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Conservative premiers go to war with Trudeau climate tax
Oil giants plan to bury massive amounts of CO2 in Southeast Asia
China’s latest EV is a ‘connected’ car from smartphone maker Xiaomi
Ageing population and green space dynamics for climate change adaptation in Southeast Asia
Nature Climate Change, Published online: 29 March 2024; doi:10.1038/s41558-024-01980-w
Rapid population ageing is challenging for climate adaptation. Considering ageing demographics and green infrastructure development in 26,885 Southeast Asian communities, the authors find a reduction in green space in ageing communities, especially in socio-economically disadvantaged areas, with implications for vulnerability.Shining a light on oil fields to make them more sustainable
Operating an oil field is complex and there is a staggeringly long list of things that can go wrong.
One of the most common problems is spills of the salty brine that’s a toxic byproduct of pumping oil. Another is over- or under-pumping that can lead to machine failure and methane leaks. (The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial emitter of methane in the U.S.) Then there are extreme weather events, which range from winter frosts to blazing heat, that can put equipment out of commission for months. One of the wildest problems Sebastien Mannai SM ’14, PhD ’18 has encountered are hogs that pop open oil tanks with their snouts to enjoy on-demand oil baths.
Mannai helps oil field owners detect and respond to these problems while optimizing the operation of their machinery to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place. He is the founder and CEO of Amplified Industries, a company selling oil field monitoring and control tools that help make the industry more efficient and sustainable.
Amplified Industries’ sensors and analytics give oil well operators real-time alerts when things go wrong, allowing them to respond to issues before they become disasters.
“We’re able to find 99 percent of the issues affecting these machines, from mechanical failures to human errors, including issues happening thousands of feet underground,” Mannai explains. “With our AI solution, operators can put the wells on autopilot, and the system automatically adjusts or shuts the well down as soon as there’s an issue.”
Amplified currently works with private companies in states spanning from Texas to Wyoming, that own and operate as many as 3,000 wells. Such companies make up the majority of oil well operators in the U.S. and operate both new and older, more failure-prone equipment that has been in the field for decades.
Such operators also have a harder time responding to environmental regulations like the Environmental Protection Agency’s new methane guidelines, which seek to dramatically reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas in the industry over the next few years.
“These operators don’t want to be releasing methane,” Mannai explains. “Additionally, when gas gets into the pumping equipment, it leads to premature failures. We can detect gas and slow the pump down to prevent it. It’s the best of both worlds: The operators benefit because their machines are working better, saving them money while also giving them a smaller environmental footprint with fewer spills and methane leaks.”
Leveraging “every MIT resource I possibly could”
Mannai learned about the cutting-edge technology used in the space and aviation industries as he pursued his master’s degree at the Gas Turbine Laboratory in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Then, during his PhD at MIT, he worked with an oil services company and discovered the oil and gas industry was still relying on decades-old technologies and equipment.
“When I first traveled to the field, I could not believe how old-school the actual operations were,” says Mannai, who has previously worked in rocket engine and turbine factories. “A lot of oil wells have to be adjusted by feel and rules of thumb. The operators have been let down by industrial automation and data companies.”
Monitoring oil wells for problems typically requires someone in a pickup truck to drive hundreds of miles between wells looking for obvious issues, Mannai says. The sensors that are deployed are expensive and difficult to replace. Over time, they’re also often damaged in the field to the point of being unusable, forcing technicians to make educated guesses about the status of each well.
“We often see that equipment unplugged or programmed incorrectly because it is incredibly over-complicated and ill-designed for the reality of the field,” Mannai says. “Workers on the ground often have to rip it out and bypass the control system to pump by hand. That’s how you end up with so many spills and wells pumping at suboptimal levels.”
To build a better oil field monitoring system, Mannai received support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund and the Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). He also participated in the delta V summer accelerator at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, the fuse program during IAP, and the MIT I-Corps program, and took a number of classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2019, Amplified Industries — which operated under the name Acoustic Wells until recently — won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition.
“My approach was to sign up to every possible entrepreneurship related program and to leverage every MIT resource I possibly could,” Mannai says. “MIT was amazing for us.”
