The Brooklyn indie art-punk group, Two-Man Giant Squid, just released a new album.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

The MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering Breakerspace transformed into an art gallery on March 10, with six easels arranged in an arc to showcase arresting images — black-and-white scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of crumpled biological structures alongside the brilliant hues of digital optical microscopy.

The images were the winning entries from the inaugural Breakerspace Microscope Image Contest, which opened in fall 2024. The contest invited all MIT undergraduates to train on the Breakerspace’s microscopic instruments, explore material samples, and capture images that were artistic, instructive, or technically challenging.

“The goal of the contest is to inspire curiosity and creativity, encouraging students to explore the imaging tools in the Breakerspace,” says Professor Jeffrey Grossman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We want students to see the beauty and complexity of materials at the microscopic level, to think critically about the images they capture, and to communicate what they mean to others.”

Grossman was a driving force behind the Breakerspace, a laboratory and lounge designed to encourage MIT undergraduates to explore the world of materials.

The contest drew about 50 entries across four categories:

• Most Instructive, for images illustrating key concepts with documentation
• Most Challenging, requiring significant sample preparation
• Best Optical Microscope Image of a sample, rendered in color
• Best Electron Microscope Image, magnified hundreds or even thousands of times

Winners in the four categories received $500, and two runners-up received $100.

“By making this a competition with prizes, we hope to motivate more students to explore microscopy and develop a stronger connection to the materials science community at MIT,” Grossman says.

A window onto research

Amelia How, a DMSE sophomore and winner of the Most Instructive category, used an SEM to show how hydrogen atoms seep into titanium — a phenomenon called hydrogen embrittlement, which can weaken metals and lead to material failure in applications such as aerospace, energy, or construction. The image stemmed from How’s research in Associate Professor Cem Tasan’s research lab, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). She trained on the SEM for the contest after seeing an email announcement.

“It helped me realize how to explain what I was actually doing,” How says, “because the work that I’m doing is something that’s going into a paper, but most people won’t end up reading that.”

Mishael Quraishi, a DMSE senior and winner of Best SEM Image, captured the flower Alstroemeria and its pollen-bearing structure, the anther. She entered the contest mainly to explore microscopy — but sharing that experience was just as rewarding.

“I really love how electron images look,” Quraishi says. “But as I was taking the images, I was also able to show people what pollen looked like at a really small scale — it’s kind of unrecognizable. That was the most fun part: sharing the image and then telling people about the technique.”

Quraishi, president of the Society of Undergraduate Materials Scientists, also organized the event, part of Materials Week, a student-run initiative that highlights the department’s people, research, and impact.

Persistence in practice

The winner of the Most Challenging category, DMSE sophomore Nelushi Vithanachchi gained not just microscopy experience, but also perseverance. The category called for significant effort put into the sample preparation — and Vithanachchi spent hours troubleshooting.

Her sample — a carving of MIT’s Great Dome in silicon carbide — was made using a focused ion beam, a tool that sculpts materials by bombarding them with ions, or charged atoms. The process requires precision, as even minor shifts can ruin a sample.

In her first attempt, while milling the dome’s façade, the sample shifted and broke. A second try with a different design also failed. She credits her UROP advisor, Aaditya Bhat from Associate Professor James LeBeau’s research group, for pushing her to keep going.

“It was four in the morning, and after failing for the third time, I said, ‘I’m not doing this,’” Vithanachchi recalls. “Then Aaditya said, ‘No, we’ve got to finish what we started.’” After a fourth attempt, using the lessons learned from the previous failures, they were finally able to create a structure that resembled the MIT dome.

Anna Beck, a DMSE sophomore and runner-up for Best Electron Microscope Image, had a much different experience. “It was very relaxed for me. I just sat down and took images,” she says. Her entry was an SEM image of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) fibers from an event wrist band. HDPE is a durable material used in packaging, plumbing, and consumer goods.

