Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02455-2

Impacts from a climate event can cascade through natural, anthropogenic and socio-economic systems. Here the authors assess cascading climate impacts on the EU and identify intervention points for adaptation related to water, livelihoods, agriculture, infrastructure and economy, and violent conflict.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02462-3

Scenarios, generated by integrated assessment models in model intercomparison projects (MIPs), play a central role in climate decision-making. This Perspective discusses the challenges of the current approach and proposes a new MIP platform with a transparent and inclusive process.

A decade-plus collaboration between MIT’s AgeLab and the Toyota Motor Corporation is recognized as a key contributor to advancements in automotive safety and human-machine interaction. Through the AgeLab at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), researchers have collected and analyzed vast real-world driving datasets that have helped inform Toyota’s vehicle design and safety systems.

Toyota recently marked the completion of its 100th project through the Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC), celebrating MIT’s role in shaping technologies that enhance driver-assistance features and continue to forge the path for automated mobility. A key foundation for the 100th project is CSRC’s ongoing support for MIT CTL’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium.

Real-world data, real-world impact

“AVT was conceptualized over a decade ago as an academic-industry partnership to promote shared investment in real-world, naturalistic data collection, analysis, and collaboration — efforts aimed at advancing safer, more convenient, and more comfortable automobility,” says Bryan Reimer, founder and co-director of AVT. “Since its founding, AVT has drawn together over 25 organizations — including vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, insurers, and consumer research groups — to invest in understanding how automotive technologies function, how they influence driver behavior, and where further innovation is needed. This work has enabled stakeholders like Toyota to make more-informed decisions in product development and deployment.”

“CSRC’s 100th project marks a significant milestone in our collaboration,” Reimer adds. “We deeply value CSRC’s sustained investment, and commend the organization’s commitment to global industry impact and the open dissemination of research to advance societal benefit.”

“Toyota, through its Collaborative Safety Research Center, is proud to be a founding member of the AVT Consortium,” says Jason Hallman, senior manager of Toyota CSRC. “Since 2011, CSRC has collaborated with researchers such as AVT and MIT AgeLab on projects that help inform future products and policy, and to promote a future safe mobility society for all. The AVT specifically has helped us to study the real-world use of several vehicle technologies now available.”

Among these technologies are lane-centering assistance and adaptive cruise control — widely-used technologies that benefit from an understanding of how drivers interact with automation. “AVT uniquely combines vehicle and driver data to help inform future products and highlight the interplay between the performance of these features and the drivers using them,” says Josh Domeyer, principal scientist at CSRC.

Influencing global standards and Olympic-scale innovation

Insights from MIT’s pedestrian-driver interaction research with CSRC also helped shape Toyota’s automated vehicle communication systems. “These data helped develop our foundational understanding that drivers and pedestrians use their movements to communicate during routine traffic encounters,” said Domeyer. “This concept informed the deployment of Toyota’s e-Palette at the Tokyo Olympics, and it has been captured as a best practice in an ISO standard for automated driving system communication.”

The AVT Consortium's naturalistic driving datasets continue to serve as a foundation for behavioral safety strategies. From identifying moments of distraction to understanding how drivers multitask behind the wheel, the work is guiding subtle but impactful design considerations.

“By studying the natural behaviors of drivers and their contexts in the AVT datasets, we hope to identify new ways to encourage safe habits that align with customer preferences,” Domeyer says. “These can include subtle nudges, or modifications to existing vehicle features, or even communication and education partnerships outside of Toyota that reinforce these safe driving habits.”

Professor Yossi Sheffi, director of MIT CTL, comments, “This partnership exemplifies the impact of MIT collaborative research on industry to make real, practical innovation possible.” 

A model for industry-academic collaboration

Founded in 2015, the AVT Consortium brings together automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and insurers to accelerate research in driver behavior, safety, and the transition toward automated systems. The consortium’s interdisciplinary approach — integrating engineering, human factors, and data science — has helped generate one of the world’s most unique and actionable real-world driving datasets.

As Toyota celebrates its research milestone, MIT reflects on a partnership that exemplifies the power of industry-academic collaboration to shape safer, smarter mobility.

Instead of catching you off-guard with a jump scare this Halloween season, EFF is here to catch you up on the latest digital rights news with our EFFector newsletter!

In this issue, we’re helping you take control of your online privacy with Opt Out October; explaining the UK’s attack on encryption and why it’s bad for all users; and covering shocking new details about an abortion surveillance case in Texas.