Mannai officially launched the company after his postdoc at MIT, and Amplified raised its first round of funding in early 2020. That year, Amplified’s small team moved into the Greentown Labs startup incubator in Somerville.
Mannai says building the company’s battery-powered, low-cost sensors was a huge challenge. The sensors run machine-learning inference models and their batteries last for 10 years. They also had to be able to handle extreme conditions, from the scorching hot New Mexico desert to the swamps of Louisiana and the freezing cold winters in North Dakota.
“We build very rugged, resilient hardware; it’s a must in those environments” Mannai says. “But it’s also very simple to deploy, so if a device does break, it’s like changing a lightbulb: We ship them a new one and it takes them a couple of minutes to swap it out.”
Customers equip each well with four or five of Amplified’s sensors, which attach to the well’s cables and pipes to measure variables like tension, pressure, and amps. Vast amounts of data are then sent to Amplified’s cloud and processed by their analytics engine. Signal processing methods and AI models are used to diagnose problems and control the equipment in real-time, while generating notifications for the operators when something goes wrong. Operators can then remotely adjust the well or shut it down.
“That’s where AI is important, because if you just record everything and put it in a giant dashboard, you create way more work for people,” Mannai says. “The critical part is the ability to process and understand this newly recorded data and make it readily usable in the real world.”
Amplified’s dashboard is customized for different people in the company, so field technicians can quickly respond to problems and managers or owners can get a high-level view of how everything is running.
Mannai says often when Amplified’s sensors are installed, they’ll immediately start detecting problems that were unknown to engineers and technicians in the field. To date, Amplified has prevented hundreds of thousands of gallons worth of brine water spills, which are particularly damaging to surrounding vegetation because of their high salt and sulfur content.
Preventing those spills is only part of Amplified’s positive environmental impact; the company is now turning its attention toward the detection of methane leaks.
Helping a changing industry
The EPA’s proposed new Waste Emissions Charge for oil and gas companies would start at $900 per metric ton of reported methane emissions in 2024 and increase to $1,500 per metric ton in 2026 and beyond.
Mannai says Amplified is well-positioned to help companies comply with the new rules. Its equipment has already showed it can detect various kinds of leaks across the field, purely based on analytics of existing data.
“Detecting methane leaks typically requires someone to walk around every valve and piece of piping with a thermal camera or sniffer, but these operators often have thousands of valves and hundreds of miles of pipes,” Mannai says. “What we see in the field is that a lot of times people don’t know where the pipes are because oil wells change owners so frequently, or they will miss an intermittent leak.”
Ultimately Mannai believes a strong data backend and modernized sensing equipment will become the backbone of the industry, and is a necessary prerequisite to both improving efficiency and cleaning up the industry.
“We’re selling a service that ensures your equipment is working optimally all the time,” Mannai says. “That means a lot fewer fines from the EPA, but it also means better-performing equipment. There’s a mindset change happening across the industry, and we’re helping make that transition as easy and affordable as possible.”
“Life is short, so aim high”
When Rafael Jaramillo talks about his favorite accomplishments, it quickly becomes clear that he has the right temperament for a researcher — he is energized by a challenge and the prospect of hard work.
“I am proudest of things that required risky strategic thinking, followed by years of technical slog, followed by validation,” says Jaramillo, the Thomas Lord Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Not even the fear of failure deters him. Referring to his work developing new semiconductor materials, he says, “It’s often a fool’s errand to try to replace silicon in any particular application. Time will tell if I spend a career making a fool of myself.”
Of course, Jaramillo is being modest. He has received several significant awards, and in 2021 he and other researchers in his lab succeeded in creating thin, high-quality films using a new family of semiconductor materials, which could be useful in such products as solar cells and environmentally benign LEDs. The materials, called chalcogenide perovskites, are extremely stable and are made of inexpensive, nontoxic elements.
The son of two musicians, Jaramillo grew up attending schools in Brookline, Massachusetts. A second-grade classmate was the son of MIT professor and cosmologist Alan Guth, who volunteered to meet with students in the class and answer their questions about space. Having made a point to check out every library book on space and astronomy, Jaramillo didn’t hold back, and asked Guth about the size of the universe at the earliest stages of the Big Bang.