Through the process, Beck gained insight into composition and microscopy techniques — and she’s excited to apply what she’s learned in the next competition in fall 2025. “In hindsight, I look at mine now and I wish I turned the brightness up a little more.”

Although 35 percent of the entries came from DMSE students, a majority — 65 percent — came from other majors, or first-year students.

With the first contest showcasing both creativity and technical skill, organizers hope even more students will take on the challenge, bringing fresh perspectives and discoveries to the microscopic world. The contest will run again in fall 2025.

“The inaugural contest brought in an incredible range of submissions. It was exciting to see students engage with microscopy in new ways and share their discoveries,” Grossman says. “The Breakerspace was designed for all undergraduates, regardless of major or experience level — whether they’re conducting research, exploring new materials, or simply curious about what something is made of. We’re excited to expand participation and encourage even more entries in the next competition.”

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has awarded MIT Lincoln Laboratory a 2025 FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. The award recognizes the laboratory's exceptional efforts in commercializing microwave sounders hosted on small satellites called CubeSats. The laboratory first developed the technology for NASA, demonstrating that such satellites could work in tandem to collect hurricane data more frequently than previously possible and significantly improve hurricane forecasts. The technology is now licensed to the company Tomorrow.io, which will launch a large constellation of the sounder-equipped satellites to enhance hurricane prediction and expand global weather coverage. 

"This FLC award recognizes a technology with significant impact, one that could enhance hourly weather forecasting for aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management, and highlights the laboratory's important role in bringing federally funded innovation to the commercial sector," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer.

A nationwide network of more than 300 government laboratories, agencies, and research centers, the FLC helps facilitate the transfer of technologies out of federal labs and into the marketplace to benefit the U.S. economy, society, and national security.

Lincoln Laboratory originally proposed and demonstrated the technology for NASA's TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats) mission. For TROPICS, the laboratory put its microwave sounders on low-cost, commercially available CubeSats for the first time.

Of all the technology used for sensing hurricanes, microwave sounders provide the greatest improvement to forecasting models. From space, these instruments detect a range of microwave frequencies that penetrate clouds, allowing them to measure 3D temperature, humidity, and precipitation in a storm. State-of-the-art instruments are typically large (the size of a washing machine) and hosted aboard $2 billion polar-orbiting satellites, which collectively may revisit a storm every six hours. If sounders could be miniaturized, laboratory researchers imagined, then they could be put on small satellites and launched in large numbers, working together to revisit storms more often.

The TROPICS sounder is the size of a coffee cup. The laboratory team worked for several years to develop and demonstrate the technology that resulted in a miniaturized instrument, while maintaining performance on par with traditional sounders for the frequencies that provide the most useful tropical cyclone observations. By 2023, NASA launched a constellation of four TROPICS satellites, which have since collected rapidly refreshed data of many tropical storms.

Now, Tomorrow.io plans to increase that constellation to a global network of 18 satellites. The resulting high-rate observations — under an hour — are expected to improve weather forecasts, hurricane tracking, and early-warning systems.

"This partnership with Tomorrow.io expands the impact of the TROPICS mission. Tomorrow.io’s increased constellation size, software pipeline, and resilient business model enable it to support a number of commercial and government organizations. This transfer to industry has resulted in a self-sustaining national capability, one that is expected to help the economy and the government for years to come," says Tom Roy, who managed the transfer of the technology to Tomorrow.io.

The technology transfer spanned 18 months. Under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), the laboratory team adapted the TROPICS payload to an updated satellite design and delivered to Tomorrow.io the first three units, two of which were launched in September 2024. The team also provided in-depth training to Tomorrow.io and seven industry partners who will build, test, launch, and operate the future full commercial constellation. The remaining satellites are expected to launch before the end of this year.

"With these microwave sounders, we can set a new standard in atmospheric data collection and prediction. This technology allows us to capture atmospheric data with exceptional accuracy, especially over oceans and remote areas where traditional observations are scarce," said Rei Goffer, co-founder of Tomorrow.io, in a press release announcing the September launches.

