From Stanford Earth Matters: “This microlab is helping Stanford researchers figure out where to store carbon dioxide”

From Stanford Earth Matters

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Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

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Stanford University

Lab on a Chip

August 2, 2022

Written by Josie Garthwaite

Ilenia Battiato
School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences
ibattiat@stanford.edu

Anthony R. Kovscek
School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences
kovscek@stanford.edu

Josie Garthwaite
School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences
(650) 497-0947
josieg@stanford.edu

A tiny new device allows scientists to directly observe and quantify how rocks change in the presence of acids, enabling more accurate assessments of sites for underground storage of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and industrial waste.

The most recent U.N. climate report describes carbon dioxide removal and storage as “unavoidable” for dealing with emissions in the next few decades from hard-to-decarbonize industries such as cement and steel manufacturing. This image shows workers outside a cement factory. (Image credit: Getty Images)Image credit: Getty Images.

Scientists at Stanford University have developed a new solution for the challenge of making sure that when carbon dioxide (CO2) is injected underground, it actually stays put.

For decades, climate models have predicted that extreme heat waves of the sort experienced by millions of people this summer would become far more common at the levels of planet-warming gases now present in Earth’s atmosphere. As emissions and temperatures continue to rise, there is growing scientific consensus that countries will need to actively remove and manage CO2 for the world to avoid warming beyond the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

One widely studied method for keeping removed carbon out of the atmosphere long-term involves injecting CO2 into rock formations deep underground. But there are still questions to be worked out.

“Injection of carbon dioxide in storage formations can lead to complex geochemical reactions, some of which may cause dramatic structural changes in the rock that are hard to predict,” said Ilenia Battiato, the study’s primary investigator and an assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Chain reactions

Earth scientists for years have simulated fluid flow, reactions, and rock mechanics to try to predict how injections of CO2 or other fluids will affect a given rock formation.

Existing models, however, don’t reliably predict the interplay and full consequences of geochemical reactions, which often produce tighter seals by effectively plugging pathways with dissolved minerals – but can also lead to cracks and wormholes that may allow buried carbon dioxide to affect drinking water or escape to the atmosphere, where it would contribute to climate change. “These reactions are ubiquitous. We need to understand them because they control the effectiveness of the seal,” Battiato said.

One of the chief modeling challenges centers on the wide range of time and spatial scales over which interacting processes unfold simultaneously underground. Some reactions fizzle out in less than a second, while others continue for months or even years. As reactions progress, the evolving mix and concentration of various minerals in any given patch of rock, and changes to the geometry and chemistry of the rock surface, influence the fluid chemistry, which in turn affects fractures and possible pathways for leaks.

Lab on a chip

The new solution, described Aug. 1 in PNAS [below], uses a microfluidics device, or what scientists often refer to as a “lab on a chip.” In this case, the researchers call it a “rock on a chip,” because the technology involves embedding a tiny sliver of shale rock into a microfluidic cell.

To demonstrate their device, the researchers used eight rock samples taken from the Marcellus shale in West Virginia and the Wolfcamp shale in Texas. They cut and polished the slivers of rock to bits no bigger than a few grains of sand, with each one containing varying amounts and arrangements of reactive carbonate minerals. The researchers placed the samples into a polymer chamber sealed in glass, with two tiny inlets left open for injections of acid solutions. High-speed cameras and microscopes allowed them to watch step by tiny step how chemical reactions caused individual mineral grains in the samples to dissolve and rearrange.

New “lab on a chip” may accelerate carbon storage efforts. Credit: Stanford University.

The idea of miniaturizing research that once required large labs cuts across Earth sciences, biomedicine, chemistry, and other fields, said study co-author Anthony R. Kovscek, the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor at Stanford Earth and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy. “If you can see it, you can describe it better. These observations have a direct connection with our ability to assess and optimize designs for safety,” he said. Today, Kovscek says geologists on drill sites may examine rocks under a microscope, but no current technologies approach the level of detail possible with this new device: “Nothing of this sort exists for really looking at how the grain shapes are changing.”

Optimizing for safety

Improving reactive transport models is a matter of growing urgency, given the role of carbon removal in government plans for addressing climate change and the hundreds of millions of dollars now flowing to the nascent technology from private investors. Existing projects for removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere are operating only at pilot scale. Those that catch emissions at the source are more common, with more than 100 projects in development worldwide and the U.S. government now preparing to spend $8.2 billion through the bipartisan infrastructure bill on carbon capture and storage from industrial facilities.

Not all carbon storage plans involve burying carbon underground. Those that do involve geological storage, however, could be aided and possibly made more stable and secure with the new Stanford technology. “Researchers need to incorporate this knowledge in their models to make good predictions about what’s going to happen once you inject CO2, to make sure it stays there and doesn’t do strange things,” Battiato said.

Looking ahead, Battiato and colleagues plan to use the same platform to study geochemical reactions triggered by injections of waste water from oil production, desalination plants, or industry, as well as hydrogen, which figures into U.S. and EU plans for slashing emissions by 2050. Although underground hydrogen storage is often cited as a promising solution to the steep and persistent challenge of ensuring safe storage of the highly flammable gas at large scale, testing it out at even pilot scale will require better screening tools and understanding of biogeochemical reactions.

Science paper:
PNAS

See the full article here .

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Stanford Earth Matters

We are scientists! Undergraduates, graduate students, professors, educational staff, and alumni working professionals. We build community in our field trips, classes, and cocurriculars. We care about the Earth and making its resources available to people across the globe now and in the future.

The School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences

The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (formerly the School of Earth Sciences) lists courses under the subject code EARTH on the Stanford Bulletin’s ExploreCourses web site. Courses offered by the School’s departments and inter-departmental programs are linked on their separate sections, and are available at the ExploreCourses web site.

The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences includes the departments of Geological Sciences, Geophysics, Energy Resources Engineering, and Earth System Science; and three interdisciplinary programs: the Earth Systems undergraduate B.S. and coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs, the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) with Ph.D. and joint M.S, and the Sustainability and Science Practice Program with coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs.

The aims of the school and its programs are:

to prepare students for careers in the fields of agricultural science and policy, biogeochemistry, climate science, energy resource engineering, environmental science and policy, environmental communications, geology, geobiology, geochemistry, geomechanics, geophysics, geostatistics, sustainability science, hydrogeology, land science, oceanography, paleontology, petroleum engineering, and petroleum geology;

to conduct disciplinary and interdisciplinary research on a range of questions related to Earth, its resources and its environment;

to provide opportunities for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students to learn about the planet’s history, to understand the energy and resource bases that support humanity, to address the geological and geophysical, and human-caused hazards that affect human societies, and to understand the challenges and develop solutions related to environment and sustainability.

To accomplish these objectives, the school offers a variety of programs adaptable to the needs of the individual student:

four-year undergraduate programs leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Science (M.S.)

five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts (M.A.)

graduate programs offering the degrees of Master of Science, Engineer, and Doctor of Philosophy.

Details of individual degree programs are found in the section for each department or program.
Undergraduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

Any undergraduate admitted to the University may declare a major in one of the school’s departments or the Earth Systems Program by contacting the appropriate department or program office.

Requirements for the B.S. degree are listed in each department or program section. Departmental academic advisers work with students to define a career or academic goal and assure that the student’s curricular choices are appropriate to the pursuit of that goal. Advisers can help devise a sensible and enjoyable course of study that meets degree requirements and provides the student with opportunities to experience advanced courses, seminars, and research projects. To maximize such opportunities, students are encouraged to complete basic science and mathematics courses in high school or during their freshman year.
Coterminal Master’s Degrees in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

The Stanford coterminal degree program enables an undergraduate to embark on an integrated program of study leading to the master’s degree before requirements for the bachelor’s degree have been completed. This may result in more expeditious progress towards the advanced degree than would otherwise be possible, making the program especially important to Earth scientists because the master’s degree provides an excellent basis for entry into the profession. The coterminal plan permits students to apply for admission to a master’s program after earning 120 units, completion of six non-summer quarters, and declaration of an undergraduate major, but no later than the quarter prior to the expected completion of the undergraduate degree.

The student may meet the degree requirements in the more advantageous of the following two ways: by first completing the 180 units required for the B.S. degree and then completing the three quarters required for the M.S. or the M.A. degree; or by completing a total of 15 quarters during which the requirements for the two degrees are completed concurrently. In either case, the student has the option of receiving the B.S. degree upon meeting all the B.S. requirements or of receiving both degrees at the end of the coterminal program.

Students earn degrees in the same department or program, in two different departments, or even in different schools; for example, a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Geological Sciences. Students are encouraged to discuss the coterminal program with their advisers during their junior year. Additional information is available in the individual department offices.

University requirements for the coterminal master’s degree are described in the “Coterminal Master’s Program” section. University requirements for the master’s degree are described in the “Graduate Degrees” section of this bulletin.
Graduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

Admission to the Graduate Program

A student who wishes to enroll for graduate work in the school must be qualified for graduate standing in the University and also must be accepted by one of the school’s four departments or the E-IPER Ph.D. program. One requirement for admission is submission of scores on the verbal and quantitative sections of the Graduate Record Exam. Admission to one department of the school does not guarantee admission to other departments.

Faculty Adviser

Upon entering a graduate program, the student should report to the head of the department or program who arranges with a member of the faculty to act as the student’s adviser. Alternatively, in several of the departments, advisers are established through student-faculty discussions prior to admission. The student, in consultation with the adviser(s), then arranges a course of study for the first quarter and ultimately develops a complete plan of study for the degree sought.

Financial Aid
Detailed information on scholarships, fellowships, and research grants is available from the school’s individual departments and programs.

Stanford University campus

Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From “Eos” : “Groundwater May Fix as Much Carbon as Some Ocean Surface Waters”

From “Eos”

AT

AGU

7.28.22
Carolyn Wilke

Researchers Will Overholt and Kirsten Küsel collect groundwater samples pumped to the surface in the Hainich Critical Zone Observatory in Germany. Credit: Friedrich-Schiller University Jena.

Life in the deep was thought to mostly munch on carbon drifting in from above. But carbon fixation, which turns inorganic carbon into useful organic molecules, may be more widespread underground than realized. New research suggests that carbon fixation rates in some groundwaters are similar to those in some nutrient-poor surface waters.