Prefer to listen in? Check out our audio companion, where EFF Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski explains how small steps to protect your privacy can add up to big changes.  Catch the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

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EFFECTOR 37.14 - 🎃 A FULL MONTH OF PRIVACY TIPS FROM EFF

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

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To help mitigate climate change, companies are using bioreactors to grow algae and other microorganisms that are hundreds of times more efficient at absorbing CO2 than trees. Meanwhile, in the pharmaceutical industry, cell culture is used to manufacture biologic drugs and other advanced treatments, including lifesaving gene and cell therapies.

Both processes are hampered by cells’ tendency to stick to surfaces, which leads to a huge amount of waste and downtime for cleaning. A similar problem slows down biofuel production, interferes with biosensors and implants, and makes the food and beverage industry less efficient.

Now, MIT researchers have developed an approach for detaching cells from surfaces on demand, using electrochemically generated bubbles. In an open-access paper published in Science Advances, the researchers demonstrated their approach in a lab prototype and showed it could work across a range of cells and surfaces without harming the cells.

“We wanted to develop a technology that could be high-throughput and plug-and-play, and that would allow cells to attach and detach on demand to improve the workflow in these industrial processes,” says Professor Kripa Varanasi, senior author of the study. “This is a fundamental issue with cells, and we’ve solved it with a process that can scale. It lends itself to many different applications.”

Joining Varanasi on the study are co-first authors Bert Vandereydt, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, and former postdoc Baptiste Blanc.

Solving a sticky problem

The researchers began with a mission.

“We’ve been working on figuring out how we can efficiently capture CO2 across different sources and convert it into valuable products for various end markets,” Varanasi says. “That’s where this photobioreactor and cell detachment comes into the picture.”

Photobioreactors are used to grow carbon-absorbing algae cells by creating tightly controlled environments involving water and sunlight. They feature long, winding tubes with clear surfaces to let in the light algae need to grow. When algae stick to those surfaces, they block out the light, requiring cleaning.

“You have to shut down and clean up the entire reactor as frequently as every two weeks,” Varanasi says. “It’s a huge operational challenge.”

The researchers realized other industries have similar problem due to many cells’ natural adhesion, or stickiness. Each industry has its own solution for cell adhesion depending on how important it is that the cells survive. Some people scrape the surfaces clean, while others use special coatings that are toxic to cells.

In the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, cell detachment is typically carried out using enzymes. However, this method poses several challenges — it can damage cell membranes, is time-consuming, and requires large amounts of consumables, resulting in millions of liters of biowaste.

To create a better solution, the researchers began by studying other efforts to clear surfaces with bubbles, which mainly involved spraying bubbles onto surfaces and had been largely ineffective.

“We realized we needed the bubbles to form on the surfaces where we don’t want these cells to stick, so when the bubbles detach it creates a local fluid flow that creates shear stress at the interface and removes the cells,” Varanasi explains.

Electric currents generate bubbles by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. But previous attempts at using electricity to detach cells were hampered because the cell culture mediums contain sodium chloride, which turns into bleach when combined with an electric current. The bleach damages the cells, making it impractical for many applications.

“The culprit is the anode — that’s where the sodium chloride turns to bleach,” Vandereydt explained. “We figured if we could separate that electrode from the rest of the system, we could prevent bleach from being generated.”

To make a better system, the researchers built a 3-square-inch glass surface and deposited a gold electrode on top of it. The layer of gold is so thin it doesn’t block out light. To keep the other electrode separate, the researchers integrated a special membrane that only allows protons to pass through. The set up allowed the researchers to send a current through without generating bleach.

To test their setup, they allowed algae cells from a concentrated solution to stick to the surfaces. When they applied a voltage, the bubbles separated the cells from the surfaces without harming them.

The researchers also studied the interaction between the bubbles and cells, finding the higher the current density, the more bubbles were created and the more algae was removed. They developed a model for understanding how much current would be needed to remove algae in different settings and matched it with results from experiments involving algae as well as cells from ovarian cancer and bones.

“Mammalian cells are orders of magnitude more sensitive than algae cells, but even with those cells, we were able to detach them with no impact to the viability of the cell,” Vandereydt says.

Getting to scale

The researchers say their system could represent a breakthrough in applications where bleach or other chemicals would harm cells. That includes pharmaceutical and food production.

“If we can keep these systems running without fouling and other problems, then we can make them much more economical,” Varanasi says.