Tomorrow.io will use the sounder data as input into their weather forecasts, data products, and decision support tools available to their customers, who range from major airlines to governments. Tomorrow.io's nonprofit partner, TomorrowNow, also plans to use the data as input to its climate model for improving food security in Africa.

This technology is especially relevant as hurricanes and severe weather events continue to cause significant destruction. In 2024, the United States experienced a near-record 27 disaster events that each exceeded $1 billion in damage, resulting in a total cost of approximately $182.7 billion, and that caused the deaths of at least 568 people. Globally, these storm systems cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage each year.

“It has been great to see the Lincoln Laboratory, Tomorrow.io, and industry partner teams work together so effectively to rapidly incorporate the TROPICS technology and bring the new Tomorrow.io microwave sounder constellation online,” says Bill Blackwell, principal investigator of the NASA TROPICS mission and the CRADA with Tomorrow.io. “I expect that the improved revisit rate provided by the Tomorrow.io constellation will drive further improvements in hurricane forecasting performance over and above what has already been demonstrated by TROPICS.”

The team behind the transfer includes Tom Roy, Bill Blackwell, Steven Gillmer, Rebecca Keenan, Nick Zorn, and Mike DiLiberto of Lincoln Laboratory and Kai Lemay, Scott Williams, Emma Watson, and Jan Wicha of Tomorrow.io. Lincoln Laboratory will be honored among other winners of 2025 FLC Awards at the FLC National Meeting to be held virtually on May 13.

In case you need proof that anyone, even people who do cybersecurity for a living, Troy Hunt has a long, iterative story on his webpage about how he got phished. Worth reading.

An internal memo says the agency is canceling future and existing grants that help states and tribes prepare for floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters.

The U.S. solar industry has boomed in recent years. But tariffs announced this week by the White House could stifle its growth.

The European Union aims to cut its climate pollution 55 percent by 2030 and hit net zero by midcentury.

An experimental wildfire insurance policy aims to show how communities can get affordable coverage if they manage trees and vegetation.

One question raised by U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy was whether federal agencies could claw back money that had been awarded.

Senate Republicans are waiting for a ruling from the parliamentarian on three Congressional Review Act resolutions.

“Clearly, we need a bit more time,” says Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra.

The EU is weighing reopening rules on renewables, energy efficiency and green renovations — despite warnings that it could be opening Pandora’s box.

New Security and Exchange Commission guidelines have also hamstrung efforts to put resolutions to shareholder votes, an advocacy group execcutive said.

Although math can calculate how often to expect floods of specific magnitudes, nature has its own plans, including irregularity.

LEGOs are no stranger to many members of the MIT community. Faculty, staff, and students, alike, have developed a love of building and mechanics while playing with the familiar plastic bricks. In just a few hours, a heap of bricks can become a house, a ship, an airplane, or a cat. The simplicity lends itself to creativity and ingenuity, and it has inspired many MIT faculty members to bring LEGOs into the classroom, including class 2.S00 (Introduction to Manufacturing), where students use LEGO bricks to learn about manufacturing processes and systems.

It was perhaps no surprise, then, that the lecture hall in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing was packed with students, faculty, staff, and guests to hear Carsten Rasmussen, chief operating officer of the LEGO Group, speak as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series on March 20.

In his engaging and inspiring talk, Rasmussen asked one of the most important questions in manufacturing: How do you balance innovation with sustainability while keeping a complex global supply chain running smoothly? He emphasized that success in modern manufacturing isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about creating value across the entire network, and integrating every aspect of the business.

Successful manufacturing is all about balance

The way the toy industry views success is evolving, Rasmussen said. In the past, focusing on “cost, quality, safety, delivery, and service” may have been enough, but today’s landscape is far more demanding. “Now, it’s about availability, customers’ happiness, and innovation,” he said.