“There’s a lot of fresh organic carbon being made in the subsurface where we’re not looking for it,” said Sunita Shah Walter, a biogeochemist at the University of Delaware who was not part of the new work. “It is happening, and it seems to be happening at pretty high rates.”

Microbial ecologist Will Overholt, geomicrobiologist Kirsten Küsel, and their colleagues collected groundwater from six wells between 5 and 90 meters below ground as part of the work at the Hainich Critical Zone Observatory in Germany. To those water samples, which harbored microbes from the deep, they added tiny amounts of radioactive carbon. Then, they used a sensitive technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to detect how much of that radioactive carbon microbes picked up.

“It was really hard to detect the new organic matter being produced by carbon fixation,” said Overholt, who works at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany. “We think most microorganisms living there are under starvation conditions. There’s just not very many of them,” he said.

The carbon fixation rates measured for this karst limestone aquifer were around 10% of the median rate of global nutrient-poor (oligotrophic) surface waters, the researchers reported in Nature Geoscience 2022 [below]. The carbon-fixing activity of these subsurface microbes even rivaled some measurements from microbes that live between 100 and 120 meters deep in the ocean. At those depths, most primary production occurs because of photosynthesis. “The fact that our rates were overlapping with the sunlit ocean waters was kind of mind-blowing,” Overholt said. Such areas, marine gyres in the middle of the ocean, are dominated by carbon-fixing cyanobacteria that photosynthesize. To look for what might be causing this carbon fixation, the researchers also took a census of microbes in their samples based on genetic material. They also wanted to understand where the microbes get the energy needed for this process. Similar to what they did in their experiments with carbon isotopes, the team spiked groundwater with isotope-labeled sources of nitrogen. The rates for a process that microbes use to gain energy from ammonium lined up closely with the carbon fixation rates. The team then looked to the organisms’ genes to infer how they fixed carbon.

These are potential rates, cautioned William Orsi, a geomicrobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München who was not part of the new work. What happens in a bottle at the surface is almost always faster than what’s happening in the actual environment because of differences in temperature, pH, or pressure or even the fact that it’s a closed system. “It doesn’t mean that’s the rate that’s actually happening down there,” he said. (Shah Walter noted that the researchers went to “great lengths” to minimize such bottle effects in this work.)

Underground Players in Carbon Cycle

Carbonate aquifers like the one in this study house some 2.26 million cubic kilometers of water. If the rate the team measured holds for other types of crystalline aquifers, which hold 12.66 cubic kilometers of water, microbes in these groundwater systems would account for 0.25% of the world’s total primary production, the team reported.

What the researchers observed at this site is important, said Magdalena Osburn, a geobiologist at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved with the study. But how quickly microbes fix carbon in an aquifer depends on factors including the water’s chemistry and how much easy-to-use carbon is already available.

With rates from a few other environments, researchers could start to get a handle on how much carbon is going into the subsurface, a carbon flux that is currently unaccounted for in climate models, Osburn said. If these subsurface environments are taking up carbon that’s filtering in through rainwater, that’s a contribution to the global carbon cycle that would be important to understand. “We don’t really know how much communication there is between the deep subsurface and the modern atmosphere.”

Carbon fixation in the subsurface may be more universal than realized, said Shah Walter. She’s previously measured rates of carbon fixation in the crust [Nature Geoscience 2018 (below)] under the ocean. And one of the new study’s coauthors found evidence for carbon fixation far deeper underground, below a geyser The ISME Journal 2020 [below].

For a long time, researchers thought that subsurface ecosystems subsisted on old carbon from surface ecosystems that was difficult to break down. But this work and other studies [Frontiers in Microbiology 2021 (below)]suggest that there may be more fresh carbon that can sustain more complex ecosystems that turn over more quickly, Shah Walter said. “That’s the beginning of this whole chain of biological activity.” That seems to be the case with this karst system. Earlier work at the Hainich Critical Zone found that more complex food webs coincided with the abundance of genes [Water Research 2020 (below)] for carbon fixation.

Science paper:
Nature Geoscience 2022

Nature Geoscience 2018

The ISME Journal 2020

Frontiers in Microbiology 2021

Water Research 2020

See the full article here .

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From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH): “Heatwaves thawing Arctic permafrost”

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH)

7.28.22
Marianne Lucien

Satellite data affords ETH Zürich researchers a new method for quantifying carbon mobilization in Arctic permafrost. Their findings also reveal how summer heatwaves accelerate the rate of Arctic landslides in thawing permafrost.

Retrogressive thaw slump, Mackenzie River Delta, Canada. (Image: ETH Zürich / Simon Zwieback)

In the northernmost region of the earth the arctic permafrost is melting at an accelerated rate. For more than a decade, an international team of researchers from ETH Zürich, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the German Aerospace Center have observed topographical pock marks – large depressions referred to as, “retrogressive thaw slumps”. The slumps occur when permanently frozen layers of soil (ice-​rich permafrost) melt leaving arctic hillslopes vulnerable to landslides. The landslides signal a risk for the potential release of carbon that has been stored in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Risk for release of organic carbon

Their findings, recently published in the European Geosciences Union journal, The Cryosphere [below], reveal substantial changes to the topography of Siberia’s Taymyr peninsula, in northern Russia. The study’s results reveal a strong, 43-​fold increase in retrogressive thaw slump activity and a 28-​fold increase in carbon mobilization. The increase also happens to coincide with an extreme heatwave that occurred in northern Siberia in 2020 in which temperatures reportedly reached 38 degrees Celsius (more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit) – record-​breaking temperatures for the Arctic region.

“The strong increase in thaw slump activity due to the Siberian heatwave shows that carbon mobilization from permafrost soils can respond sharply and non-​linearly to increasing temperatures,” asserts the paper’s lead author, Philipp Bernhard, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zürich.

Measuring changes to Arctic permafrost

Using satellite data, the research team has been able to develop a new method to quantify carbon mobilization in permafrost soil. Currently no other large-​scale method exists that measures, to such a high level of spatial and vertical resolution, the changes in permafrost regions. This method allows researchers to provide a more accurate estimate of the state of the carbon cycle to the global carbon budget.

Sentinel-​2 satellite elevation comparison of the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia from Summer 2019 and 2021. The vegetation (red) change due to thaw slumps activity is clearly visible.
(Image: European Space Agency (ESA) / ETH v)

ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2.

Building on an earlier field and airborne flight study conducted in Canada’s Mackenzie River Delta, the researchers collected pre-​study data that they later used to compare and analyze with satellite acquired data over the same region. Since 2010, the German Aerospace Center has been operating an innovative satellite mission using single-​pass synthetic aperture radar, the TanDEM-​X mission, to collect 3-​dimensional elevation data over the earth surface.

DLR TanDEM-X satellite

In addition to the radar data, from 2015, researchers analyzed data obtained from the optical Sentinel-​2 satellites [above] deployed as part of the European Space Agency’s Earth Observation mission, Copernicus Programme with the focus on the arctic landscape.

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) Copernicus Sentinels

TanDEM-​X radar elevation comparison between 2010 – 2017 of Mackenzie River Delta, Canada. (Image: ETH Zürich)

Neglected part of Arctic carbon cycle

Siberia’s Taymyr peninsula, like many areas of the arctic, is a remote and nearly inaccessible region making scientific field studies a challenging, if not impossible, operation. The findings of this study indicate; however, that summer heatwaves and warming arctic regions pose a significant environmental risk that are worth monitoring.

The Arctic permafrost reportedly encases approximately 1.5 trillion metric tons of organic carbon, about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere. Bernhard agrees that the potential risks associated with this type of carbon mobilisation is “a major, but largely neglected component of the Arctic carbon cycle”. The research team anticipates that satellite remote sensing will be an indispensable tool for continuous monitoring of carbon mobilization resulting from melting permafrost across the Arctic.

Science paper:
The Cryosphere

See the full article here .

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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH) is a public research university in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. Founded by the Swiss Federal Government in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the school focuses exclusively on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Like its sister institution The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne](CH) , it is part of The Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain (ETH Domain)) , part of the The Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research [EAER][Eidgenössisches Departement für Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung] [Département fédéral de l’économie, de la formation et de la recherche] (CH).

The university is an attractive destination for international students thanks to low tuition fees of 809 CHF per semester, PhD and graduate salaries that are amongst the world’s highest, and a world-class reputation in academia and industry. There are currently 22,200 students from over 120 countries, of which 4,180 are pursuing doctoral degrees. In the 2021 edition of the QS World University Rankings ETH Zürich is ranked 6th in the world and 8th by the Times Higher Education World Rankings 2020. In the 2020 QS World University Rankings by subject it is ranked 4th in the world for engineering and technology (2nd in Europe) and 1st for earth & marine science.

As of November 2019, 21 Nobel laureates, 2 Fields Medalists, 2 Pritzker Prize winners, and 1 Turing Award winner have been affiliated with the Institute, including Albert Einstein. Other notable alumni include John von Neumann and Santiago Calatrava. It is a founding member of the IDEA League and the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) and a member of the CESAER network.

ETH Zürich was founded on 7 February 1854 by the Swiss Confederation and began giving its first lectures on 16 October 1855 as a polytechnic institute (eidgenössische polytechnische schule) at various sites throughout the city of Zurich. It was initially composed of six faculties: architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, forestry, and an integrated department for the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, literature, and social and political sciences.

It is locally still known as Polytechnikum, or simply as Poly, derived from the original name eidgenössische polytechnische schule, which translates to “federal polytechnic school”.

ETH Zürich is a federal institute (i.e., under direct administration by the Swiss government), whereas The University of Zürich [Universität Zürich ] (CH) is a cantonal institution. The decision for a new federal university was heavily disputed at the time; the liberals pressed for a “federal university”, while the conservative forces wanted all universities to remain under cantonal control, worried that the liberals would gain more political power than they already had. In the beginning, both universities were co-located in the buildings of the University of Zürich.

From 1905 to 1908, under the presidency of Jérôme Franel, the course program of ETH Zürich was restructured to that of a real university and ETH Zürich was granted the right to award doctorates. In 1909 the first doctorates were awarded. In 1911, it was given its current name, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. In 1924, another reorganization structured the university in 12 departments. However, it now has 16 departments.

ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

Reputation and ranking

ETH Zürich is ranked among the top universities in the world. Typically, popular rankings place the institution as the best university in continental Europe and ETH Zürich is consistently ranked among the top 1-5 universities in Europe, and among the top 3-10 best universities of the world.