For cell culture plates used in the pharmaceutical industry, the team envisions their system comprising an electrode that could be robotically moved from one culture plate to the next, to detach cells as they’re grown. It could also be coiled around algae harvesting systems.

“This has general applicability because it doesn’t rely on any specific biological or chemical treatments, but on a physical force that is system-agnostic,” Varanasi says. “It’s also highly scalable to a lot of different processes, including particle removal.”

Varanasi cautions there is much work to be done to scale up the system. But he hopes it can one day make algae and other cell harvesting more efficient.

“The burning problem of our time is to somehow capture CO2 in a way that’s economically feasible,” Varanasi says. “These photobioreactors could be used for that, but we have to overcome the cell adhesion problem.”

The work was supported, in part, by Eni S.p.A through the MIT Energy Initiative, the Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship, and the Maria Zambrano Fellowship.

Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core part of her life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through high school.

“For most of my life, writing and playing music was the clearest way I had to express myself,” says Lecamwasam. “I was a really shy and anxious kid, and I struggled with speaking up for myself. Over time, composing and performing music became central to both how I communicated and to how I managed my own mental health.”

Along with equipping her with valuable skills and experiences, she credits her passion for music as the catalyst for her interest in neuroscience.

“I got to see firsthand not only the ways that audiences reacted to music, but also how much value music had for musicians,” she says. “That close connection between making music and feeling well is what first pushed me to ask why music has such a powerful hold on us, and eventually led me to study the science behind it.”

Lecamwasam earned a bachelor’s degree in 2021 from Wellesley College, where she studied neuroscience — specifically in the Systems and Computational Neuroscience track — and also music. During her first semester, she took a class in songwriting that she says made her more aware of the connections between music and emotions. While studying at Wellesley, she participated in the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for three years. Working in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences lab of Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, she focused primarily on classifying consciousness in anesthetized patients and training brain-computer interface-enabled prosthetics using reinforcement learning.

“I still had a really deep love for music, which I was pursuing in parallel to all of my neuroscience work, but I really wanted to try to find a way to combine both of those things in grad school,” says Lecamwasam. Brown recommended that she look into the graduate programs at the MIT Media Lab within the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), which turned out to be an ideal fit.

“One thing I really love about where I am is that I get to be both an artist and a scientist,” says Lecamwasam. “That was something that was important to me when I was picking a graduate program. I wanted to make sure that I was going to be able to do work that was really rigorous, validated, and important, but also get to do cool, creative explorations and actually put the research that I was doing into practice in different ways.”

Exploring the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of music

Informed by her years of neuroscience research as an undergraduate and her passion for music, Lecamwasam focused her graduate research on harnessing the emotional potency of music into scalable, non-pharmacological mental health tools. Her master’s thesis focused on “pharmamusicology,” looking at how music might positively affect the physiology and psychology of those with anxiety.

The overarching theme of Lecamwasam’s research is exploring the various impacts of music and affective computing — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Now in the third year of her doctoral program in the Opera of the Future group, she is currently investigating the impact of large-scale live music and concert experiences on the mental health and well-being of both audience members and performers. She is also working to clinically validate music listening, composition, and performance as health interventions, in combination with psychotherapy and pharmaceutical interventions.

Her recent work, in collaboration with Professor Anna Huang’s Human-AI Resonance Lab, assesses the emotional resonance of AI-generated music compared to human-composed music; the aim is to identify more ethical applications of emotion-sensitive music generation and recommendation that preserve human creativity and agency, and can also be used as health interventions. She has co-led a wellness and music workshop at the Wellbeing Summit in Bilbao, Spain, and has presented her work at the 2023 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany and the 2024 Audio Mostly conference in Milan, Italy. 

Lecamwasam has collaborated with organizations near and far to implement real-world applications of her research. She worked with Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute on its Well-Being Concerts and is currently partnering on a study assessing the impact of lullaby writing on perinatal health with the North Shore Lullaby Project in Massachusetts, an offshoot of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. Her main international collaboration is with a company called Myndstream, working on projects comparing the emotional resonance of AI-generated music to human-composed music and thinking of clinical and real-world applications. She is also working on a project with the companies PixMob and Empatica (an MIT Media Lab spinoff), centered on assessing the impact of interactive lighting and large-scale live music experiences on emotional resonance in stadium and arena settings.