Rasmussen, who has been with the LEGO Group since 2001, started as a buyer before moving to various leadership roles within the organization. Today, he oversees the LEGO Group’s operations strategy, including manufacturing and supply chain planning, quality, engineering, and sales and operations planning.

“The way we can inspire the builders of tomorrow is basically, whatever we develop, we are able to produce, and we are able to sell,” he said.

The LEGO Group’s operations are intricate. Focusing on areas such as capacity and infrastructure, network utilization, analysis and design, and sustainability, keeps the company true to its mission, “to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.” Within the organization, departments operate with a focus on how their decisions will impact the rest of the company. To do this, they need to communicate effectively.

Intuition and experience play a big role in effective decision-making

In a time where data analytics is a huge part of decision-making in manufacturing and supply-chain management, Rasmussen highlighted the importance of blending data with intuition and experience.

“Many of the decisions you have to make are very, very complex,” he explained. “A lot of the data you’re going to provide me is based on history. And what happened in history is not what you’re facing right now. So, you need to really be able to take great data and blend that with your intuition and your experience to make a decision.”

This shift reflects a broader trend in industries where leaders are beginning to see the benefits of looking beyond purely data-driven decision-making. With global supply chains disrupted by unforeseen events like the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s growing acknowledgement that historical data may not be the most effective way to predict the future. Rasmussen said that the audience should practice blending their own intuition and experience with data by asking themselves: “Does it make sense? Does it feel right?”

Prioritizing sustainability 

Rasmussen also highlighted the LEGO Group’s ambitious sustainability goals, signaling that innovation cannot come at the expense of environmental responsibility. “There is no excuse for us to not leave a better planet for the next generation, for the next hundred years,” he said.

With an ambition to make its products from more renewable or recycled materials by 2032 and eliminate single-use packaging, the company aims to lead a shift in trends in manufacturing toward being more environmentally friendly, including an effort to turn waste into bricks.

Innovation doesn’t exist in a vacuum

Throughout his talk, Rasmussen underscored the importance of innovation. The only way to stay on top is to be constantly thinking of new ideas, he said.

“Are you daring to put new products into the market?” he asked, adding that it’s not enough to come up with a novel product or approach. How its implementation will work within the system is essential, too. “Our challenge that you need to help me with,” he said to the audience, “is how can we bring in innovation, because we can’t stand still either. We also need to be fit for the future … that is actually one of our bigger challenges.”

He reminded the audience that innovation is not a linear path. It involves risk, some failure, and continuous evolution. “Resilience is absolutely key,” he said.

Q&A

After his presentation, Rasmussen sat down with Professor John Hart for a brief Q&A, followed by audience questions. Among the questions that Hart asked Rasmussen was how he would respond to a designer who presented a model of MIT-themed LEGO set, assuring Rasmussen it would break sales records. “Oh, I’ve heard that so many times,” Rasmussen laughed.

Hart asked what it would take to turn an idea into reality. “How long does it take from bricks to having it on my doorstep?” he asked.

“Typically, a new product takes between 12 to 18 months from idea to when we put it out on the market,” said Rasmussen, explaining that the process requires a good deal of integration and that there is a lot of planning to make sure that new ideas can be implemented across the organization.

Then the microphone was opened up to the crowd. The first audience questions came from Emerson Linville-Engler, the youngest audience member at just 5 years old, who wanted to know what the most difficult LEGO set to make was (the Technic round connector pieces), as well as Rasmussen’s favorite LEGO set (complex builds, like buildings or Technic models).

Other questions showcased how much LEGO inspired the audience. One member asked Rasmussen if it ever got old being told that he worked for a company that inspires the inner child? “No. It motivates me every single day when you meet them,” he said.

Through the Q&A, the audience was also able to ask more about the manufacturing process from ideas to execution, as well as whether Rasmussen was threatened by imitators (he welcomes healthy competition, but not direct copycats), and whether the LEGO Group plans on bringing back some old favorites (they are discussing whether to bring back old sets, but there are no set plans to do so at this time).

