Aulet published “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” which has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been used to teach entrepreneurship at universities around the world. One MIT course where it’s used is 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), where instructors have tweaked the framework over the years. In a new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures,” they codify those changes and provide a new blueprint for entrepreneurs working in the climate and energy spaces.

MIT News spoke with lead author and Trust Center Entrepreneur-in-Residence Ben Soltoff, who wrote the book with Aulet, Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, Senior Lecturer Francis O’Sullivan, and Lecturer Libby Wayman. Soltoff explains why climate and energy entrepreneurship is so challenging and talks about some of the new steps in the book.

Q: What are climate and energy ventures?

A: It’s a broad umbrella. These ventures aren’t all in a specific industry or structured in the same way. They could be software, they could be hardware, or they could be deep tech coming out of labs. This book is also written for people working in government, large corporations, or nonprofits. Each of those folks can benefit from the entrepreneurial framework in this book. We very intentionally refer to them as climate and energy ventures in the book, not just climate and energy startups.

One common theme is meeting the challenge of providing enough energy for current and future needs without exacerbating, or even while reducing, the impact we have on our planet. Generally, climate and energy ventures are less likely to be only software. Many of the solutions we need are around molecules, not bits. A lot of it is breakthrough technology and science from research labs. You could be making a useful fuel, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or delivering something in a novel way. Your venture might produce a chemical or molecule that’s already being provided and is a commodity. It needs to be not only more sustainable, but better for your customers — either cheaper, more reliable, or more securely delivered. Ultimately, all of these ventures have to provide value. They also often involve physical infrastructure that you have to scale up — not just 10 times or 100 times, but 1,000 times or more — from original lab demonstrations.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs be thinking about navigating financing and working with the government?

A: One of the major themes of the book is the importance of figuring out if policy is in your favor and constantly applying a policy lens to what you’re building. Finance is another major theme. In climate and energy, these things are fundamental, and we need to consider them from the beginning. We talk about different “valleys of death” — the idea that going from one stage to the next stage requires this jump in time and resources that presents a big challenge. That also relates to the jump in scale of the technology, from a lab scale to something you can produce and sell in a quantity and at a cost the market is interested in. All of that requires financing.

At an early stage, a lot of these ventures are funded through grants and research funding. Later, they start getting early-stage capital — often venture capital. Eventually, as folks are scaling, they move to debt and project financing. Companies need to be very intentional about the type of financing they’re going to pursue and at what stage. We have an entire step on creating a long-term capital plan. Entrepreneurs need to be very clear about the story they’re going to tell investors at different stages. Otherwise, they can paint themselves into a corner and fail to build a company for the next stage of capital they need.

In terms of policy, entrepreneurs should use the policy environment as a filter for selecting a market. We have a story in the book about a startup that switched from working in sub-Saharan Africa to the U.S. after the Inflation Reduction Act passed. As those incentives began disappearing, they still had the option to return to their original market. It’s not ideal for them, but they are still able to build profitable projects. You shouldn’t build a company based on the incentives alone, but you should understand which way the wind is blowing and take advantage of policy when it’s in your favor. That said, policy can always change.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs select the right market “stepping stones”?

A: Each of the “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” books talks about the importance of selecting customers and listening to your customers. When thinking about their beachhead market, or where to initially focus, climate and energy entrepreneurs need to look for the easiest near-term opportunity to plug in their technology. Subsequent market selection is also driven by technology. Instead of just picking a beachhead market and figuring everything else out later, there often needs to be an intentional choice of what we call market stepping stones. You start by focusing on an initial market in the early days — land and expand — but there needs to be a long-term strategy, so you don’t go down a dead end. These ventures don’t have a lot of flexibility as they build out potentially expensive technologies. Being intentional means having a pathway planned from the beachhead market up to the big prize that makes the entire enterprise worthwhile. The prize means having a big impact but also targeting a big market opportunity.

We have an example in the book of a company that can turn CO2 into useful products. They knew the big prize was turning it into fuel, most likely aviation fuel, but they couldn’t produce at the right volume or cost early on, so they looked at other applications. They started with making vodka from CO2 because it was low-volume and high-margin. Then the pandemic happened, so they made hand sanitizer. Then they made perfume, which had the highest margins of all. By that point, they were ready to start moving into the fuel market. The stepping stones are about figuring out who is willing to buy the simple version of your technology or product and pay a premium. Initially, looking at that company, you might say, “They’re not going to save the planet by selling vodka.” But it was a critical stepping stone to get to the big prize. Long-term thinking is essential for ventures in this space.

