Greenpeace busca un proyecto innovador y se une a la iniciativa EmprendeMedia

• Se han convocado diez becas para identificar focos de creatividad en el ámbito de las artes audiovisuales

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El barco de Greenpeace Esperanza recorrerá el Cantábrico en una campaña para “salvar el clima”

• El buque de la organización ecologista comenzará su travesía en A Coruña, visitará Gijón y terminará su viaje en Bilbao

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Bob Esponja ya no vivirá en la piña debajo del mar

En uno de los mares más bonitos del mundo, al norte de la provincia filipina de Palawan existe una barrera de coral en un estado de conservación envidiable. Es tan impresionante su riqueza ambiental...

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Hawaii: el paraíso del surf y de las renovables

Ya sé que la vuelta después del verano se hace cuesta arriba pero, para mantener un poco más los recuerdos de las playas, vamos a imaginarnos en Hawaii. Tú también ves en tu imaginación playas...

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¿Cómplices de los crímenes de guerra saudíes?

Al menos 46 personas muertas y 24 heridas. Son las víctimas del ataque aéreo saudí al norte de la capital de Yemen el miércoles 23 de agosto, en un conflicto “olvidado" que se ha cobrado más de...

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Los rostros de la trama del Segura

¿Qué ocurre con el agua en la cuenca del Segura? ¿Qué irregularidades se cometen? ¿Puede esta zona ser autosuficiente y vivir sin el agua del Tajo? ¿Es necesario el trasvase Tajo-Segura? ¿Existen...

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Greenpeace confirma que el trasvase Tajo-Segura podría cerrarse en tres años

• Testimonios sobre las irregularidades en la gestión del agua demuestran trato desigual a pequeños agricultores, que incluso sufren amenazas, y a grandes empresas • Se niega el agua a la...

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La trama del agua en la cuenca del Segura

Ilegalidades, ocultación de información, mediciones trucadas, robo de agua, trato de favor a grandes empresas… la gestión del agua en la cuenca del Segura está salpicada de malas prácticas e...

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For the love of ice: Journeys to the remote and inhospitable

Ice has always been fascinating to Alison Criscitiello PhD '14.

“I had a science teacher who did a short unit on glaciers … I couldn’t believe they were real,” she says. That classroom encounter when she was in eight grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, had a lasting impact.

Criscitiello went on to earn MIT’s first PhD in glaciology, and now she is an adjunct assistant professor of glaciology at the University of Calgary in Canada. She studies the history of sea ice and polar marine environments, primarily by drilling ice cores on land-based ice sheets and ice caps in both the Arctic and Antarctic. In March, Criscitiello became the technical director of the newly-created Canadian Ice Core Archive at the University of Alberta, where scientists will have access to 1.7 kilometers of core samples.

“The very northernmost reaches of the Canadian High Arctic are incredibly understudied and under­sampled,” says Criscitiello. To reach remote sites, she often must take several small prop plane flights and then ski in to the destination. On trips to such places as West Antarctica and Greenland, she has had to camp on ice sheets; in Greenland, she’s even slept with a shotgun in case of polar bear attacks.

In a 2014 Lady Paragons Women in STEM podcast, Criscitiello said she does not mind the hardships: “For me, there is really nothing else in the world that compares to that feeling of being somewhere incredibly remote and frozen, even if it’s inhospitable.”

Her 40-day winter ski traverse with Rebecca ­Haspel and Kate Harris SM ’10 through the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia in 2015 is the subject of the new documentary "Borderski." In it, the women travel along Tajikistan’s border with Kyrgyzstan, China, and Afghanistan to bring attention to conservation of the area’s migratory wildlife. The three reunited this winter to bike a 1,450-kilometer ice road that connects remote communities in northern Canada.

Criscitiello has also led the first all-women’s summit of Pinnacle Peak in the Indian Himalayas. Recent expeditions have included summiting Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak, and the first all-female ascents of mixed routes off Alaska’s Pika Glacier.

In 2016, Criscitiello cofounded Girls on Ice Canada, a nonprofit wilderness and science education program that gives First Nations girls free opportunities to experience scientific mountain expeditions. In her free time, she blows glass and plays the mandolin.

Why the mandolin? “It’s very portable,” she says, “and I can take it on trips.”

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review magazine.

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Testimonios 'La trama del agua en el río Segura'

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Los orangutanes están en peligro

En estos días han salido las cifras oficiales de Indonesia sobre el estado de las poblaciones de orangután en la isla de Borneo. Son datos que se han conseguido a través de un estudio realizado con...