For the aspiring manufacturing leaders and innovators in the room, the lesson of Rasmussen’s talk was clear: Success isn’t just about making the right decision, it’s about understanding the entire system, having the courage to innovate, and being resilient enough to navigate unexpected challenges.

The event was hosted by the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series. Past speakers include the TSMC founder Morris Chang, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 04 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02301-5

The emotional toll of fieldwork

Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia.

But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A new study shows that when radiologists express confidence about a certain pathology using a phrase like “very likely,” they tend to be overconfident, and vice-versa when they express less confidence using a word like “possibly.”

Using clinical data, a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School created a framework to quantify how reliable radiologists are when they express certainty using natural language terms.

They used this approach to provide clear suggestions that help radiologists choose certainty phrases that would improve the reliability of their clinical reporting. They also showed that the same technique can effectively measure and improve the calibration of large language models by better aligning the words models use to express confidence with the accuracy of their predictions.

By helping radiologists more accurately describe the likelihood of certain pathologies in medical images, this new framework could improve the reliability of critical clinical information.

“The words radiologists use are important. They affect how doctors intervene, in terms of their decision making for the patient. If these practitioners can be more reliable in their reporting, patients will be the ultimate beneficiaries,” says Peiqi Wang, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this research.

He is joined on the paper by senior author Polina Golland, a Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the leader of the Medical Vision Group; as well as Barbara D. Lam, a clinical fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Yingcheng Liu, at MIT graduate student; Ameneh Asgari-Targhi, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB); Rameswar Panda, a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; William M. Wells, a professor of radiology at MGB and a research scientist in CSAIL; and Tina Kapur, an assistant professor of radiology at MGB. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

Decoding uncertainty in words

A radiologist writing a report about a chest X-ray might say the image shows a “possible” pneumonia, which is an infection that inflames the air sacs in the lungs. In that case, a doctor could order a follow-up CT scan to confirm the diagnosis.

However, if the radiologist writes that the X-ray shows a “likely” pneumonia, the doctor might begin treatment immediately, such as by prescribing antibiotics, while still ordering additional tests to assess severity.

Trying to measure the calibration, or reliability, of ambiguous natural language terms like “possibly” and “likely” presents many challenges, Wang says.

Existing calibration methods typically rely on the confidence score provided by an AI model, which represents the model’s estimated likelihood that its prediction is correct.

For instance, a weather app might predict an 83 percent chance of rain tomorrow. That model is well-calibrated if, across all instances where it predicts an 83 percent chance of rain, it rains approximately 83 percent of the time.

“But humans use natural language, and if we map these phrases to a single number, it is not an accurate description of the real world. If a person says an event is ‘likely,’ they aren’t necessarily thinking of the exact probability, such as 75 percent,” Wang says.

Rather than trying to map certainty phrases to a single percentage, the researchers’ approach treats them as probability distributions. A distribution describes the range of possible values and their likelihoods — think of the classic bell curve in statistics.

“This captures more nuances of what each word means,” Wang adds.

Assessing and improving calibration

The researchers leveraged prior work that surveyed radiologists to obtain probability distributions that correspond to each diagnostic certainty phrase, ranging from “very likely” to “consistent with.”

For instance, since more radiologists believe the phrase “consistent with” means a pathology is present in a medical image, its probability distribution climbs sharply to a high peak, with most values clustered around the 90 to 100 percent range.

In contrast the phrase “may represent” conveys greater uncertainty, leading to a broader, bell-shaped distribution centered around 50 percent.

Typical methods evaluate calibration by comparing how well a model’s predicted probability scores align with the actual number of positive results.

The researchers’ approach follows the same general framework but extends it to account for the fact that certainty phrases represent probability distributions rather than probabilities.

To improve calibration, the researchers formulated and solved an optimization problem that adjusts how often certain phrases are used, to better align confidence with reality.