Historically, ETH Zürich has achieved its reputation particularly in the fields of chemistry, mathematics and physics. There are 32 Nobel laureates who are associated with ETH Zürich, the most recent of whom is Richard F. Heck, awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2010. Albert Einstein is perhaps its most famous alumnus.

In 2018, the QS World University Rankings placed ETH Zürich at 7th overall in the world. In 2015, ETH Zürich was ranked 5th in the world in Engineering, Science and Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of Cambridge (UK). In 2015, ETH Zürich also ranked 6th in the world in Natural Sciences, and in 2016 ranked 1st in the world for Earth & Marine Sciences for the second consecutive year.

In 2016, Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked ETH Zürich 9th overall in the world and 8th in the world in the field of Engineering & Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Cambridge(UK), Imperial College London(UK) and University of Oxford(UK) .

In a comparison of Swiss universities by swissUP Ranking and in rankings published by CHE comparing the universities of German-speaking countries, ETH Zürich traditionally is ranked first in natural sciences, computer science and engineering sciences.

In the survey CHE Excellence Ranking on the quality of Western European graduate school programs in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics, ETH Zürich was assessed as one of the three institutions to have excellent programs in all the considered fields, the other two being Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Cambridge (UK), respectively.

From Michigan State University: “Michigan State University researchers create method for breaking down plant materials for earth-friendly energy”

From Michigan State University

July 7, 2022
Emilie Lorditch

Michigan State University – College of Natural Science

These chemical tools can access renewable energy from plant matter that could lessen our dependence on fossil fuels.

With energy costs rising, and the rapidly emerging effects of burning fossil fuels on the global climate, the need has never been greater for researchers to find paths to products and fuels that are truly renewable.

“We use 20 million barrels of oil a day in the U.S.; that’s about a fifth of the world’s usage,” said Ned Jackson, a professor of organic chemistry in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University. “All our liquid fuels and nearly all of our manufactured materials, from gasoline and gallon jugs to countertops and clothes, start with petroleum — crude oil.”

Developing the tools to move from fossil fuels to renewable sources of carbon for all these components of daily life is necessary. But according to the most optimistic projections, Jackson said, “What we could harvest annually from biomass in the U.S. only has about two-thirds as much carbon in it as the crude oil that the nation uses.”

Jackson and his former graduate student Yuting Zhou, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, have developed a chemical method that enables electricity and water to break the strong chemical bonds in biomass or plant matter. This “electrocatalytic” process could be applied to lignin, a carbon-rich biomass component that is usually discarded or simply burned as a byproduct of making paper. This new tool also has the potential to destroy environmental pollutants.

A global goal is to tap into both the carbon and the energy stored in biomass to enable it to replace petroleum. But new, efficient methods are needed to break this complex, tough, low-energy material down into the building blocks for fuels and products. Specifically, tools are needed to disconnect the strong chemical bonds that bind it together, while retaining — and even enhancing — as much of the carbon and energy content as possible.

“One of the things that drives us is the idea that our main use of petroleum is fuel that is burned to produce energy, adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere,” Jackson said. “The new science is a step toward extracting useful carbon compounds to displace some fraction of the fossil petroleum that we use today.”

Parts of this research were supported by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. The GLBRC is led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and brings together over 400 scientists, engineers, students and staff from across different disciplines from institutions like MSU. One of GLBRC’s goals is to develop sustainable biofuels.

Science paper:
The research was published on April 19, 2022, in the journal Nature Communications.

See the full article here .

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Michigan State University is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. Michigan State University was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

The university was founded as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, one of the country’s first institutions of higher education to teach scientific agriculture. After the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, Michigan State University is one of the largest universities in the United States (in terms of enrollment) and has approximately 634,300 living alumni worldwide.

U.S. News & World Report ranks its graduate programs the best in the U.S. in elementary teacher’s education, secondary teacher’s education, industrial and organizational psychology, rehabilitation counseling, African history (tied), supply chain logistics and nuclear physics in 2019. Michigan State University pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, supply chain management, and communication sciences. Michigan State University is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university’s campus houses the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, the W. J. Beal Botanical Garden, the Abrams Planetarium, the Wharton Center for Performing Arts, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, and the country’s largest residence hall system.

Research

The university has a long history of academic research and innovation. In 1877, botany professor William J. Beal performed the first documented genetic crosses to produce hybrid corn, which led to increased yields. Michigan State University dairy professor G. Malcolm Trout improved the process for the homogenization of milk in the 1930s, making it more commercially viable. In the 1960s, Michigan State University scientists developed cisplatin, a leading cancer fighting drug, and followed that work with the derivative, carboplatin. Albert Fert, an Adjunct professor at Michigan State University, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.

Today Michigan State University continues its research with facilities such as the Department of Energy -sponsored Plant Research Laboratory and a particle accelerator called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory [below]. The Department of Energy Office of Science named Michigan State University as the site for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). The $730 million facility will attract top researchers from around the world to conduct experiments in basic nuclear science, astrophysics, and applications of isotopes to other fields.

Michigan State University FRIB [Facility for Rare Isotope Beams] .

In 2004, scientists at the Cyclotron produced and observed a new isotope of the element germanium, called Ge-60 In that same year, Michigan State University, in consortium with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the governments of Brazil and Chile, broke ground on the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) in the Andes Mountains of Chile.

NSF NOIRLab NOAO Southern Astrophysical Research [SOAR] telescope, operated by a consortium including the countries of Brazil and Chile, Michigan State University, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) (part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, NOAO), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill situated on Cerro Pachón, just to the southeast of Cerro Tololo, on the NOIRLab NOAO AURA site at an altitude of 2,700 meters (8,775 feet) above sea level.

The consortium telescope will allow the Physics & Astronomy department to study galaxy formation and origins. Since 1999, MSU has been part of a consortium called the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor, which aims to develop biotechnology research in the State of Michigan. Finally, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences’ Quello Center researches issues of information and communication management.

NSCL Nuclear research at MSU National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory S800 Spectrograph schematic.

The Michigan State University Spartans compete in the NCAA Division I Big Ten Conference. Michigan State Spartans football won the Rose Bowl Game in 1954, 1956, 1988 and 2014, and the university claims a total of six national football championships. Spartans men’s basketball won the NCAA National Championship in 1979 and 2000 and has attained the Final Four eight times since the 1998–1999 season. Spartans ice hockey won NCAA national titles in 1966, 1986 and 2007. The women’s cross country team was named Big Ten champions in 2019. In the fall of 2019, MSU student-athletes posted all-time highs for graduation success rates and federal graduation rates, according to NCAA statistics.

From Dartmouth College: “Study Shows Economic Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions”

From Dartmouth College

7.12.22
David Hirsch

Climate-warming activity from five countries caused $6 trillion in global losses.

A Dartmouth study calculates the economic impact of warming from greenhouse gas emissions by individual countries. (Photo by Veeterzy on Unsplash)

A sound scientific basis exists for climate liability claims between individual countries, according to a Dartmouth study released today.

The study is the first to assess the economic impacts that individual countries have caused to other countries through their contributions to global warming. The research draws direct connections between cumulative emissions per nation of heat-trapping gases to losses and gains in gross domestic product in 143 countries for which data are available.

“Greenhouse gases emitted in one country cause warming in another, and that warming can depress economic growth,” says Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography and senior researcher of the study. “This research provides legally valuable estimates of the financial damages individual nations have suffered due to other countries’ climate-changing activities.”

Among the data, the research found that five national emitters of greenhouse gases caused $6 trillion in global economic losses through warming from 1990 to 2014.

According to the study, emissions from the U.S. and China, the world’s two leading emitters, are responsible for global income losses of over $1.8 trillion each in the 25-year period from 1990. Economic losses caused by Russia, India, and Brazil individually exceed $500 billion each for the same years. The $6 trillion in cumulative losses attributable to the five countries equals about 11% of annual global GDP within the study period.

“This research provides an answer to the question of whether there is a scientific basis for climate liability claims—the answer is yes,” says Christopher Callahan, Guarini ’23, first author of the study. “We have quantified each nation’s culpability for historical temperature-driven income changes in every other country.”

Warmer temperatures can cause economic losses for a country through many pathways, such as lowering agricultural yields, reducing labor productivity, and decreasing industrial output.

In addition to losses, the research also values the economic benefits derived from warming caused by country-level emissions but highlights that the large gains disproportionately benefitting some countries do not negate the losses suffered in others.

The study focuses on the economic impacts of temperature change as a consequence of emissions, not other effects of emissions such as those on air quality. Data presented in the study quantifies economic impacts based on distinct greenhouse gas emissions accounting schemes, considering those emissions that happened within a country’s territory versus the emissions embodied in international trade.

The research shows that the distribution of warming impacts from emitters is highly unequal, with the top 10 global emitters causing more than two-thirds of losses worldwide. Countries that lose income are warmer and poorer than the global average and are generally located in the tropics and the global South. Countries that gain income are cooler and wealthier than the global average and are generally located in the middle latitudes and the North.

“Irrespective of the accounting, warm counties have warmed and lost income because of it, while colder countries have warmed but enjoyed economic gains,” says Mankin. “The responsibility for the warming rests primarily with a handful of major emitters, and this warming has resulted in the enrichment of a few wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest people in the world.”

For years, researchers have worked to establish direct legal links between economic loss and emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Previous studies have provided estimates on the total, global level of economic loss but could not determine the warming attributable to individual nations, undermining efforts to hold emitting countries accountable for legal damages because of the uncertainties involved.

By creating an analytical framework that links emissions from individual countries to the losses and gains in every other country, the Dartmouth research team hopes to help resolve questions of climate liability and national accountability to inform climate policy.

“For the first time, we have been able to show clear and statistically significant linkages between the emissions of specific countries and historical economic losses experienced by other countries,” says Callahan. “This is about the culpability of one country to another country, not the effect of overall global warming on a country.”

The team from the Climate Modeling & Impacts Group says that the study discredits the idea that climate mitigation is simply a “collective action problem,” where no one country acting alone can have an effect on the impacts of global warming.

“Until now, the complexity of the carbon cycle, natural variations in climate, and uncertainties in models have provided emitters with plausible deniability for individual damage claims. That veil of deniability has now been lifted,” says Mankin.

According to the team, identifying national culpability demonstrates that individual countries can have large, attributable impacts from warming due to their emissions; the actions of individual nations do matter; and country-level mitigation, even if pursued alone, would limit measurable harms to others.