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Presentación del informe 'La trama del agua en la cuenca del Segura, 10 años después'

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Gracias por enseñarnos el camino hacia la paz

Esta vez le ha tocado a Barcelona sufrir el golpe, el dolor y las consecuencias mortales de los discursos de odio, amenaza latente y rechazo al diferente que tratan de instalarse en diferentes partes...

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¿Por qué hay plaguicidas en los huevos que comemos?

Durante la primera semana de agosto, la Autoridad Holandesa de Seguridad Alimentaria (NWMA) anunció que descubrieron decenas de miles de huevos contaminados con fipronil - un insecticida sintético...

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La ONU acaba de dar un gran paso adelante para la protección del mar

Acabo de volver de una reunión en Naciones Unidas en Nueva York y traigo noticias  emocionantes. La ONU acaba de dar un paso adelante hacia un nuevo Tratado que proteja la vida marina en alta...

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ANSE y Greenpeace piden que no se permitan las obras de mantenimiento en Puerto Mayor por ser ilegales

• Las organizaciones han presentado alegaciones para que se realicen los trámites para la caducidad definitiva del proyecto y su restauración ambiental • Recuerdan al director general de Costas que...

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Cambios en el paisaje 25 años después del incendio forestal de Terra Mítica

El Parque Temático Terra Mítica se construyó al pie de la Sierra Cortina de Benidorm, en un terreno que hasta agosto de 1992 era conocido como “la mayor pinada del Mediterráneo”. Sobre los...

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Six from MIT awarded 2017 Fulbright grants

Three MIT undergraduate students and three graduate students have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants to conduct independent research projects overseas during the coming academic year. In addition, a graduate student alumnus was named a Fulbright Finalist but declined the award.

The 2017-2018 Fulbright Students from MIT will engage in research projects in Germany, Austria, China, New Zealand, Mexico, and Poland.

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and operates in over 160 countries worldwide. It is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement as well as record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields. The MIT winners are:

James Deng graduated from MIT this spring with a BS in chemistry. During his Fulbright year in Germany, he will do research on epigenetics at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Deng will be investigating the interactions and regulation of TET proteins, which are associated with cancer and other diseases.

Jesse Feiman is an art history doctoral student in the History Theory and Criticism program within the School of Architecture and Planning. He will be spending his Fulbright year in Austria conducting archival research on the taxonomy system developed by the 18th century Viennese artist Adam von Bartsch.  

Jessica Gordon is a doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Her Fulbright research in China will examine how governmental policies affect climate change adaptation. She will be conducting her research in Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, and Guizhou provinces.

Jorlyn Le Garrec graduated this spring with a BS in mechanical and ocean engineering. As a Fulbright Student in New Zealand, she will pursue a research-based mechanical engineering master’s degree through the University of Auckland. Le Garrec’s research focuses on underwater robotics.

Albert Lopez is an architectural history doctoral student in the History Theory and Criticism program within the School of Architecture and Planning. Lopez will be based in Mexico City, where he will use his Fulbright grant to investigate architects’ contributions to Mexican political society and the discourses of integration during the 1940s-1950s. 

Jiwon Victoria Park graduated this spring with a BS in chemistry. She will be traveling to Poland to conduct research in organometallic chemistry at the Warsaw University of Technology. Park’s research has potential applications for drug delivery and electronic devices.

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Groenlandia: Fuego en el hielo

Imágenes de satélite nos han permitido ver estos días un gran incendio en el oeste de Groenlandia que comenzó el 31 de julio.  Informaciones de medios locales dicen que la columna de humo del...

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72º aniversario de Hiroshima: sin compromiso de España ni Japón para acabar con las armas nucleares

Doce personas y una arriesgada misión. El grupo de activistas navegó hasta la isla de Amchitka, frente a Alaska, para protestar por una prueba nuclear subterránea de Estados Unidos. Era...

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Phytoplankton and chips

Microbes mediate the global marine cycles of elements, modulating atmospheric carbon dioxide and helping to maintain the oxygen we all breathe, yet there is much about them scientists still don’t understand. Now, an award from the Simons Foundation will give researchers from MIT's Darwin Project access to bigger, better computing resources to model these communities and probe how they work.

The simulations of plankton populations made by Darwin Project researchers have become increasingly computationally demanding. MIT Professor Michael "Mick" Follows and Principal Research Engineer Christopher Hill, both affiliates of the Darwin Project, were therefore delighted to learn of their recent Simons Foundation award, providing them with enhanced compute infrastructure to help execute the simulations of ocean circulation, biogeochemical cycles, and microbial population dynamics that are the bread and butter of their research.