They derived a calibration map that suggests certainty terms a radiologist should use to make the reports more accurate for a specific pathology.

“Perhaps, for this dataset, if every time the radiologist said pneumonia was ‘present,’ they changed the phrase to ‘likely present’ instead, then they would become better calibrated,” Wang explains.

When the researchers used their framework to evaluate clinical reports, they found that radiologists were generally underconfident when diagnosing common conditions like atelectasis, but overconfident with more ambiguous conditions like infection.

In addition, the researchers evaluated the reliability of language models using their method, providing a more nuanced representation of confidence than classical methods that rely on confidence scores. 

“A lot of times, these models use phrases like ‘certainly.’ But because they are so confident in their answers, it does not encourage people to verify the correctness of the statements themselves,” Wang adds.

In the future, the researchers plan to continue collaborating with clinicians in the hopes of improving diagnoses and treatment. They are working to expand their study to include data from abdominal CT scans.

In addition, they are interested in studying how receptive radiologists are to calibration-improving suggestions and whether they can mentally adjust their use of certainty phrases effectively.

“Expression of diagnostic certainty is a crucial aspect of the radiology report, as it influences significant management decisions. This study takes a novel approach to analyzing and calibrating how radiologists express diagnostic certainty in chest X-ray reports, offering feedback on term usage and associated outcomes,” says Atul B. Shinagare, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with this work. “This approach has the potential to improve radiologists’ accuracy and communication, which will help improve patient care.”

The work was funded, in part, by a Takeda Fellowship, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT CSAIL Wistrom Program, and the MIT Jameel Clinic.

For over a decade, through a collaboration managed by MIT.nano, MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), one of the largest universities in Latin America, have worked together to develop innovative academic and research initiatives with a particular focus in nanoscience and nanotechnology and, more recently, an emphasis on design and smart manufacturing. Now, the collaboration has also expanded to include undergraduate education. Seven Tec undergrads are developing methods to manufacture low-cost, desktop fiber-extrusion devices, or FrEDs, alongside peers at MIT in an “in-the-lab” teaching and learning factory, the FrED Factory.

“The FrED Factory serves as a factory-like education platform for manufacturing scale-up, enabling students and researchers to engage firsthand in the transition from prototype development to small-scale production,” says Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).

Through on-campus learning, participants observe, analyze, and actively contribute to this process, gaining critical insights into the complexities of scaling manufacturing operations. The product of the FrED Factory are FrED kits — tabletop manufacturing kits that themselves produce fiber and that are used to teach smart manufacturing principles. “We’re thrilled to have students from Monterrey Tec here at MIT, bringing new ideas and perspectives, and helping to develop these new ways to teach manufacturing at both MIT and Tec,” says Anthony.

The FrED factory was originally built by a group of MIT graduate students in 2022 as their thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program. They adapted and scaled the original design of the device, built by Anthony’s student David Kim, into something that could be manufactured into multiple units at a substantially lower cost. The resulting computer-aided design files were shared with Tec de Monterrey for use by faculty and students. Since launching the FrED curriculum at Tec in 2022, MIT has co-hosted two courses led by Tec faculty: “Mechatronics Design: (Re) Design of FrED,” and “Automation of Manufacturing Systems: FrED Factory Challenge.”

New this academic year, undergraduate Tec students are participating in FrED Factory research immersions. The students engage in collaborative FrED projects at MIT and then return to Tec to implement their knowledge — particularly to help replicate and implement what they have learned, with the launch of a new FrED Factory at Tec de Monterrey this spring. The end goal is to fully integrate this project into Tec’s mechatronics engineering curriculum, in which students learn about automation and robotics firsthand through the devices.

Russel Bradley, a PhD student in MechE supervised by Anthony, is the project lead of FrED Factory and has been working closely with the undergraduate Tec students.