“Nations need to work together to stop warming, but that doesn’t mean that individual countries can’t take actions that drive change,” says Callahan. “This research upends the notion that the causes and impacts of warming only occur at the global level.”

A major challenge for the research was to account for large uncertainties at each step in the causal chain from emissions to global warming, from warming to country-level temperature changes, and from country-level temperature changes to impact.

To overcome this difficulty, the research team combined historical data with climate models in an integrated framework to quantify each nation’s culpability for historical temperature-driven income changes in every other country.

The study sampled 2 million possible values for each country-to-country interaction. In total, 11 trillion values were calculated on a supercomputer operated by Dartmouth’s Research Information, Technology and Consulting.

“This is the first research to integrate and quantify all of the uncertainties in each step of the chain between emissions and economic impact,” says Callahan. “We are not addressing the question of whether fossil fuels have been good or bad for economic growth, but how to compensate for the damage caused by the warming from those emissions.”

According to the research team, future work can use the same analytical approach to determine the contribution of specific emitters, including individual corporations, to economic loss and gain.

The research was funded by the Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities, a research center in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, and the National Science Foundation.

The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, provides an essential basis for nations to make legal claims for economic losses tied to emissions and warming, according to the researchers.

See the full article here .

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Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League, research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Incorporated as the “Trustees of Dartmouth College”, it is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Dartmouth College was established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregational minister. After a long period of financial and political struggles, Dartmouth emerged in the early 20th century from relative obscurity, into national prominence.

Comprising an undergraduate population of 4,307 and a total student enrollment of 6,350 (as of 2016), Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Its undergraduate program, which reported an acceptance rate around 10 percent for the class of 2020, is characterized by the Carnegie Foundation and U.S. News & World Report as “most selective”. Dartmouth offers a broad range of academic departments, an extensive research enterprise, numerous community outreach and public service programs, and the highest rate of study abroad participation in the Ivy League.

From The Yale School of the Environment: “YSE-led Study Examines the Increasing Importance of Mid-Size Urban Forests”

From The Yale School of the Environment

at

Yale University

June 13, 2022 [Just today in social media.]

Fran Silverman
Associate Director of Communications
fran.silverman@yale.edu
+1 203-436-4842

A view of New Haven, CT. Credit: Matthew Garrett.

Forests within cities are becoming increasingly important as urban areas continue to expand because they provide a range of social, ecological, economic, and health benefits. A new study, co-authored by researchers from The Forest School at YSE, examines how New Haven’s urban forest patches change over time and how the findings can contribute to effective management strategies.

More than two-thirds of the world’s population are predicted to reside in cities by 2050, with urban areas expected to increase by 40%. Forests within urban regions provide a range of social, ecological, economic, and health benefits, but how urban forests change over time and regenerate is not well understood. A new study led by The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment has taken steps to address this by examining 126 forest plots in New Haven.

Danica Doroski ’21 PhD examines forest dynamics and regeneration patterns in New Haven’s urban forest patches.

The study, published in Ecosphere [below], focused on understanding the range of conditions that can be found in urban forest patches and included all publicly accessible forest plots within the city, from small vacant lots to large intact forested parcels.

Danica Doroski ’21 PhD, lead author of the study, says she became interested in examining New Haven’s urban forest dynamics and regeneration patterns after working in New York City to restore degraded forest patches. Much of the research on urban forests has been done in big cities, leaving smaller cities such as New Haven, which are more representative of urban areas in the U.S., understudied, the researchers say. Additionally, previous research has focused on comparing urban forests to rural forests rather than examining the full range of forest conditions that can exist within just one city. Much attention has also been centered on tree plantings in urban areas as a tool to mitigate climate change.

“Tree planting is often seen as a panacea to climate change and urbanization, but planting trees is not the only solution. In urban forested patches, trees are naturally regenerating and replacing themselves already — we just need to know how to manage them better so that we can more effectively leverage these forest patches as a form of green infrastructure in our cities.

“In terms of carbon storage, forest patches are a much more effective carbon sink than planted street trees, which need to be grown in nurseries, transported, planted, and eventually removed and landfilled when they die.” Doroski says.

The study found that some of the larger forest patches were almost identical to forests in rural settings and smaller patches in highly developed areas still had regeneration from bird-and-mammal dispersed tree species, illustrating their importance from a wildlife perspective. Even forests with non-native species could transition over time with proper management, underscoring the importance of investing in these forests and tailoring management to their unique conditions, the study found.

“What this research really shows us is that even in a relatively small city like New Haven, you can see lots of different forest types ranging from forests that are primarily dominated by native species to those that are primarily non-native dominated. Knowing that there is this diversity in urban forest types helps us to tailor our management approaches to improve outcomes and ensure healthy and sustainable future forests,” says Doroski, who is now state urban forester for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “In my current role, I am working to draw attention to these overlooked green spaces, promote more management of them, and channel resources into their long-term care and maintenance.”

The study was co-authored by Mark Ashton, senior associate dean of The Forest School at YSE, director of Yale Forests and Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology; Marlyse Duguid, Yale Forests director of research; Mark Bradford, professor of soils and ecosystem ecology; Clara Pregitzer, ’20 PhD, who is deputy director of conservation science at the Natural Areas Conservancy; and Richard Hallett, a research ecologist for the USDA Forest Service.

Duguid notes that the work is unique in that it brings basic forest dynamics theory to the study of urban forests rather than applied research.

“There’s huge potential here on how we think about managing natural urban forest patches and their connectivity to the landscapes and plant and wildlife communities,” Duguid says.

Ashton says the study and Doroski’s work pushes the frontier of research on representative urban forests in the eastern U.S.

“The importance of this work shows that urban forestry is not a niche, separate from rural or peri-urban forests. They are intimately linked. Danica brings a set of information that makes us think about what we do in terms of restoration and passive versus active management,” Ashton says.

Science paper:
Ecosphere

See the full article here .

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The Yale School of the Environment

Yale School of the Environment Vision and Mission

We are leading the world toward a sustainable future with cutting-edge research, teaching, and public engagement on society’s evolving and urgent environmental challenges.

Core Values

Our Mission and Vision are grounded in seven fundamental values:

Excellence: We promote and engage in path-breaking science, policy, and business models that build on a fundamental commitment to analytic rigor, data, intellectual integrity, and excellence.
Leadership: We attract outstanding students nationally and internationally and offer a pioneering curriculum that defines the knowledge and skills needed to be a 21st century environmental leader in a range of professions.
Sustainability: We generate knowledge that will advance thinking and understanding across the various dimensions of sustainability.
Community: We offer a community that finds strength in its collegiality, diversity, independence, commitment to excellence, and lifelong learning.
Diversity: We celebrate our differences and identify pathways to a sustainable future that respects diverse values including equity, liberty, and civil discourse.
Collaboration: We foster collaborative learning, professional skill development, and problem-solving — and we strengthen our scholarship, teaching, policy work, and outreach through partnerships across the university and beyond.
Responsibility: We encourage environmental stewardship and responsible behavior on campus and beyond.

Guiding Principles

In pursuit of our Mission and Vision, we:

Build on more than a century of work bringing science-based strategies, ethical considerations, and conservation practices to natural resource management.
Approach problems on a systems basis and from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Integrate theory and practice, providing innovative solutions to society’s most pressing environmental problems.
Address environmental challenges at multiple scales and settings — from local to global, urban to rural, managed to wild.
Draw on the depth of resources at Yale University and our network of alumni who extend across the world.
Create opportunities for research, policy application, and professional development through our unique centers and programs.
Provide a diverse forum to convene conversations on difficult issues that are critical to progress on sustainability.
Bring special focus on the most significant threats to a sustainable future including climate change, the corresponding need for clean energy, and the increasing stresses on our natural resources.

Statement of Environmental Policy

As faculty, staff, and students of the Yale School of the Environment, we affirm our commitment to responsible stewardship of the environment of our School, our University, the city of New Haven, and the other sites of our teaching, research, professional, and social activities.

In the course of these activities, we shall strive to:

reduce our use of natural resources;
support the sustainable production of the resources we must use by purchasing renewable, reusable, recyclable, and recycled materials;
minimize our use of toxic substances and ensure that unavoidable use is in full compliance with federal, state, and local environmental regulations;
reduce the amount of waste we generate and promote strategies to reuse and recycle those wastes that cannot be avoided;
restore the environment where possible.

Each member of the School community is encouraged to set an example for others by serving as an active steward of our environment.

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.

Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

As of October 2020, 65 Nobel laureates, five Fields Medalists, four Abel Prize laureates, and three Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires, and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 252 Rhodes Scholars, 123 Marshall Scholars, and nine Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Research

Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 15th in the nation.

Yale’s faculty include 61 members of the National Academy of Sciences , 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering and 49 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.

In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.

Notable alumni

Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. According to 2020 data, around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, with a total of 1,199 in its history and has produced 89 MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale fifth among research institutions producing the most 2020–2021 Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, 31 living billionaires are Yale alumni.

At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.

Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, 19 justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.

Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.

In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton,

Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology via “Science Alert (AU)” : “MIT Scientists Suggest Wild Plan to Ease Climate Change:: Space Bubbles”

From The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Via

“Science Alert (AU)”

11 JULY 2022
MIKE MCRAE

(MIT Senseable City Laboratory)

Concerned that efforts to staunch the flow of excess greenhouse gases bleeding into our atmosphere won’t be enough to save us from a worsening crisis, MIT engineers have returned to a decades old vision to help ease the effects of climate change.

To buy time for weaning ourselves off our fossil fuel addiction we could simply raise a parasol made of high-tech bubbles over the planet to create a bit of shade.

First proposed in the late 1980s, the suggestion of using a vast space-umbrella to block a tiny proportion of solar radiation isn’t quite as far-fetched as it sounds. And to be fair, it’s also a far less risky plan than other large scale geo-engineering projects intent on reflecting light from the surface back into space.

Yet even if the fundamental concept of cooling Earth with some kind of orbiting shield is feasible, the materials required wouldn’t exactly be off-the-shelf, requiring properties that made them robust, light-weight, and optically suitable.

Initial suggestions centered on a 2,000-kilometer (1,200 mile) wide glass sandwich blown from materials mined from lunar rock. Placed in a precise balance between the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity and the impact of solar rays and particles, it would reflect an amount of light calculated to mitigate the steady rise in temperature.