One of the biggest risk factors for developing liver cancer is a high-fat diet. A new study from MIT reveals how a fatty diet rewires liver cells and makes them more prone to becoming cancerous.

The researchers found that in response to a high-fat diet, mature hepatocytes in the liver revert to an immature, stem-cell-like state. This helps them to survive the stressful conditions created by the high-fat diet, but in the long term, it makes them more likely to become cancerous.

“If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis,” says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The researchers also identified several transcription factors that appear to control this reversion, which they believe could make good targets for drugs to help prevent tumor development in high-risk patients.

Shalek; Ömer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute; and Wolfram Goessling, co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT graduate student Constantine Tzouanas, former MIT postdoc Jessica Shay, and Massachusetts General Brigham postdoc Marc Sherman are the co-first authors of the paper.

Cell reversion

A high-fat diet can lead to inflammation and buildup of fat in the liver, a condition known as steatotic liver disease. This disease, which can also be caused by a wide variety of long-term metabolic stresses such as high alcohol consumption, may lead to liver cirrhosis, liver failure, and eventually cancer.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to figure out just what happens in cells of the liver when exposed to a high-fat diet — in particular, which genes get turned on or off as the liver responds to this long-term stress.

To do that, the researchers fed mice a high-fat diet and performed single-cell RNA-sequencing of their liver cells at key timepoints as liver disease progressed. This allowed them to monitor gene expression changes that occurred as the mice advanced through liver inflammation, to tissue scarring and eventually cancer.

In the early stages of this progression, the researchers found that the high-fat diet prompted hepatocytes, the most abundant cell type in the liver, to turn on genes that help them survive the stressful environment. These include genes that make them more resistant to apoptosis and more likely to proliferate.

At the same time, those cells began to turn off some of the genes that are critical for normal hepatocyte function, including metabolic enzymes and secreted proteins.

“This really looks like a trade-off, prioritizing what’s good for the individual cell to stay alive in a stressful environment, at the expense of what the collective tissue should be doing,” Tzouanas says.

Some of these changes happened right away, while others, including a decline in metabolic enzyme production, shifted more gradually over a longer period. Nearly all of the mice on a high-fat diet ended up developing liver cancer by the end of the study.

When cells are in a more immature state, it appears that they are more likely to become cancerous if a mutation occurs later on, the researchers say.

“These cells have already turned on the same genes that they’re going to need to become cancerous. They’ve already shifted away from the mature identity that would otherwise drag down their ability to proliferate,” Tzouanas says. “Once a cell picks up the wrong mutation, then it’s really off to the races and they’ve already gotten a head start on some of those hallmarks of cancer.”

The researchers also identified several genes that appear to orchestrate the changes that revert hepatocytes to an immature state. While this study was going on, a drug targeting one of these genes (thyroid hormone receptor) was approved to treat a severe form of steatotic liver disease called MASH fibrosis. And, a drug activating an enzyme that they identified (HMGCS2) is now in clinical trials to treat steatotic liver disease.

Another possible target that the new study revealed is a transcription factor called SOX4, which is normally only active during fetal development and in a small number of adult tissues (but not the liver).

Cancer progression

After the researchers identified these changes in mice, they sought to discover if something similar might be happening in human patients with liver disease. To do that, they analyzed data from liver tissue samples removed from patients at different stages of the disease. They also looked at tissue from people who had liver disease but had not yet developed cancer.

Those studies revealed a similar pattern to what the researchers had seen in mice: The expression of genes needed for normal liver function decreased over time, while genes associated with immature states went up. Additionally, the researchers found that they could accurately predict patients’ survival outcomes based on an analysis of their gene expression patterns.

“Patients who had higher expression of these pro-cell-survival genes that are turned on with high-fat diet survived for less time after tumors developed,” Tzouanas says. “And if a patient has lower expression of genes that support the functions that the liver normally performs, they also survive for less time.”

While the mice in this study developed cancer within a year or so, the researchers estimate that in humans, the process likely extends over a longer span, possibly around 20 years. That will vary between individuals depending on their diet and other risk factors such as alcohol consumption or viral infections, which can also promote liver cells’ reversion to an immature state.