Building community

“Kimy combines a deep love for — and sophisticated knowledge of — music with scientific curiosity and rigor in ways that represent the Media Lab/MAS spirit at its best,” says Professor Tod Machover, Lecamwasam’s research advisor, Media Lab faculty director, and director of the Opera of the Future group. “She has long believed that music is one of the most powerful and effective ways to create personalized interventions to help stabilize emotional distress and promote empathy and connection. It is this same desire to establish sane, safe, and sustaining environments for work and play that has led Kimy to become one of the most effective and devoted community-builders at the lab.”

Lecamwasam has participated in the SOS (Students Offering Support) program in MAS for a few years, which assists students from a variety of life experiences and backgrounds during the process of applying to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She will soon be the first MAS peer mentor as part of a new initiative through which she will establish and coordinate programs including a “buddy system,” pairing incoming master’s students with PhD students as a way to help them transition into graduate student life at MIT. She is also part of the Media Lab’s Studcom, a student-run organization that promotes, facilitates, and creates experiences meant to bring the community together.

“I think everything that I have gotten to do has been so supported by the friends I’ve made in my lab and department, as well as across departments,” says Lecamwasam. “I think everyone is just really excited about the work that they do and so supportive of one another. It makes it so that even when things are challenging or difficult, I’m motivated to do this work and be a part of this community.”

Apple is now offering a $2M bounty for a zero-click exploit. According to the Apple website:

Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards.

1. We’re doubling our top award to $2 million for exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks. This is an unprecedented amount in the industry and the largest payout offered by any bounty program we’re aware of ­ and our bonus system, providing additional rewards for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities discovered in beta software, can more than double this reward, with a maximum payout in excess of $5 million. We’re also doubling or significantly increasing rewards in many other categories to encourage more intensive research. This includes $100,000 for a complete Gatekeeper bypass, and $1 million for broad unauthorized iCloud access, as no successful exploit has been demonstrated to date in either category. ...

Kevin Guthrie operates "Alligator Alcatraz." Some emergency managers worry that could scare Hispanic residents away from seeking help in a hurricane or other disaster.

The sharply worded ruling came after the judge said administration officials ignored his earlier decision barring Federal Emergency Management Agency from forcing states to participate in immigration enforcement activities.

Information from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program has grown spotty, some researchers say.

Gavin Newsom has a year left as California governor to pass headline-grabbing legislation — and he’s tightening his grip on in-state Democrats to do it.

Leases are about to expire for as many as 2 million electric vehicles. Their drivers got a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act.

The city is relaxing its deadlines for its ambitious law to cap building emissions

The measure emerged in direct response to Caltrain’s sale of retired diesel locomotives to Peru.

A factory on the edge of the EU needs to prove that the bloc can reduce its reliance on China while ensuring a future for fossil fuel workers.

A Parliament committee voted to expand the number of employees that companies must have to trigger corporate sustainability directives.

People tend to think of quantum materials — whose properties arise from quantum mechanical effects — as exotic curiosities. But some quantum materials have become a ubiquitous part of our computer hard drives, TV screens, and medical devices. Still, the vast majority of quantum materials never accomplish much outside of the lab.

What makes certain quantum materials commercial successes and others commercially irrelevant? If researchers knew, they could direct their efforts toward more promising materials — a big deal since they may spend years studying a single material.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a system for evaluating the scale-up potential of quantum materials. Their framework combines a material’s quantum behavior with its cost, supply chain resilience, environmental footprint, and other factors. The researchers used their framework to evaluate over 16,000 materials, finding that the materials with the highest quantum fluctuation in the centers of their electrons also tend to be more expensive and environmentally damaging. The researchers also identified a set of materials that achieve a balance between quantum functionality and sustainability for further study.

The team hopes their approach will help guide the development of more commercially viable quantum materials that could be used for next generation microelectronics, energy harvesting applications, medical diagnostics, and more.

“People studying quantum materials are very focused on their properties and quantum mechanics,” says Mingda Li, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and the senior author of the work. “For some reason, they have a natural resistance during fundamental materials research to thinking about the costs and other factors. Some told me they think those factors are too ‘soft’ or not related to science. But I think within 10 years, people will routinely be thinking about cost and environmental impact at every stage of development.”