“He was very kind and patient,” Jaramillo says.
Over the years, Jaramillo’s fascination with space transformed into a love of physics, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in applied and engineering physics at Cornell University and his PhD in physics at the University of Chicago.
Jaramillo says he studied physics “because it satisfied a compulsive need to understand and explain things at a certain level of simplicity.”
“I like physics because I like the methods of physics — the habits of mind, the problem-solving strategies, the experiments,” he says. “Physicists like to tell themselves that they can always figure things out from first principles, and that their field is the opposite of rote memorization.”
A longtime environmentalist with a desire to help society to move beyond reliance on fossil fuels, Jaramillo wanted to focus his knowledge on low-carbon energy after earning his PhD.
“I want to pass on to my kids a world at least as lovely and diverse as I’ve enjoyed and, like most people, I’m worried for the future of our planet,” he says. “Different people can and should bring different disciplinary backgrounds and skillsets to bear on problems of shared importance — it takes a village to solve the hardest ones.”
Jaramillo says that his having switched fields from physics into materials science highlighted some beneficial connections in his work: “I’m sure that some of my ideas, if they contain originality, it’s because I may have a different perspective than others in my field.”
Nonetheless, the switch involved some heavy lifting during two postdocs.
Wanting to engage in solar cell research, “I had to be intentional about seeing postdoc opportunities where I would learn a thing or two about semiconductors, materials science, device optimization, energy technologies, and techno-economies,” Jaramillo says, adding that he read and took notes on hundreds of pages of textbooks “in an attempt to catch up to people around me who always seemed to know more useful things than I did, probably because they did their PhD work in the field.”
Jaramillo conducted postdoctoral research at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as well as at MIT with Tonio Buonassisi, a professor of mechanical engineering and an expert in solar photovoltaics. Jaramillo joined the MIT faculty in 2015 and recently earned tenure.
His current research on new materials could improve the economics and reduce the environmental footprint of semiconductors used in such applications as telecommunications, microelectronics, and photovoltaics.
“We’re butting up against the limitations of the tried-and-true materials,” Jaramillo said in a previous interview with MIT News. “That’s exciting because it means you get to dive in and think about new materials.”
Also exciting to Jaramillo is the increasing worldwide attention devoted to the kind of research he and his lab have been conducting on chalcogenide perovskites for solar cells.
“It used to be a quiet and somewhat lonely field, so I welcome the new community and the competition,” he says. “We took on a lot of risk and delayed gratification for a long time for that project. Now it’s churning out results. If we continue to work quite hard, and if we catch a lot of breaks, it’s possible that chalcogenide perovskite solar cells will contribute meaningfully to the continued expansion of global solar power generation.”
Always the determined researcher, Jaramillo encourages MIT students — who, he is quick to point out, share his high level of motivation — to shoot for the stars.
“I’d say life is short, so aim high,” he says. “As scientists and engineers, that means tackling the hard problems because the easy ones have been solved and, besides, there’s little satisfaction in them.”
Restricting Flipper is a Zero Accountability Approach to Security: Canadian Government Response to Car Hacking
On February 8, François-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced Canada would ban devices used in keyless car theft. The only device mentioned by name was the Flipper Zero—the multitool device that can be used to test, explore, and debug different wireless protocols such as RFID, NFC, infrared, and Bluetooth.
EFF explores toilet hacking
While it is useful as a penetration testing device, Flipper Zero is impractical in comparison to other, more specialized devices for car theft. It’s possible social media hype around the Flipper Zero has led people to believe that this device offers easier hacking opportunities for car thieves*. But government officials are also consuming such hype. That leads to policies that don’t secure systems, but rather impedes important research that exposes potential vulnerabilities the industry should fix. Even with Canada walking back on the original statement outright banning the devices, restricting devices and sales to “move forward with measures to restrict the use of such devices to legitimate actors only” is troublesome for security researchers.
This is not the first government seeking to limit access to Flipper Zero, and we have explained before why this approach is not only harmful to security researchers but also leaves the general population more vulnerable to attacks. Security researchers may not have the specialized tools car thieves use at their disposal, so more general tools come in handy for catching and protecting against vulnerabilities. Broad purpose devices such as the Flipper have a wide range of uses: penetration testing to facilitate hardening of a home network or organizational infrastructure, hardware research, security research, protocol development, use by radio hobbyists, and many more. Restricting access to these devices will hamper development of strong, secure technologies.