“The process of designing and manufacturing FrEDs is an educational experience in itself,” says Bradley. “Unlike a real factory, which likely wouldn’t welcome students to experiment with the machines, the FrED factory provides an environment where you can fail and learn.”

The Tec undergrads are divided into groups working on specific projects, including Development of an Education 4.0 Framework for FrED, Immersive Technology (AR) for Manufacturing Operations, Gamifying Advanced Manufacturing Education in FrED Factory, and Immersive Cognitive Factory Twins.

Sergio Siller Lobo is a Tec student who is working on the development of the education framework for FrED. He and other students are revising the code to make the interface more student-friendly and best enable the students to learn while working with the devices. They are focused particularly on helping students to engage with the topics of control systems, computer vision, and internet of things (IoT) in both a digital course that they are developing, and in directly working with the devices. The digital course can be presented by an instructor or done autonomously by students.

“Students can be learning the theory with the digital courses, as well as having access to hands-on, practical experience with the device,” says Siller Lobo. “You can have the best of both ways of learning, both the practical and the theoretical.”

Arik Gómez Horita, an undergrad from Tec who has also been working on the education framework, says that the technology that currently exists in terms of how to teach students about control systems, computer vision, and IoT is often very limited in either its capability or quantity.

“A key aspect of the value of the FrEDs is that we are integrating all these concepts and a module for education into a single device,” says Gómez Horita. “Bringing FrED into a classroom is a game-changer. Our main goal is trying to put FrED into the hands of the teacher, to use it for all its teaching capabilities.”

Once the students return to Tec de Monterrey with the educational modules they’ve developed, there will be workshops with the FrEDs and opportunities for Tec students to use their own creativity and iterate on the devices.

“The FrED is really a lab in a box, and one of the best things that FrEDs do is create data,” says Siller Lobo. “Finding new ways to get data from FrED gives it more value.”

Tec students Ángel Alarcón and André Mendoza are preparing to have MIT students test the FrED factory, running a simulation with the two main roles of engineer and operator. The operator role assembles the FrEDs within the workstations that simulate a factory. The engineer role analyzes the data created on the factory side by the operator and tries to find ways to improve production.

“This is a very immersive way to teach manufacturing systems,” says Alarcón. “Many students studying manufacturing, undergraduate and even graduate, finish their education never having even gone to an actual factory. The FrED Factory gives students the valuable opportunity to get to know what a factory is like and experience an industry environment without having to go off campus.”

The data gained from the workstations — including cycle time and defects in an operation — will be used to teach different topics about manufacturing. Ultimately, the FrED factory at Tec will be used to compare the benefits and drawbacks of automation versus manual labor.

Bradley says that the Tec students bring a strong mechatronics background that adds a lot of important insights to the project, and beyond the lab, it’s also a valuable multicultural exchange.

“It’s not just about what the students are learning from us,” says Bradley, “but it’s really a collaborative process in which we’re all complementing each other.”

Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.

“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.

The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.

Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.

“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”

A shifting clean energy landscape

During a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.

Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.

Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.

During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”

David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”

“Everything on the table”

The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.

Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.

By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.

Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.

“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.

One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.

“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”

The road ahead

Several speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.

“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”

During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”

Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.

World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.”

The process of catalysis — in which a material speeds up a chemical reaction — is crucial to the production of many of the chemicals used in our everyday lives. But even though these catalytic processes are widespread, researchers often lack a clear understanding of exactly how they work.

A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.

Previously, it had been thought that only one of the two forms was needed. The new findings are published today in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate students Deiaa Harraz and Kunal Lodaya, Bryan Tang PhD ’23, and MIT professor of chemistry and chemical engineering Yogesh Surendranath.

There are two broad classes of catalysts: homogeneous catalysts, which consist of dissolved molecules, and heterogeneous catalysts, which are solid materials whose surface provides the site for the chemical reaction. “For the longest time,” Surendranath says, “there’s been a general view that you either have catalysis happening on these surfaces, or you have them happening on these soluble molecules.” But the new research shows that in the case of vinyl acetate — an important material that goes into many polymer products such as the rubber in the soles of your shoes — there is an interplay between both classes of catalysis.