Since then, a variety of alternatives have been considered, from hydrogen-filled aluminum balloons to an artificial ring of particles that would turn Earth into a miniature Saturn.

All have their pros, but overwhelming cons relegate most to the ‘nice idea, shame about the science’ bin.

Still, desperate times call for desperate measures. Confident there’s still merit to the fundamental benefits of a solar shield, MIT scientists are calling for a feasibility study on deploying a raft of foamy bubbles the size of Brazil.

Once you get past thoughts of launching giant cans of shaving cream out into the interplanetary vacuum, it doesn’t sound all that ludicrous.

Made from a homogeneous substance like molten silicon, the subtle variations in thickness in the bubble film could reflect a variety of wavelengths of solar radiation, increasing its efficiency. And unlike the complex origami required to fold and un-fold large reflective fabrics for delivery, a sheet of bubbles could be blown in place, optimizing costs.

Best of all, should something unforeseen occur, it’s far more effective to pop a bunch of bubbles than it is to scoop up clouds of dust, recall crowds of tiny umbrellas, or shatter a city-sized pane of glass.

In theory such a shield would have a mass density of around 1.5 grams per square meter, putting it on the same level as speculative technology based on swarms of orbiting space-umbrellas.

Like many similar suggestions, the technology would need to be held in place by the tug-of-war between Earth and the Sun to avoid the need for heavy guidance systems.

Ideally, engineers would hope for the entire system to be capable of reducing the amount of sunlight that would otherwise bake our planet by 1.8 percent – a figure arrived at by previous studies.

Whether they can find a material capable of ticking all the right boxes, and work out a suitable way to launch it into position and then start blowing, depends on getting funding for additional research. Of course, none of this has been published in a peer-reviewed journal as yet – the researchers are simply putting the idea out there in the hopes that future work can be conducted to build upon it. So for now it’s mostly intriguing speculation.

Preliminary experiments have shown it’s possible to inflate thin-film bubbles at a pressure of around three-thousandths of an atmosphere, maintained at a temperature of -50 degrees Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit). But a lot more work needs to be done before we can even consider putting the plan into action.

“We believe that advancing feasibility studies of a solar shield to the next level could help us make more informed decisions in the years to come should geoengineering approaches become urgent,” says Carlo Ratti, a professor of urban technologies at MIT Senseable City Lab.

None of this would mean easing off on efforts to strangle carbon emissions of course. Previous MIT research [Geographical Research Letters] also implies we need to be extremely cautious when it comes to any kind of solar shading, with the changing global weather patterns a distinct possibility.

But in light of evidence that disastrous temperatures could be reached within as little as a decade or two, it’s clear all options need to be left on the table for consideration.

Just don’t let these big flashy projects distract us from the real solution – stopping emissions as quickly as humanly possible.

See the full article here .

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USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory campus

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology . The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From Stanford Earth Matters: “An AI solution to climate models’ gravity wave problem”

From Stanford Earth Matters

in

Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

at

Stanford University

7.1.22
Josie Garthwaite

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Stanford scientists are among a growing number of researchers harnessing artificial intelligence techniques to bring more realistic representations of ubiquitous atmospheric ripples into global climate models.

Global climate models agree on a litany of consequences from the buildup of heat-trapping gasses in Earth’s atmosphere, from higher average surface temperatures and rising sea levels to more extreme heat waves.

Gravity waves are ubiquitous atmospheric ripples that emerge when air is forced upward by wind blowing over, for instance, a thunderstorm or mountain. (Image credit: NASA)

But there are other aspects of our climate for which the outlook remains murkier than scientists would like. Models disagree on how rainfall patterns will change as the planet warms, and for many regions, it’s unclear how different the frequency of storms and dry spells, intensity of downpours, or amount of snowfall will be in 50 years. “That’s the sort of thing we would ultimately like to be able to have a lot more confidence in,” said Aditi Sheshadri, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, because the uncertainty hinders efforts to safeguard water supplies, food production, infrastructure, and people against future climate impacts.

Research published recently by Sheshadri and her former graduate student Zachary Espinosa in the journal Geophysical Research Letters may help to build that confidence by providing more realistic estimates of ubiquitous atmospheric ripples called gravity waves. “Including a more physical representation of gravity waves in climate models should ultimately lead to more accurate climate projections, particularly at a regional scale,” Sheshadri said.

Unlike gravitational waves, which distort the fabric of space-time, gravity waves emerge when air is forced upward by wind blowing over-for instance-a thunderstorm or mountain. Launched into a higher, thinner layer of atmosphere, the air falls back down under the force of gravity – then rises again like a cork bobbing up from underwater. Any given air parcel may rise and fall for a few minutes or many hours, transporting momentum as it goes. Eventually, the wave spreads up and out until it breaks in the middle and upper atmosphere like an ocean wave crashing on the beach.

Atmospheric scientists have long understood gravity waves help to drive the overall circulation of the atmosphere, and influence storm tracks and the polar vortex – the swirl of bitter cold air near Earth’s poles that occasionally wobbles and brings extreme winter weather to parts of the United States, Europe, and Asia.

“We understand the physics of how gravity waves propagate and break, but their effects cannot be explicitly represented in climate models due to computational constraints,” Sheshadri said.

ORNL OLCF IBM Q AC922 SUMMIT supercomputer, was No.1 on the TOP500.

Global climate models require large amounts of computing power, such as that of the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Image credit: The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Small waves, big impact

Gravity waves are simply too small and short lived to appear in models designed to cover the whole planet, much the way fine details are absent from low resolution photographs. Higher resolution models can provide more detailed information but are computationally expensive to run at the global scale for predictions covering more than a couple weeks.

To account for smaller scale processes like gravity waves without bogging down computation, scientists use simplified equations known as “parameterizations,” which are informed by physics but don’t calculate the oscillations and interactions of individual waves or incorporate even the limited available observational data. “We put in a guess as to what we think gravity waves are doing to the mean flow based on variables that the model can resolve,” Sheshadri said.

Even small changes in the approximations built into gravity wave parameterizations can lead to very different regional climate projections. As a result, climate modelers “tune” parameterizations so the results overall resemble the observed climate today – leaving a cloud of uncertainty around how circulation will respond as people and industry add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Accounting for gravity waves through A.I.

Sheshadri and Espinosa are among a growing number of researchers looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques for a possible solution. “Parameterizations are a large computational sink for climate models, so if we can accelerate them, that means we can bump up the resolution of all sorts of things,” Espinosa said.

The researchers have developed an AI-driven model, dubbed “WaveNet”, that can accurately emulate how dissipating gravity waves accelerate and decelerate atmospheric winds. The work involved building and training a set of artificial neural networks in the widely used programming language Python, and then coupling them to a typical global climate model built decades ago in a language from the 1950s, called Fortran.

Superpressure balloons designed to provide internet service incidentally also collected data that researchers have been able to use to calculate gravity wave motions. (Image credit: Loon)

The model has passed two important tests. Trained on only one year of data, its predictions of how gravity waves would respond to extremely high CO2 concentrations over 800 years were similar to those produced by conventional parameterizations. And, based on only one phase of data, it accurately simulated a full two-phase cycle of the quasi-biennial oscillation, a regular reversal of winds racing high above the equator that affects surface weather and ozone depletion – and is driven by breaking gravity waves.

“WaveNet is not really telling us anything new about gravity waves’ response to the CO2. It’s just doing what the conventional gravity wave parameterization would have done as a response to CO2 – at least, for now,” Sheshadri said.

The results are a promising first step towards developing fully data-driven gravity wave parameterizations, the focus of an international project Sheshadri leads called DataWave. These parameterizations could be optimized for speed and trained with data from high resolution regional simulations, high resolution but short-term global climate simulations, and a growing trove of atmospheric measurements from internet-beaming superpressure balloons. “Hopefully, that will give us computationally feasible ways of representing gravity waves in climate models that are physically meaningful as well as observationally constrained,” she said. “That’s the ultimate goal with this project.”

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Stanford Earth Matters

We are scientists! Undergraduates, graduate students, professors, educational staff, and alumni working professionals. We build community in our field trips, classes, and cocurriculars. We care about the Earth and making its resources available to people across the globe now and in the future.

The School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences

The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (formerly the School of Earth Sciences) lists courses under the subject code EARTH on the Stanford Bulletin’s ExploreCourses web site. Courses offered by the School’s departments and inter-departmental programs are linked on their separate sections, and are available at the ExploreCourses web site.

The School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences includes the departments of Geological Sciences, Geophysics, Energy Resources Engineering, and Earth System Science; and three interdisciplinary programs: the Earth Systems undergraduate B.S. and coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs, the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) with Ph.D. and joint M.S, and the Sustainability and Science Practice Program with coterminal M.A. and M.S. programs.

The aims of the school and its programs are:

to prepare students for careers in the fields of agricultural science and policy, biogeochemistry, climate science, energy resource engineering, environmental science and policy, environmental communications, geology, geobiology, geochemistry, geomechanics, geophysics, geostatistics, sustainability science, hydrogeology, land science, oceanography, paleontology, petroleum engineering, and petroleum geology;

to conduct disciplinary and interdisciplinary research on a range of questions related to Earth, its resources and its environment;

to provide opportunities for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students to learn about the planet’s history, to understand the energy and resource bases that support humanity, to address the geological and geophysical, and human-caused hazards that affect human societies, and to understand the challenges and develop solutions related to environment and sustainability.

To accomplish these objectives, the school offers a variety of programs adaptable to the needs of the individual student:

four-year undergraduate programs leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Science (M.S.)

five-year programs leading to the coterminal Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts (M.A.)

graduate programs offering the degrees of Master of Science, Engineer, and Doctor of Philosophy.

Details of individual degree programs are found in the section for each department or program.
Undergraduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

Any undergraduate admitted to the University may declare a major in one of the school’s departments or the Earth Systems Program by contacting the appropriate department or program office.