When Brazil’s national telecoms regulator Anatel refused to certify the Flipper Zero and as a result prevented the national postal service from delivering the devices, they were responding to media hype. With a display and controls reminiscent of portable video game consoles, the compact form-factor and range of hardware (including an infrared transceiver, RFID reader/emulator, SDR and Bluetooth LE module) made the device an easy target to demonize. While conjuring imagery of point-and-click car theft was easy, citing examples of this actually occurring proved impossible. Over a year later, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single instance of a car being stolen with the device. The number of cars stolen with the Flipper seems to amount to, well, zero (pun intended). It is the same media hype and pure speculation that has led Canadian regulators to err in their judgment to ban these devices.
Still worse, law enforcement in other countries have signaled their own intentions to place owners of the device under greater scrutiny. The Brisbane Times quotes police in Queensland, Australia: “We’re aware it can be used for criminal means, so if you’re caught with this device we’ll be asking some serious questions about why you have this device and what you are using it for.” We assume other tools with similar capabilities, as well as Swiss Army Knives and Sharpie markers, all of which “can be used for criminal means,” will not face this same level of scrutiny. Just owning this device, whether as a hobbyist or professional—or even just as a curious customer—should not make one the subject of overzealous police suspicions.
It wasn’t too long ago that proficiency with the command line was seen as a dangerous skill that warranted intervention by authorities. And just as with those fears of decades past, the small grain of truth embedded in the hype and fears gives it an outsized power. Can the command line be used to do bad things? Of course. Can the Flipper Zero assist criminal activity? Yes. Can it be used to steal cars? Not nearly as well as many other (and better, from the criminals’ perspective) tools. Does that mean it should be banned, and that those with this device should be placed under criminal suspicion? Absolutely not.
We hope Canada wises up to this logic, and comes to view the device as just one of many in the toolbox that can be used for good or evil, but mostly for good.
*Though concerns have been raised about Flipper Devices' connection to the Russian state apparatus, no unexpected data has been observed escaping to Flipper Devices' servers, and much of the dedicated security and pen-testing hardware which hasn't been banned also suffers from similar problems.
Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas
To achieve the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — limiting the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — will require its 196 signatories to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Those greenhouse gases differ widely in their global warming potential (GWP), or ability to absorb radiative energy and thereby warm the Earth’s surface. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWP of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times that of CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report.
Used primarily in high-voltage electrical switchgear in electric power grids, SF6 is one of the most potent greenhouse gases on Earth. In the 21st century, atmospheric concentrations of SF6 have risen sharply along with global electric power demand, threatening the world’s efforts to stabilize the climate. This heightened demand for electric power is particularly pronounced in China, which has dominated the expansion of the global power industry in the past decade. Quantifying China’s contribution to global SF6 emissions — and pinpointing its sources in the country — could lead that nation to implement new measures to reduce them, and thereby reduce, if not eliminate, an impediment to the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal.
To that end, a new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Fudan University, Peking University, University of Bristol, and Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration determined total SF6 emissions in China over 2011-21 from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, involving additional researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and CSIRO, Australia's National Science Agency.
The researchers found that SF6 emissions in China almost doubled from 2.6 gigagrams (Gg) per year in 2011, when they accounted for 34 percent of global SF6 emissions, to 5.1 Gg per year in 2021, when they accounted for 57 percent of global total SF6 emissions. This increase from China over the 10-year period — some of it emerging from the country’s less-populated western regions — was larger than the global total SF6 emissions rise, highlighting the importance of lowering SF6 emissions from China in the future.
The open-access study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, explores prospects for future SF6 emissions reduction in China.
“Adopting maintenance practices that minimize SF6 leakage rates or using SF6-free equipment or SF6 substitutes in the electric power grid will benefit greenhouse-gas mitigation in China,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and the study’s lead author. “We see our findings as a first step in quantifying the problem and identifying how it can be addressed.”