“What we discovered,” Surendranath explains, “is that you actually have these solid metal materials converting into molecules, and then converting back into materials, in a cyclic dance.”

He adds: “This work calls into question this paradigm where there’s either one flavor of catalysis or another. Really, there could be an interplay between both of them in certain cases, and that could be really advantageous for having a process that’s selective and efficient.”

The synthesis of vinyl acetate has been a large-scale industrial reaction since the 1960s, and it has been well-researched and refined over the years to improve efficiency. This has happened largely through a trial-and-error approach, without a precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the researchers say.

While chemists are often more familiar with homogeneous catalysis mechanisms, and chemical engineers are often more familiar with surface catalysis mechanisms, fewer researchers study both. This is perhaps part of the reason that the full complexity of this reaction was not previously captured. But Harraz says he and his colleagues are working at the interface between disciplines. “We’ve been able to appreciate both sides of this reaction and find that both types of catalysis are critical,” he says.

The reaction that produces vinyl acetate requires something to activate the oxygen molecules that are one of the constituents of the reaction, and something else to activate the other ingredients, acetic acid and ethylene. The researchers found that the form of the catalyst that worked best for one part of the process was not the best for the other. It turns out that the molecular form of the catalyst does the key chemistry with the ethylene and the acetic acid, while it’s the surface that ends up doing the activation of the oxygen.

They found that the underlying process involved in interconverting the two forms of the catalyst is actually corrosion, similar to the process of rusting. “It turns out that in rusting, you actually go through a soluble molecular species somewhere in the sequence,” Surendranath says.

The team borrowed techniques traditionally used in corrosion research to study the process. They used electrochemical tools to study the reaction, even though the overall reaction does not require a supply of electricity. By making potential measurements, the researchers determined that the corrosion of the palladium catalyst material to soluble palladium ions is driven by an electrochemical reaction with the oxygen, converting it to water. Corrosion is “one of the oldest topics in electrochemistry,” says Lodaya, “but applying the science of corrosion to understand catalysis is much newer, and was essential to our findings.”

By correlating measurements of catalyst corrosion with other measurements of the chemical reaction taking place, the researchers proposed that it was the corrosion rate that was limiting the overall reaction. “That’s the choke point that’s controlling the rate of the overall process,” Surendranath says.

The interplay between the two types of catalysis works efficiently and selectively “because it actually uses the synergy of a material surface doing what it’s good at and a molecule doing what it’s good at,” Surendranath says. The finding suggests that, when designing new catalysts, rather than focusing on either solid materials or soluble molecules alone, researchers should think about how the interplay of both may open up new approaches.

“Now, with an improved understanding of what makes this catalyst so effective, you can try to design specific materials or specific interfaces that promote the desired chemistry,” Harraz says. Since this process has been worked on for so long, these findings may not necessarily lead to improvements in this specific process of making vinyl acetate, but it does provide a better understanding of why the materials work as they do, and could lead to improvements in other catalytic processes.

Understanding that “catalysts can transit between molecule and material and back, and the role that electrochemistry plays in those transformations, is a concept that we are really excited to expand on,” Lodaya says.

Harraz adds: “With this new understanding that both types of catalysis could play a role, what other catalytic processes are out there that actually involve both? Maybe those have a lot of room for improvement that could benefit from this understanding.”

This work is “illuminating, something that will be worth teaching at the undergraduate level," says Christophe Coperet, a professor of inorganic chemistry at ETH Zurich, who was not associated with the research. “The work highlights new ways of thinking. ... [It] is notable in the sense that it not only reconciles homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, but it describes these complex processes as half reactions, where electron transfers can cycle between distinct entities.”

The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation as a Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation; the Center for Interfacial Ionics; and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.