The paper appears in Materials Today. Joining Li on the paper are co-first authors and PhD students Artittaya Boonkird, Mouyang Cheng, and Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk, along with PhD students Denisse Cordova Carrizales and Ryotaro Okabe; former graduate research assistants Thanh Nguyen and Nathan Drucker; postdoc Manasi Mandal; Instructor Ellan Spero of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Professor Christine Ortiz of the Department of DMSE; Professor Liang Fu of the Department of Physics; Professor Tomas Palacios of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Associate Professor Farnaz Niroui of EECS; Assistant Professor Jingjie Yeo of Cornell University; and PhD student Vsevolod Belosevich and Assostant Professor Qiong Ma of Boston College.

Materials with impact

Cheng and Boonkird say that materials science researchers often gravitate toward quantum materials with the most exotic quantum properties rather than the ones most likely to be used in products that change the world.

“Researchers don’t always think about the costs or environmental impacts of the materials they study,” Cheng says. “But those factors can make them impossible to do anything with.”

Li and his collaborators wanted to help researchers focus on quantum materials with more potential to be adopted by industry. For this study, they developed methods for evaluating factors like the materials’ price and environmental impact using their elements and common practices for mining and processing those elements. At the same time, they quantified the materials’ level of “quantumness” using an AI model created by the same group last year, based on a concept proposed by MIT professor of physics Liang Fu, termed quantum weight.

“For a long time, it’s been unclear how to quantify the quantumness of a material,” Fu says. “Quantum weight is very useful for this purpose. Basically, the higher the quantum weight of a material, the more quantum it is.”

The researchers focused on a class of quantum materials with exotic electronic properties known as topological materials, eventually assigning over 16,000 materials scores on environmental impact, price, import resilience, and more.

For the first time, the researchers found a strong correlation between the material’s quantum weight and how expensive and environmentally damaging it is.

“That’s useful information because the industry really wants something very low-cost,” Spero says. “We know what we should be looking for: high quantum weight, low-cost materials. Very few materials being developed meet that criteria, and that likely explains why they don’t scale to industry.”

The researchers identified 200 environmentally sustainable materials and further refined the list down to 31 material candidates that achieved an optimal balance of quantum functionality and high-potential impact.

The researchers also found that several widely studied materials exhibit high environmental impact scores, indicating they will be hard to scale sustainably. “Considering the scalability of manufacturing and environmental availability and impact is critical to ensuring practical adoption of these materials in emerging technologies,” says Niroui.

Guiding research

Many of the topological materials evaluated in the paper have never been synthesized, which limited the accuracy of the study’s environmental and cost predictions. But the authors say the researchers are already working with companies to study some of the promising materials identified in the paper.

“We talked with people at semiconductor companies that said some of these materials were really interesting to them, and our chemist collaborators also identified some materials they find really interesting through this work,” Palacios says. “Now we want to experimentally study these cheaper topological materials to understand their performance better.”

“Solar cells have an efficiency limit of 34 percent, but many topological materials have a theoretical limit of 89 percent. Plus, you can harvest energy across all electromagnetic bands, including our body heat,” Fu says. “If we could reach those limits, you could easily charge your cell phone using body heat. These are performances that have been demonstrated in labs, but could never scale up. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to push forward."

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02448-1

Glacier microclimates can decouple glacier temperatures from ongoing climatic warming, slowing down melting. However, these microclimates will decay as glaciers retreat. A statistical model indicates that by the latter half of the twenty-first century, the temperature of glaciers will be increasingly sensitive to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature.

Earthquakes often bring to mind images of destruction, of the Earth breaking open and altering landscapes. But after an earthquake, the area around it undergoes a period of post-seismic deformation, where areas that didn’t break experience new stress as a result of the sudden change in the surroundings. Once it has adjusted to this new stress, it reaches a state of recovery.

Geologists have often thought that this recovery period was a smooth, continuous process. But MIT research published recently in Science has found evidence that while healing occurs quickly at shallow depths — roughly above 10 km — deeper depths recover more slowly, if at all.

“If you were to look before and after in the shallow crust, you wouldn’t see any permanent change. But there’s this very permanent change that persists in the mid-crust,” says Jared Bryan, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and lead author on the paper.

The paper’s other authors include EAPS Professor William Frank and Pascal Audet from the University of Ottawa.

Everything but the quakes

In order to assemble a full understanding of how the crust behaves before, during, and after an earthquake sequence, the researchers looked at seismic data from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes in California. This immature fault zone experienced the largest earthquake in the state in 20 years, and tens of thousands of aftershocks over the following year. They then removed seismic data created by the sequence and only looked at waves generated by other seismic activity around the world to see how their paths through the Earth changed before and after the sequence.