Emissions of SF6 are expected to last more than 1,000 years in the atmosphere, raising the stakes for policymakers in China and around the world.
“Any increase in SF6 emissions this century will effectively alter our planet’s radiative budget — the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from the Earth — far beyond the multi-decadal time frame of current climate policies,” says MIT Joint Program and CGCS Director Ronald Prinn, a coauthor of the study. “So it’s imperative that China and all other nations take immediate action to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their SF6 emissions.”
The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and Shanghai B&R Joint Laboratory Project, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other funding agencies.
Second round of seed grants awarded to MIT scholars studying the impact and applications of generative AI
Last summer, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart issued a call for papers to “articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI.” The response to the call far exceeded expectations with 75 proposals submitted. Of those, 27 proposals were selected for seed funding.
In light of this enthusiastic response, Kornbluth and Barnhart announced a second call for proposals this fall.
“The groundswell of interest and the caliber of the ideas overall made clear that a second round was in order,” they said in their email to MIT’s research community this fall. This second call for proposals resulted in 53 submissions.
Following the second call, the faculty committee from the first round considered the proposals and selected 16 proposals to receive exploratory funding. Co-authored by interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers affiliated with all five of the Institute’s schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the proposals offer insights and perspectives on the potential impact and applications of generative AI across a broad range of topics and disciplines.
Each selected research group will receive between $50,000 and $70,000 to create 10-page impact papers. Those papers will be shared widely via a publication venue managed and hosted by the MIT Press under the auspices of the MIT Open Publishing Services program.
As with the first round of papers, Thomas Tull, a member of the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and a former innovation scholar at the School of Engineering, contributed funding to support the effort.
The selected papers are:
- “A Road-map for End-to-end Privacy and Verifiability in Generative AI,” led by Alex Pentland, Srini Devadas, Lalana Kagal, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan;
- “A Virtuous Cycle: Generative AI and Discovery in the Physical Sciences,” led by Philip Harris and Phiala Shanahan;
- “Artificial Cambrian Intelligence: Generating New Forms of Visual Intelligence,” led by Ramesh Raskar and Tomaso A. Poggio;
- “Artificial Fictions and the Value of AI-Generated Art,” led by Justin Khoo;
- “GenAI for Improving Human-to-human Interactions with a Focus on Negotiations,” led by Lawrence Susskind;
- “Generative AI as a New Applications Platform and Ecosystem,” led by Michael Cusumano;
- “Generative AI for Cities: A Civic Engagement Playbook,” led by Sarah Williams, Sara Beery, and Eden Medina;
- “Generative AI for Textile Engineering: Advanced Materials from Heritage Lace Craft,” led by Svetlana V. Boriskina;
- “Generative AI Impact for Biomedical Innovation and Drug Discovery,” led by Manolis Kellis, Brad Pentelute, and Marinka Zitnik;
- “Impact of Generative AI on the Creative Economy,” led by Ashia Wilson and Dylan Hadfield-Menell;
- “Redefining Virtuosity: The Role of Generative AI in Live Music Performances,” led by Joseph A. Paradiso and Eran Egozy;
- “Reflection-based Learning with Generative AI,” led by Stefanie Mueller;
- “Robust and Reliable Systems for Generative AI,” led by Shafi Goldwasser, Yael Kalai, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan;
- “Supporting the Aging Population with Generative AI,” led by Pattie Maes;
- “The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI,” led by Danny Fox, Yoon Kim, and Roger Levy; and
- “Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI,” led by Caroline Jones and Huma Gupta.
VIAVI Solutions joins MIT.nano Consortium
VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.
With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.
“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”
With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.
“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”
The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:
- Analog Devices
- Edwards
- Fujikura
- IBM Research
- Lam Research
- Lockheed Martin
- NC
- NEC
- Raith
- Shell
- UpNano
MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.
Hardware Vulnerability in Apple’s M-Series Chips
It’s yet another hardware side-channel attack:
The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually needed, the DMP, as the feature is abbreviated, reduces latency between the main memory and the CPU, a common bottleneck in modern computing. DMPs are a relatively new phenomenon found only in M-series chips and Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake microarchitecture, although older forms of prefetchers have been common for years...