The researchers now plan to investigate whether any of the changes that occur in response to a high-fat diet can be reversed by going back to a normal diet, or by taking weight-loss drugs such as GLP-1 agonists. They also hope to study whether any of the transcription factors they identified could make good targets for drugs that could help prevent diseased liver tissue from becoming cancerous.

“We now have all these new molecular targets and a better understanding of what is underlying the biology, which could give us new angles to improve outcomes for patients,” Shalek says.

The research was funded, in part, by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative through Foundation MIT.

Aviation’s climate impact is partly due to contrails — condensation that a plane streaks across the sky when it flies through icy and humid layers of the atmosphere. Contrails trap heat that radiates from the planet’s surface, and while the magnitude of this impact is uncertain, several studies suggest contrails may be responsible for about half of aviation’s climate impact.

Pilots could conceivably reduce their planes’ climate impact by avoiding contrail-prone regions, similarly to making altitude adjustments to avoid turbulence. But to do so requires knowing where in the sky contrails are likely to form.

To make these predictions, scientists are studying images of contrails that have formed in the past. Images taken by geostationary satellites are one of the main tools scientists use to develop contrail identification and avoidance systems. 

But a new study shows there are limits to what geostationary satellites can see. MIT engineers analyzed contrail images taken with geostationary satellites, and compared them with images of the same areas taken by low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites. LEO satellites orbit the Earth at lower altitudes and therefore can capture more detail. However, since LEO satellites only snap an image as they fly by, they capture images of the same area far less frequently than geostationary (GEO) satellites, which continuously image the same region of the Earth every few minutes.

The researchers found that geostationary satellites miss about 80 percent of the contrails that appear in LEO imagery. Geostationary satellites mainly see larger contrails that have had time to grow and spread across the atmosphere. The many more contrails that LEO satellites can pick up are often shorter and thinner. These finer threads likely formed immediately from a plane’s engines and are still too small or otherwise not distinct enough for geostationary satellites to discern.

The study highlights the need for a multiobservational approach in developing contrail identification and avoidance systems. The researchers emphasize that both GEO and LEO satellite images have their strengths and limitations. Observations from both sources, as well as images taken from the ground, could provide a more complete picture of contrails and how they evolve.

“With more ‘eyes’ on the sky, we could start to see what a contrail’s life looks like,” says Prakash Prashanth, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “Then you can understand what are its radiative properties over its entire life, and when and why a contrail is climatically important.”

The new study appears today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Marlene Euchenhofer, a graduate student in AeroAstro; Sydney Parke, an undergraduate student; Ian Waitz, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT’s vice president of research; and Sebastian Eastham of Imperial College London.

Imaging backbone

Contrails form when the exhaust from planes meets icy, humid air, and the particles from the exhaust act as seeds on which water vapor collects and freezes into ice crystals. As a plane moves forward, it leaves a trail of condensation in its wake that starts as a thin thread that can grow and spread over large distances, lasting for several hours before dissipating.

When it persists, a contrail acts similar to an ice cloud and, as such, can have two competing effects: one in which the contrail is a sort of heat shield, reflecting some incoming radiation from the sun. On the other hand, a contrail can also act as a blanket, absorbing and reflecting back some of the heat from the surface. During the daytime, when the sun is shining, contrails can have both heat shielding and trapping effects. At night, the cloud-like threads have only a trapping, warming effect. On balance, studies have shown that contrails as a whole contribute to warming the planet.

There are multiple efforts underway to develop and test aircraft contrail-avoidance systems to reduce aviation’s climate-warming impact. And scientists are using images of contrails from space to help inform those systems.

“Geostationary satellite images are the workhorse of observations for detecting contrails,” says Euchenhofer. “Because they are at 36,000 kilometers above the surface, they can cover a wide area, and they look at the same point day and night so you can get new images of the same location every five minutes.”

But what they bring in rate and coverage, geostationary satellites lack in clarity. The images they take are about one-fifth the resolution of those taken by LEO satellites. This wouldn’t be a surprise to most scientists. But Euchenhofer wondered how different the geostationary and LEO contrail pictures would look, and what opportunities there might be to improve the picture if both sources could be combined.

“We still think geostationary satellites are the backbone of observation-based avoidance because of the spatial coverage and the high frequency at which we get an image,” she says. “We think that the data could be enhanced if we include observations from LEO and other data sources like ground-based cameras.”

Catching the trail

In their new study, the researchers analyzed contrail images from two satellite imagers: the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard a geostationary satellite that is typically used to observe contrails and the higher-resolution Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument onboard several LEO satellites.