Requirements for the B.S. degree are listed in each department or program section. Departmental academic advisers work with students to define a career or academic goal and assure that the student’s curricular choices are appropriate to the pursuit of that goal. Advisers can help devise a sensible and enjoyable course of study that meets degree requirements and provides the student with opportunities to experience advanced courses, seminars, and research projects. To maximize such opportunities, students are encouraged to complete basic science and mathematics courses in high school or during their freshman year.
Coterminal Master’s Degrees in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

The Stanford coterminal degree program enables an undergraduate to embark on an integrated program of study leading to the master’s degree before requirements for the bachelor’s degree have been completed. This may result in more expeditious progress towards the advanced degree than would otherwise be possible, making the program especially important to Earth scientists because the master’s degree provides an excellent basis for entry into the profession. The coterminal plan permits students to apply for admission to a master’s program after earning 120 units, completion of six non-summer quarters, and declaration of an undergraduate major, but no later than the quarter prior to the expected completion of the undergraduate degree.

The student may meet the degree requirements in the more advantageous of the following two ways: by first completing the 180 units required for the B.S. degree and then completing the three quarters required for the M.S. or the M.A. degree; or by completing a total of 15 quarters during which the requirements for the two degrees are completed concurrently. In either case, the student has the option of receiving the B.S. degree upon meeting all the B.S. requirements or of receiving both degrees at the end of the coterminal program.

Students earn degrees in the same department or program, in two different departments, or even in different schools; for example, a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Geological Sciences. Students are encouraged to discuss the coterminal program with their advisers during their junior year. Additional information is available in the individual department offices.

University requirements for the coterminal master’s degree are described in the “Coterminal Master’s Program” section. University requirements for the master’s degree are described in the “Graduate Degrees” section of this bulletin.
Graduate Programs in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences

Admission to the Graduate Program

A student who wishes to enroll for graduate work in the school must be qualified for graduate standing in the University and also must be accepted by one of the school’s four departments or the E-IPER Ph.D. program. One requirement for admission is submission of scores on the verbal and quantitative sections of the Graduate Record Exam. Admission to one department of the school does not guarantee admission to other departments.

Faculty Adviser

Upon entering a graduate program, the student should report to the head of the department or program who arranges with a member of the faculty to act as the student’s adviser. Alternatively, in several of the departments, advisers are established through student-faculty discussions prior to admission. The student, in consultation with the adviser(s), then arranges a course of study for the first quarter and ultimately develops a complete plan of study for the degree sought.

Financial Aid
Detailed information on scholarships, fellowships, and research grants is available from the school’s individual departments and programs.

Stanford University campus

Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From “WIRED“: “Gravity Could Solve Clean Energy’s One Major Drawback”

From “WIRED“

Jan 4, 2022 [Just now in social media.]
Matt Reynolds

The Commercial Demonstration Unit lifts blocks weighing 35 tons each.Photograph: Giovanni Frondoni.

Finding green energy when the winds are calm and the skies are cloudy has been a challenge. Storing it in giant concrete blocks could be the answer.

In a Swiss valley, an unusual multi-armed crane lifts two 35-ton concrete blocks high into the air. The blocks delicately inch their way up the blue steel frame of the crane, where they hang suspended from either side of a 66-meter-wide horizontal arm. There are three arms in total, each one housing the cables, winches, and grabbing hooks needed to hoist another pair of blocks into the sky, giving the apparatus the appearance of a giant metallic insect lifting and stacking bricks with steel webs. Although the tower is 75 meters tall, it is easily dwarfed by the forested flanks of southern Switzerland’s Lepontine Alps, which rise from the valley floor in all directions.

Thirty meters. Thirty-five. Forty. The concrete blocks are slowly hoisted upwards by motors powered with electricity from the Swiss power grid. For a few seconds they hang in the warm September air, then the steel cables holding the blocks start to unspool and they begin their slow descent to join the few dozen similar blocks stacked at the foot of the tower. This is the moment that this elaborate dance of steel and concrete has been designed for. As each block descends, the motors that lift the blocks start spinning in reverse, generating electricity that courses through the thick cables running down the side of the crane and onto the power grid. In the 30 seconds during which the blocks are descending, each one generates about one megawatt of electricity: enough to power roughly 1,000 homes.

This tower is a prototype from Switzerland-based Energy Vault, one of a number of startups finding new ways to use gravity to generate electricity. A fully-sized version of the tower might contain 7,000 bricks and provide enough electricity to power several thousand homes for eight hours. Storing energy in this way could help solve the biggest problem facing the transition to renewable electricity: finding a zero-carbon way to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. “The greatest hurdle we have is getting low-cost storage,” says Robert Piconi, CEO and cofounder of Energy Vault.

Without a way to decarbonize the world’s electricity supply we’ll never hit net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Electricity production and heat add up to a quarter of all global emissions [IPCC] and, since almost every activity you can imagine requires electricity, cleaning up power grids has huge knock-on effects. If our electricity gets greener, so do our homes, industries, and transport systems. This will become even more critical as more parts of our lives become electrified— particularly heating and transport, which will be difficult to decarbonize in any other way. All of this electrification is expected to double electricity production by 2050 according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But without an easy way to store large amounts of energy and then release it when we need it, we may never undo our reliance on dirty, polluting, fossil-fuel-fired power stations.

This is where gravity energy storage comes in. Proponents of the technology argue that gravity provides a neat solution to the storage problem. Rather than relying on lithium-ion batteries, which degrade over time and require rare-earth metals that must be dug out of the ground, Piconi and his colleagues say that gravity systems could provide a cheap, plentiful, and long-lasting store of energy that we’re currently overlooking. But to prove it, they’ll need to build an entirely new way of storing electricity, and then convince an industry already going all-in on lithium-ion batteries that the future of storage involves extremely heavy weights falling from great heights.

Energy Vault’s test site is in a small town called Arbedo-Castione in Ticino, the southernmost of Switzerland’s 26 cantons and the only one where the sole official language is Italian. The foothills of the Swiss Alps is a fitting location for a gravity energy storage startup: A short drive east from Energy Vault’s offices will take you to the Contra Dam, a concrete edifice made famous in the opening scene of GoldenEye, where James Bond bungee-jumps down the dam’s 220-meter-high face to infiltrate a top-secret Soviet chemical weapons facility. Just to the north of Arbedo-Castione, another towering dam blocks the upper Blenio Valley, holding back the waters of the Luzzone reservoir.

Water and height—Switzerland has both of these resources in abundance, which is why the country was an early pioneer of the oldest and most widely used large-scale energy storage on the planet: pumped hydro. In the very north of Switzerland is the oldest working pumped hydro facility in the world. Built in 1907, the Engeweiher pumped hydro facility works on the same basic premise as Energy Vault’s tower. When electricity supply is plentiful, water is pumped upwards from the nearby Rhine to fill the 90,000-cubic-meter Engeweiher reservoir. When energy demand is at its highest, some of this water is released through a set of gates and plunges down to a hydroelectric power plant, where the downward movement of the water turns the blades of a turbine and generates electricity. Engeweiher now doubles as a local beauty spot, popular with joggers and dog walkers from the nearby town of Schaffhausen, but pumped hydro has come a long way since the early 20th century. Over 94 percent of the world’s large-scale energy storage is pumped hydro, most of it built between the 1960s and ’90s to harness cheap electricity produced by nuclear power plants running overnight.

The simplicity of pumped hydro made it the obvious starting point for Bill Gross, a serial entrepreneur and founder of the California-based startup incubator Idealab. “I always wanted to figure out a way to make what I was thinking was an artificial dam. How can we take the properties of a dam, which are so great, but build it wherever we want?” he says. Although new pumped hydro plants are still being built, the technology has some big drawbacks. New projects take years to plan and build, and they only work in places where height and water are plentiful. Gross wanted to re-create the simplicity of pumped hydro, but in a way that meant the storage could be built anywhere. In 2009 he cofounded a startup called Energy Cache, which planned to store energy by lifting gravel bags up hillsides using a jerry-rigged ski lift. Gross and his cofounder Aaron Fyke eventually built a small prototype of the device in 2012 on a hillside in Irwindale, California, but they struggled to find customers and shortly afterwards the startup folded. “For years I thought about that. I was saddened about that,” he says. “But I kept on thinking that the real thing that energy storage has to have is that you need to be able to put it wherever you want.” While Gross was brooding on his failed startup, the case for energy storage was only getting stronger. Between 2010 and 2016, the cost of solar electricity went from 38 cents (28p) per kilowatt hour to just 11 cents. Gross became convinced that it might be time to return to his gravity storage idea, with a new startup and a new design. And he knew exactly who he wanted to build it.

Blocks raised by the Commercial Demonstration Unit “plug” into the blocks below.Photograph: Giovanni Frondoni.

Andrea Pedretti has a background in building improbable structures. At his family’s civil engineering firm in Ticino he helped build the main stage for the annual Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway: a 20-meter-high floating PVC blanket with a bulging horn that pours sound into the town square. In 2016, Pedretti received a call from Gross asking him to help design a very different kind of structure: an energy storage device that would re-create pumped hydro without the need for mountains. The pair started drafting rough ideas for structures, calculating how much each one would cost to build and discussing the designs over frequent calls between Ticino and California. “[Gross] is always obsessed with reducing the cost of everything—he’s very good at this,” says Pedretti, now Energy Vault’s chief technology officer. One of their first designs took the form of a steel-walled tank 100 meters tall and 30 meters wide, where water would be pumped to the top and then released to plunge back down to the bottom, turning a turbine connected to a generator. Later they considered building a series of elevated plastic troughs that would tilt as water dropped between the levels. None of the designs brought the cost down low enough, so Pedretti and Gross returned to one of their very first ideas: using a crane to lift and drop weights. Cranes are cheap and the technology is everywhere, reasoned Pedretti. This way they wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel just to get their idea off the ground.

The tricky part however would be figuring out a way to lift and stack weights autonomously. The storage system would work by stacking thousands of blocks in concentric rings around a central tower, which would require millimeter-precise placement of the blocks and the ability to compensate for wind and the pendulum effect caused by a heavy weight swinging at the end of a cable. On the demonstrator tower in Arbedo-Castione, the trolleys that hold the cables that lift the bricks move back and forth to compensate for this motion; the blackboard in Pedretti’s office in Westlake Village, California, is still covered with equations he used to work out the best way to smoothly lift and stack blocks.

In July 2017, Pedretti went online and bought a 40-year-old crane for €5,000. “It was rusty, but it was fine. It did the job,” he says. With his colleague at Energy Vault, Johnny Zani, he replaced the crane’s electronics and set it up in a town called Biasca, north of Energy Vault’s current test site. For their first test of the software, they instructed the crane to lift a bag of dirt and move it to a specific point a short distance away. “It was amazing—it worked the first time. This never happens! It took the weight, moved it and stopped it exactly ten metres away,” says Pedretti. A week later they swapped the bag of dirt for a stack of bright blue barrels and took a video of the crane stacking the barrels. “This was the video that basically started the company,” says Pedretti.