“One person’s signal is another person’s noise,” says Bryan. They also used general ambient noise from sources like ocean waves and traffic that are also picked up by seismometers. Then, using a technique called a receiver function, they were able to see the speed of the waves as they traveled and how it changed due to conditions in the Earth such as rock density and porosity, much in the same way we use sonar to see how acoustic waves change when they interact with objects. With all this information, they were able to construct basic maps of the Earth around the Ridgecrest fault zone before and after the sequence.

What they found was that the shallow crust, extending about 10 km into the Earth, recovered over the course of a few months. In contrast, deeper depths in the mid-crust didn’t experience immediate damage, but rather changed over the same timescale as shallow depths recovered.

“What was surprising is that the healing in the shallow crust was so quick, and then you have this complementary accumulation occurring, not at the time of the earthquake, but instead over the post-seismic phase,” says Bryan.

Balancing the energy budget

Understanding how recovery plays out at different depths is crucial for determining how energy is spent during different parts of the seismic process, which includes activities such as the release of energy as waves, the creation of new fractures, or energy being stored elastically in the surrounding areas. Altogether, this is collectively known as the energy budget, and it is a useful tool for understanding how damage accumulates and recovers over time.

What remains unclear is the timescales at which deeper depths recover, if at all. The paper presents two possible scenarios to explain why that might be: one in which the deep crust recovers over a much longer timescale than they observed, or one where it never recovers at all.

“Either of those are not what we expected,” says Frank. “And both of them are interesting.”

Further research will require more observations to build out a more detailed picture to see at what depth the change becomes more pronounced. In addition, Bryan wants to look at other areas, such as more mature faults that experience higher levels of seismic activity, to see if it changes the results.

“We’ll let you know in 1,000 years whether it’s recovered,” says Bryan.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced that two MIT affiliates have been named 2025 Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering. Darcy McRose, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been honored, along with Mehtaab Sawhney ’20, PhD ’24, a graduate of the Department of Mathematics who is now at Columbia University. 

The honorees are among 20 junior faculty named among the nation’s most innovative early-career scientists and engineers. Each Packard Fellow receives an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years to support their pursuit of pioneering research and bold new ideas.

“I’m incredibly grateful and honored to be awarded a Packard Fellowship,” says McRose. “It will allow us to continue our work exploring how small molecules control microbial communities in soils and on plant roots, with much-appreciated flexibility to follow our imagination wherever it leads us.”

McRose and her lab study secondary metabolites — small organic molecules that microbes and plants release into soils. Often known as antibiotics, these compounds do far more than fight infections; they can help unlock soil nutrients, shape microbial communities around plant roots, and influence soil fertility.

“Antibiotics made by soil microorganisms are widely used in medicine, but we know surprisingly little about what they do in nature,” explains McRose. “Just as healthy microbiomes support human health, plant microbiomes support plant health, and secondary metabolites can help to regulate the microbial community, suppressing pathogens and promoting beneficial microbes.” 

Her lab integrates techniques from genetics, chemistry, and geosciences to investigate how these molecules shape interactions between microbes and plants in soil — one of Earth’s most complex and least-understood environments. By using secondary metabolites as experimental tools, McRose aims to uncover the molecular mechanisms that govern processes like soil fertility and nutrient cycling that are foundational to sustainable agriculture and ecosystem health.

Studying antibiotics in the environments where they evolved could also yield new strategies for combating soil-borne pathogens and improving crop resilience. “Soil is a true scientific frontier,” McRose says. “Studying these environments has the potential to reveal fascinating, fundamental insights into microbial life — many of which we can’t even imagine yet.”

A native of California, McRose earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in geosciences from Princeton University. Her graduate thesis focused on how bacteria acquire trace metals from the environment. Her postdoctoral research on secondary metabolites at Caltech was supported by multiple fellowships, including the Simons Foundation Marine Microbial Ecology Postdoctoral Fellowship, the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship, and a Division Fellowship from Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech.

McRose joined the MIT faculty in 2022. In 2025, she was named a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in Earth System Science and awarded the Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award.

Past Packard Fellows have gone on to earn the highest honors, including Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics, the Fields Medal, Alan T. Waterman Awards, Breakthrough Prizes, Kavli Prizes, and elections to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Each year, the foundation reviews 100 nominations for consideration from 50 invited institutions. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends 20 fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.