For each month from December 2023 to November 2024, the team picked out an image of the contiguous United States taken by VIIRS during its flyby. They found corresponding images of the same location, taken at about the same time of day by the geostationary ABI. The images were taken in the infrared spectrum and represented in false color, which enabled the researchers to more easily identify contrails that formed during both the day and night. The researchers then worked by eye, zooming in on each image to identify, outline, and label each contrail they could see.

When they compared the images, they found that GEO images missed about 80 percent of the contrails observed in the LEO images. They also assessed the length and width of contrails in each image and found that GEO images mostly captured larger and longer contrails, while LEO images could also discern shorter, smaller contrails.

“We found 80 percent of the contrails we could see with LEO satellites, we couldn’t see with GEO imagers,” says Prashanth, who is the executive officer of MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. “That does not mean that 80 percent of the climate impact wasn’t captured. Because the contrails we see with GEO imagers are the bigger ones that likely have a bigger climate effect.”

Still, the study highlights an opportunity.

“We want to make sure this message gets across: Geostationary imagers are extremely powerful in terms of the spatial extent they cover and the number of images we can get,” Euchenhofer says. “But solely relying on one instrument, especially when policymaking comes into play, is probably too incomplete a picture to inform science and also airlines regarding contrail avoidance. We really need to fill this gap with other sensors.”

The team says other sensors could include networks of cameras on the ground that under ideal conditions can spot contrails as planes form them in real time. These smaller, “younger” contrails are typically missed by geostationary satellites. Once scientists have these ground-based data, they can match the contrail to the plane and use the plane’s flight data to identify the exact altitude at which the contrail appears. They could then track the contrail as it grows and spreads through the atmosphere, using geostationary images. Eventually, with enough data, scientists could develop an accurate forecasting model, in real time, to predict whether a plane is heading toward a region where contrails might form and persist, and how it could change its altitude to avoid the region.

“People see contrail avoidance as a near-term and cheap opportunity to attack one of the hardest-to-abate sectors in transportation,” Prashanth says. “We don’t have a lot of easy solutions in aviation to reduce our climate impact. But it is premature to do so until we have better tools to determine where in the atmosphere contrails will form, to understand their relative impacts and to verify avoidance outcomes. We have to do this in a careful and rigorous manner, and this is where a lot of these pieces come in.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Office of Environment and Energy.

In the past year, two separate experiments in two different materials captured the same confounding scenario: the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism. Scientists had assumed that these two quantum states are mutually exclusive; the presence of one should inherently destroy the other.

Now, theoretical physicists at MIT have an explanation for how this Jekyll-and-Hyde duality could emerge. In a paper appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team proposes that under certain conditions, a magnetic material’s electrons could splinter into fractions of themselves to form quasiparticles known as “anyons.” In certain fractions, the quasiparticles should flow together without friction, similar to how regular electrons can pair up to flow in conventional superconductors.

If the team’s scenario is correct, it would introduce an entirely new form of superconductivity — one that persists in the presence of magnetism and involves a supercurrent of exotic anyons rather than everyday electrons.

“Many more experiments are needed before one can declare victory,” says study lead author Senthil Todadri, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics at MIT. “But this theory is very promising and shows that there can be new ways in which the phenomenon of superconductivity can arise.”

What’s more, if the idea of superconducting anyons can be confirmed and controlled in other materials, it could provide a new way to design stable qubits — atomic-scale “bits” that interact quantum mechanically to process information and carry out complex computations far more efficiently than conventional computer bits.

“These theoretical ideas, if they pan out, could make this dream one tiny step within reach,” Todadri says.

The study’s co-author is MIT physics graduate student Zhengyan Darius Shi.

“Anything goes”

Superconductivity and magnetism are macroscopic states that arise from the behavior of electrons. A material is a magnet when electrons in its atomic structure have roughly the same spin, or orbital motion, creating a collective pull in the form of a magnetic field within the material as a whole. A material is a superconductor when electrons passing through, in the form of voltage, can couple up in “Cooper pairs.” In this teamed-up state, electrons can glide through a material without friction, rather than randomly knocking against its atomic latticework.

For decades, it was thought that superconductivity and magnetism should not co-exist; superconductivity is a delicate state, and any magnetic field can easily sever the bonds between Cooper pairs. But earlier this year, two separate experiments proved otherwise. In the first experiment, MIT’s Long Ju and his colleagues discovered superconductivity and magnetism in rhombohedral graphene — a synthesized material made from four or five graphene layers.