By October 2017, Energy Vault had officially become a company, with Robert Piconi, a former healthcare executive and another of Gross’s collaborators, as its CEO. Now they had to convince investors that their 40-year-old crane was just the beginning of a company that could help solve the world’s growing renewable electricity dilemma.

Energy Vault’s 75-meter-tall Commercial Demonstration Unit at night, in Arbedo-Castione, Switzerland.Photograph: Giovanni Frondoni.

We are living through a revolution in electricity production. In many parts of the world the era of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity is drawing to a close. In 2020, the UK went a record-breaking 67 days without firing up one of its few remaining coal power plants, a staggering feat for a country that produced one-third of its electricity from coal less than 10 years ago. Since 2010, the rapid deployment of wind and solar has pushed the share of global electricity produced by renewables up from 20 percent to just under 29 percent. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2023 total installed wind and solar capacity will surpass that of natural gas. By 2024 it will shoot past coal and a year later renewables as a whole are set to become the single largest source of electricity generation worldwide. “If we are serious about trying to deal with climate change, we better be in a situation where we are moving towards a high renewables penetration system,” says Dharik Mallapragada, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative. “That’s our best card from a technology perspective. Just deploy as much wind and solar into the system as we can.”

The race to decarbonize our grids poses challenges we haven’t faced before. Running a power grid is a high-wire act where electricity generation must be carefully balanced with demand at all times. The system is always on the verge of veering dangerously out of equilibrium. Generate too much electricity and the grid breaks down. Generate too little electricity and, well, the grid breaks down. This is exactly what happened in Texas in February 2021, when one of the coldest winter storms in decades hit the state. Texans raced to turn up their heating and defend against temperatures so low that the pipelines running to gas and nuclear power stations froze solid. As demand surged and supply plummeted in the early hours of February 15, staff in the control room at the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) frantically called utilities, asking them to cut power to their customers. Millions of Texans were left without electricity for days. Some died of hypothermia inside their own homes while they waited for the power to come back online. A few days after the crisis, ERCOT’s chief executive officer Bill Magness admitted that the entire grid was only “seconds and minutes” away from an uncontrolled blackout that could have left tens of millions of residents without power for several weeks.

Grids with a high percentage of wind and solar power are susceptible to sudden swings in electricity supply. When the skies darken or the winds grow calm, that electricity generation simply disappears from the grid, leaving utilities to plug the gap using fossil fuels. The opposite situation poses problems too. Around 32 percent of California’s electricity is generated from renewables, but on cool spring days, when the skies are clear and the winds steady, this can spike to almost 95 percent. Unfortunately, solar power peaks at around midday, hours before electricity demand reaches its highest level as people return home from work, crank up the air-conditioning, and turn on the TV. Since solar power isn’t generated late in the evening, this peak demand is usually met by gas power plants instead. When researchers at California Independent System Operator charted this gap between solar production and peak energy demand on a graph, they noticed that the line traced the round belly and slender neck of a duck, and christened one of renewables’ most vexing complications the “duck curve.” The cute-looking curve is such a problem that California sometimes has to pay neighboring states to take excess solar energy off its hands to avoid overloading its power lines. In Hawaii, where the difference between peak solar electricity generation and peak demand is even more pronounced, this curve has another name: the “Nessie curve.”

All of these problems are down to a fundamental quirk of electricity: It is impossible to store. A spark of electricity produced at a coal-fired power plant cannot stay still; it has to go somewhere. To keep networks in balance, grid operators are constantly matching supply and demand, but the more wind and solar you add to the grid, the more uncertainty you introduce into this balancing act. Utilities hedge against this by keeping fossil-fuel power plants around to dispatch reliable energy whenever necessary. Energy storage offers one way out of this bind. By converting electrical energy into a different form of energy—chemical energy in a lithium-ion battery, or gravitational potential energy in one of Energy Vault’s hanging bricks—you can hold onto that energy and deploy it exactly when you need it. That way you squeeze more value out of renewable power sources and reduce the need for backup from fossil fuel power plants. “It’s a shift that has to happen, and battery technology and energy storage more generally is an important part of that shift towards renewable power,” says Alex Holland, a senior technology analyst at IDTechEx. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, energy storage is on the verge of an exponential rise: Its 2019 report predicts a 122-fold increase in storage by 2040, requiring up to half a trillion pounds in new investments.

A rendering of how retired coal-plant sites could be reused for Energy Vault Resiliences Centers.Photograph: Energy Vault Inc.

Even as his company started work on the multi-arm crane design in 2018, it was becoming clear to Piconi that the next version of his energy storage system would need a major overhaul. For a start, a full-scale tower would weigh an astronomical amount and require deep foundations to keep it stable. The blocks alone would add up to about 245,000 ton—nearly half the weight of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. The exposed design also posed potential problems. If snow was trapped between two blocks it could be compacted into ice, making stacking more blocks impossible. Sandstorms could prove a similar risk.

To solve these problems, Piconi and his colleagues decided to put their gravity storage system inside vast modular buildings—a system they call EVx. Each proposed building would measure at least 100 meters tall and contain thousands of weights. Getting rid of the crane simplifies the logistics of working with so many weights. Instead of having to be stacked precisely in concentric circles, now the weights can simply be lifted vertically by a trolley system and stored on a rack at the top of the building until they are ready to come back down again. The design can also be altered depending on storage requirements: A long but thin building would provide lots of energy over a relatively short period of time, while adding further width to the building would increase the timespan over which it could release energy. A one-gigawatt-hour system that could provide roughly enough energy to power around 100,000 homes for 10 hours would have a footprint of 25 to 30 acres. “I mean, it’s pretty massive,” Piconi says, but he points out that the systems are likely to be deployed in places where there is no shortage of space, including near existing wind and solar farms. The system is also garnering interest from power-hungry heavy industries eager to use more renewable energy. One potential customer is an ammonia manufacturer in the Middle East and another a large mining firm in Australia. Piconi says that the majority of customers will buy the storage system outright, but some can be leased on a monthly storage-as-a-service model. So far, the biggest deals on the table for Energy Vault are with big industrial clients. “As things have evolved and people are looking at alternatives and [solar power] has come down so low, these industrial applications become very interesting,” Piconi says.

The most important question facing Energy Vault is whether it can get the cost of its buildings low enough that it makes gravity the most attractive form of energy storage. Since 1991, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 97 percent, and analysts expect that price to keep dropping in the coming decades. “Really, any storage technology has to compete against lithium-ion, because lithium-ion is on this incredible cost-reduction trajectory,” says Oliver Schmidt, a visiting researcher at Imperial College London. Over the next couple of decades, hundreds of millions of electric vehicles will roll off production lines, and almost every single one of them will contain a lithium-ion battery. In mid-2018, Tesla’s Gigafactory was producing more than 20 gigawatt hours of lithium-ion batteries every year—more than the total grid-scale battery storage installed in the entire world. The boom in electric vehicles is driving the cost of lithium-ion down, and energy storage is coming along for the ride.

The price of Energy Vault’s systems might not have so far to fall. Every facility will require the construction of a new building, although Gross says the team is already working on ways to cut costs by reducing the amount of material required and automating parts of the construction. One advantage it has is the weights. The several thousand 30-ton blocks in each EVx system can be made out of soil from the building site or other materials destined for landfill, plus a little binder. In July 2021, Energy Vault announced a partnership with Italian energy firm Enel Green Power to use fiberglass from decommissioned wind turbine blades to form part of its bricks. At its test site in Arbedo-Castione, it has a brick press that can churn out a new block every 15 minutes. “That’s what’s great about the way we’ve designed the supply chain. There’s nothing to stop us. It’s dirt. It’s waste product. We can build these brick machines in four months, we can build 25 to 50 of them,” says Piconi.

Edinburgh-based energy storage startup Gravitricity has found a novel way to keep the costs of gravity storage down: dropping its weights down disused mineshafts, rather than building towers. “We believe that to get the sort of cost, engineering and physics to work for large scale systems … we need to use the geology of the Earth to hold the weight up,” says Gravitricity managing director Charlie Blair. In April 2021, Gravitricity started tests on a 15-meter-high demonstration system assembled in Leith, Scotland, but the company’s first commercial system may end up being in Czechia, where politicians are keen to find a new use for soon-to-be-decommissioned coal mines. Another potential location is South Africa, which has plenty of its own mines plus the added problems of an unstable electricity grid and frequent power blackouts.

Gravitricity is targeting a different part of the energy market from Energy Vault: providing short bursts of electricity at crucial times to keep expensive energy infrastructure from being damaged. Power grids are designed to operate at a certain frequency; European grids run at 50 hertz while in the US it’s 60 hertz. This frequency is maintained by keeping a balance between supply and demand on the grid, but a sudden spike in either of these threatens to send the frequency rising or falling. In fossil-fuel power plants, spinning turbines act like shock absorbers, smoothing out small changes in frequency while operators either increase or decrease energy supply to match demand. Solar and wind power plants don’t work like this, so when they stop generating electricity, grids need another source of power to quickly step in to maintain frequency while generation elsewhere is ramped up. Blair says that Gravitricity’s systems will be able to respond to frequency changes in less than a second, and that combining its system with other technologies could shorten this response time even further. This service, called frequency response, is so crucial that power network operators pay a heavy premium for companies that can respond with split-second timing.

Has the moment for gravity energy storage finally arrived? In the last decade, multiple gravity startups have launched, failed and then reappeared in different forms. None of them have yet sold and built a system for a customer, although Energy Vault has eight deals signed with several projects slated to begin by the middle of 2022. In September 2021, the company announced that it would soon list on the New York Stock Exchange after a merger with a special purchase acquisition company (SPAC): an in-vogue alternative to an IPO that offers firms a quicker and easier route into going public. The company behind Energy Vault’s listing, Novus Capital, was also behind another SPAC which took the farming technology firm AppHarvest public in February 2021. Since then, AppHarvest’s share price has been on a dramatic downward slide, and the company is now subject to a class action lawsuit alleging that the firm misled investors about its projected financial results.