“It was electrifying,” says Todadri, who recalls hearing Ju present the results at a conference. “It set the place alive. And it introduced more questions as to how this could be possible.”

Shortly after, a second team reported similar dual states in the semiconducting crystal molybdenium ditelluride (MoTe2). Interestingly, the conditions in which MoTe2 becomes superconductive happen to be the same conditions in which the material exhibits an exotic “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect,” or FQAH — a phenomenon in which any electron passing through the material should split into fractions of itself. These fractional quasiparticles are known as “anyons.”

Anyons are entirely different from the two main types of particles that make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons are the extroverted particle type, as they prefer to be together and travel in packs. The photon is the classic example of a boson. In contrast, fermions prefer to keep to themselves, and repel each other if they are too near. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are examples of fermions. Together, bosons and fermions are the two major kingdoms of particles that make up matter in the three-dimensional universe.

Anyons, in contrast, exist only in two-dimensional space. This third type of particle was first predicted in the 1980s, and its name was coined by MIT’s Frank Wilczek, who meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea that, in terms of the particle’s behavior, “anything goes.”

A few years after anyons were first predicted, physicists such as Robert Laughlin PhD ’79, Wilczek, and others also theorized that, in the presence of magnetism, the quasiparticles should be able to superconduct.

“People knew that magnetism was usually needed to get anyons to superconduct, and they looked for magnetism in many superconducting materials,” Todadri says. “But superconductivity and magnetism typically do not occur together. So then they discarded the idea.”

But with the recent discovery that the two states can, in fact, peacefully coexist in certain materials, and in MoTe2 in particular, Todadri wondered: Could the old theory, and superconducting anyons, be at play?

Moving past frustration

Todadri and Shi set out to answer that question theoretically, building on their own recent work. In their new study, the team worked out the conditions under which superconducting anyons could emerge in a two-dimensional material. To do so, they applied equations of quantum field theory, which describes how interactions at the quantum scale, such as the level of individual anyons, can give rise to macroscopic quantum states, such as superconductivity. The exercise was not an intuitive one, since anyons are known to stubbornly resist moving, let alone superconducting, together.

“When you have anyons in the system, what happens is each anyon may try to move, but it’s frustrated by the presence of other anyons,” Todadri explains. “This frustration happens even if the anyons are extremely far away from each other. And that’s a purely quantum mechanical effect.”

Even so, the team looked for conditions in which anyons might break out of this frustration and move as one macroscopic fluid. Anyons are formed when electrons splinter into fractions of themselves under certain conditions in two-dimensional, single-atom-thin materials, such as MoTe2. Scientists had previously observed that MoTe2 exhibits the FQAH, in which electrons fractionalize, without the help of an external magnetic field.

Todadri and Shi took MoTe2 as a starting point for their theoretical work. They modeled the conditions in which the FQAH phenomenon emerged in MoTe2, and then looked to see how electrons would splinter, and what types of anyons would be produced, as they theoretically increased the number of electrons in the material.

They noted that, depending on the material’s electron density, two types of anyons can form: anyons with either 1/3 or 2/3 the charge of an electron. They then applied equations of quantum field theory to work out how either of the two anyon types would interact, and found that when the anyons are mostly of the 1/3 flavor, they are predictably frustrated, and their movement leads to ordinary metallic conduction. But when anyons are mostly of the 2/3 flavor, this particular fraction encourages the normally stodgy anyons to instead move collectively to form a superconductor, similar to how electrons can pair up and flow in conventional superconductors.

“These anyons break out of their frustration and can move without friction,” Todadri says. “The amazing thing is, this is an entirely different mechanism by which a superconductor can form, but in a way that can be described as Cooper pairs in any other system.”

Their work revealed that superconducting anyons can emerge at certain electron densities. What’s more, they found that when superconducting anyons first emerge, they do so in a totally new pattern of swirling supercurrents that spontaneously appear in random locations throughout the material. This behavior is distinct from conventional superconductors and is an exotic state that experimentalists can look for as a way to confirm the team’s theory. If their theory is correct, it would introduce a new form of superconductivity, through the quantum interactions of anyons.

“If our anyon-based explanation is what is happening in MoTe2, it opens the door to the study of a new kind of quantum matter which may be called ‘anyonic quantum matter,’” Todadri says. “This will be a new chapter in quantum physics.”

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