The latest SPAC valued Energy Vault at $1.1 billion (£808 million), but some experts aren’t convinced that the potential for gravity energy storage is as widespread as its proponents suggest. “There’s a lot of money floating around, generally, green energy storage technologies. And I think you can ride that wave to a certain extent,” says Alex Holland, the analyst at IDTechEx. In 2019 Energy Vault announced a $110 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, although SoftBank only delivered $25 million of this before pausing the funding in 2020. SoftBank later re-invested in Energy Vault as part of a Series C round in August 2021 and again as part of the SPAC deal. Other investors in Energy Vault include Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, Prime Movers Lab, and several investment firms.

As with other early-stage storage companies, Energy Vault has had to strike a careful balancing act in how it pitches itself: disruptive enough to attract investors looking for the next big thing, but reliable and cheap enough that utilities will consider making it a part of their energy infrastructure. On one hand there is the moonshot of a fully renewable world, on the other the brute economics of cheap energy storage. One wall in the company’s Ticino offices holds a framed tweet from Bill Gates calling Energy Vault an “exciting company.” On the opposite side of the wall is another framed quote, this time from Robert Piconi himself, about dispatching stored energy below the cost of fossil fuels.

Schmidt was also surprised to see a billion-dollar valuation. The need for long-term storage really starts to bite when energy systems are made up of more than 80 percent renewable energy. That figure is a very long way off for most countries. In the meantime, we still have other ways of achieving flexibility: thermal power plants burning biomass with carbon capture, interconnections between power grids and reducing demand for electricity. Schmidt thinks that lithium-ion will satisfy most of the world’s need for new storage until national power grids hit 80 percent renewables, and then the need for longer-term storage will be met by a host of competing technologies, including flow batteries, compressed air, thermal storage and gravity storage. “The first challenge with renewables, as you get to high penetrations, is second-to-second, minute-to-minute volatility, and if you can’t solve those stability problems you won’t ever get to 80 percent renewable penetration,” says Marek Kubik, a managing director at Fluence, an energy storage company that has built 3.4 gigawatts of grid-scale battery storage—almost all of it lithium ion. “Today, lithium ion has just been the dominant technology because of the cost declines, which are driven not by the stationary storage industry but by electric vehicles. That is a very formidable force.”

Pedretti points out, however, that lithium ion batteries degrade over time and have to be replaced. Gravity is a form of storage that theoretically shouldn’t lose efficacy. “Today, people think short-term,” he says. “Politicians, managers, everyone is measured on short-term performance.” Switching the world to renewable electricity will require a shift in thinking from just a few years ahead to decades and even centuries to come. The people who built Switzerland’s dams and pumped hydro plants didn’t take a short-term view, he adds. The Engeweiher pumped hydro plant in Schaffhausen is still contracted to run for another 31 years; by the end of that contract it will have been in operation for nearly one and a half centuries. Building the power grid for a zero-carbon world is a similar exercise in long-term thinking: “In the past the people who made the dams didn’t think short-term. They thought more long-term. And today this is missing.”

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From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “Bacteria for Blastoff:: Using Microbes to Make Supercharged New Rocket Fuel”

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

June 30, 2022
Aliyah Kovner
akovner@lbl.gov

Scientists turned to an oddball bacterial molecule that looks like a jaw full of sharp teeth to create a new type of fuel that could be used for all types of vehicles including rockets. (Credit: Jenny Nuss/Berkeley Lab)

Converting petroleum into fuels involves crude chemistry first invented by humans in the 1800s. Meanwhile, bacteria have been producing carbon-based energy molecules for billions of years. Which do you think is better at the job?

Well aware of the advantages biology has to offer, a group of biofuel experts led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took inspiration from an extraordinary antifungal molecule made by Streptomyces bacteria to develop a totally new type of fuel that has projected energy density greater than the most advanced heavy-duty fuels used today, including the rocket fuels used by NASA.

“This biosynthetic pathway provides a clean route to highly energy-dense fuels that, prior to this work, could only be produced from petroleum using a highly toxic synthesis process,” said project leader Jay Keasling, a synthetic biology pioneer and CEO of the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “As these fuels would be produced from bacteria fed with plant matter – which is made from carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere – burning them in engines will significantly reduce the amount of added greenhouse gas relative to any fuel generated from petroleum.”

The incredible energy potential of these fuel candidate molecules, called POP-FAMEs (for polycylcopropanated fatty acid methyl esters), comes from the fundamental chemistry of their structures. Polycylcopropanated molecules contain multiple triangle-shaped three-carbon rings that force each carbon-carbon bond into a sharp 60-degree angle. The potential energy in this strained bond translates into more energy for combustion than can be achieved with the larger ring structures or carbon-carbon chains typically found in fuels. In addition, these structures enable fuel molecules to pack tightly together in a small volume increasing the mass – and therefore the total energy – of fuel that fits in any given tank.

With petrochemical fuels, you get kind of a soup of different molecules and you don’t have a lot of fine control over those chemical structures. But that’s what we used for a long time and we designed all of our engines to run on petroleum derivatives,” said Eric Sundstrom, an author on the paper describing POP fuel candidates published in the journal Joule and a research scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU).

“The larger consortium behind this work, Co-Optima, was funded to think about not just recreating the same fuels from biobased feedstocks, but how we can make new fuels with better properties,” said Sundstrom. “The question that led to this is: ‘What kinds of interesting structures can biology make that petrochemistry can’t make?’”

A quest for the ring(s)

Keasling, who is also a professor at UC Berkeley, had his eye on cyclopropane molecules for a long time. He had scoured the scientific literature for organic compounds with three-carbon rings and found just two known examples, both made by Streptomyces bacteria that are nearly impossible to grow in a lab environment. Fortunately, one of the molecules had been studied and genetically analyzed due to interest in its antifungal properties. Discovered in 1990, the natural product is named jawsamycin, because its unprecedented five cyclopropane rings make it look like a jaw filled with pointy teeth.

A culture of the Streptomyces bacteria that makes the jawsamycin. (Credit: Pablo Morales-Cruz)

Keasling’s team, comprised of JBEI and ABPDU scientists, studied the genes from the original strain (S. roseoverticillatus) that encode the jawsamycin-building enzymes and took a deep dive into the genomes of related Streptomyces, looking for a combination of enzymes that could make a molecule with jawsamycin’s toothy rings while skipping the other parts of the structure. Like a baker rewriting recipes to invent the perfect dessert, the team hoped to remix existing bacterial machinery to create a new molecule with ready-to-burn fuel properties.

First author Pablo Cruz-Morales was able to assemble all the necessary ingredients to make POP-FAMEs after discovering new cyclopropane-making enzymes in a strain called S. albireticuli. “We searched in thousands of genomes for pathways that naturally make what we needed. That way we avoided the engineering that may or may not work and used nature’s best solution,” said Cruz-Morales, a senior researcher at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark and the co-principal investigator of the yeast natural products lab with Keasling.

Unfortunately, the bacteria weren’t as cooperative when it came to productivity. Ubiquitous in soils on every continent, Streptomyces are famous for their ability to make unusual chemicals. “A lot of the drugs used today, such as immunosuppressants, antibiotics, and anti-cancer drugs, are made by engineered Streptomyces,” said Cruz-Morales. “But they are very capricious and they’re not nice to work with in the lab. They’re talented, but they’re divas.” When two different engineered Streptomyces failed to make POP-FAMEs in sufficient quantities, he and his colleagues had to copy their newly arranged gene cluster into a more “tame” relative.

The resulting fatty acids contain up to seven cyclopropane rings chained on a carbon backbone, earning them the name fuelimycins. In a process similar to biodiesel production, these molecules require only one additional chemical processing step before they can serve as a fuel.

Now we’re cooking with cyclopropane

Though they still haven’t produced enough fuel candidate molecules for field tests – “you need 10 kilograms of fuel to do a test in a real rocket engine, and we’re not there yet,” Cruz-Morales explained with a laugh – they were able to evaluate Keasling’s predictions about energy density.

Colleagues at The DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory analyzed the POP-FAMEs with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to prove the presence of the elusive cyclopropane rings. And collaborators at The DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories used computer simulations to estimate how the compounds would perform compared to conventional fuels.

The simulation data suggest that POP fuel candidates are safe and stable at room temperature and will have energy density values of more than 50 megajoules per liter after chemical processing. Regular gasoline has a value of 32 megajoules per liter, JetA, the most common jet fuel, and RP-1, a popular kerosene-based rocket fuel, have around 35.

During the course of their research, the team discovered that their POP-FAMEs are very close in structure to an experimental petroleum-based rocket fuel called Syntin developed in the 1960s by the Soviet Union space agency and used for several successful Soyuz rocket launches in the 70s and 80s. Despite its powerful performance, Syntin manufacturing was halted due to high costs and the unpleasant process involved: a series of synthetic reactions with toxic byproducts and an unstable, explosive intermediate.

“Although POP-FAMEs share similar structures to Syntin, many have superior energy densities. Higher energy densities allow for lower fuel volumes which in a rocket can allow for increased payloads and decreased overall emissions,” said author Alexander Landera, a staff scientist at Sandia. One of the team’s next goals to create a process to remove the two oxygen atoms on each molecule, which add weight but no combustion benefit. “When blended into a jet fuel, properly deoxygenated versions of POP-FAMEs may provide a similar benefit,” Landera added.

Since publishing their proof-of-concept paper, the scientists have begun work to increase the bacteria’s production efficiency even further to generate enough for combustion testing. They are also investigating how the multi-enzyme production pathway could be modified to create polycyclopropanated molecules of different lengths. “We’re working on tuning the chain length to target specific applications,” said Sundstrom. “Longer chain fuels would be solids, well-suited to certain rocket fuel applications, shorter chains might be better for jet fuel, and in the middle might be a diesel-alternative molecule.”

Author Corinne Scown, JBEI’s Director of Technoeconomic Analysis, added: “Energy density is everything when it comes to aviation and rocketry and this is where biology can really shine. The team can make fuel molecules tailored to the applications we need in those rapidly evolving sectors.”

Eventually, the scientists hope to engineer the process into a workhorse bacteria strain that could produce large quantities of POP molecules from plant waste food sources (like inedible agricultural residue and brush cleared for wildfire prevention), potentially making the ultimate carbon-neutral fuel.

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Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into the Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above the University of California- Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

E.O. Lawrence’ first cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded Fermi National Accelerator Laborator.

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

LBNL/ALS

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source .
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology . The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

The LBNL Molecular Foundry [above] is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer.

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science , and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.