The Darwin Project, an alliance between oceanographers and microbiologists in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and the Parsons Lab in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was conceived as an initiative to “advance the development and application of novel models of marine microbes and microbial communities, identifying the relationships of individuals and communities to their environment, connecting cellular-scale processes to global microbial community structure" with the goal of coupling “state of the art physical models of global ocean circulation with biogeochemistry and genome-informed models of microbial processes."

In response to increases in model complexity and resolution over the course of past decade since the project’s inception in 2007, computational demands have ballooned. Increased fidelity and algorithmic sophistication in both biological and fluid dynamical component models and forays into new statistical analysis approaches, leveraging big-data innovations to analyze the simulations and field data, have grown inexorably.

"The award allows us to grow our in-house computational and data infrastructure to accelerate and facilitate these new modeling capabilities," says Hill, who specializes in Earth and planetary computational science.

The boost in computational infrastructure the award provides for will advance several linked areas of research, including the capacity to model marine microbial systems in more detail, enhanced fidelity of the modeled fluid dynamical environment, support for state of the art data analytics including machine learning techniques, and accelerating and extending genomic data processing capabilities.

High diversity is a ubiquitous aspect of marine microbial communities that is not fully understood and, to date, is rarely resolved in simulations. Darwin Project researchers have broken new ground and continue to push the envelope in modeling in this area: In addition to resolving a much larger number of phenotypes and interactions than has typically been attempted by other investigators, the Darwin Project team has also been increasing the fidelity of the underlying physiological sub-models which define traits and trade-offs.

"One thing we are doing is implementing simplified metabolic models which resolve additional constraints [electron and energy conservation] and higher fidelity [dynamic representations of macro-molecular and elemental composition]," says Fellows. "These advances require more state variables per phenotype. We have also an explicit radiative transfer model that allows us to better exploit satellite remote sensing data but both come at a greater computational expense.” Darwin researchers are also expanding their models to resolve not only phototrophic and grazer communities in the surface ocean, but to include heterotrophic and chemo-autotrophic populations throughout the water column.

Follows and Hill believe these advances will provide better fidelity to real world observations, a more dynamic and fundamental description of marine microbial communities and biogeochemical cycles, and the potential to examine the underlying drivers and significance of diversity in the system.

"Much of the biological action in the surface ocean occurs at scales currently unresolved in most biogeochemical simulations,” Follows explains. “Numerical models and recent observations show that the sub-mesoscale motions in the ocean have a profound impact on the supply of resources to the surface and the dispersal and communication between different populations. The integral impact of this, and how to properly parameterize it, is not yet clear, but one approach, that is within reach, is to resolve these scales of motion nested within global simulations,"

Hill and Follows hope such advances will allow them to examine both local and regionally integrated effects of fine-scale physical drivers. "We have already completed a full annual cycle numerical simulation that resolves physical processes down to kilometer scales globally," says Hill. “Such simulations provide a basis for driving targeted modeling of, for example, the role of fronts that may involve fully non-hydrostatic dynamics and that could help explain in-situ measurements that suggest enhanced growth rates under such conditions.” Such work is strongly complementary to another Simons Foundation sponsored project, the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE). As an initiative to advance our understanding of the biology, ecology, and biogeochemistry of microbial processes that dominate Earth’s largest biome — the global ocean — SCOPE seeks to measure, model, and conduct experiments at a model ecosystem site located 100 km north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu that is representative of a large portion of the North Pacific Ocean.

The team has also already implemented algorithms to enable explicit modeling of the relevant fluid dynamics, but here too, the approaches are computationally demanding. "The improved facilities this award provides will enable these extremely demanding experiments to proceed," says Follows.

Enhanced computer resources will also allow Darwin Project researchers to more effectively utilize data analytics. "We are adopting multiple statistical approaches for classifying fluid dynamical and ecosystem features in observations and in simulations which we plan to apply to biogeochemical problems," says Hill. “One current direction, which employs random forest classification to identify features corresponding to training sets, is showing particular promise for objectively quantifying links between biogeochemical event occurrence and physical environment phenomena.”

Not only will these methods provide useful analysis tools for their simulations, the pair also see them bridging to real world interpretations of, for example, metagenomics surveys in the ocean. Follows and Hill see this direction as a route by which to bring simulations and observations closer in new and meaningful ways. The growth in computational infrastructure the Simons award allows for, creates the potential for making much larger queries across more realistic datasets.

The Darwin Project is part of a long and fruitful collaboration with Institute Professor Sally "Penny" Chisholm of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Steady growth in available large-scale metagenomic and single-cell genomic data resulting from genetics data activities in the Chisholm Lab are also driving additional computational processing resource needs.

With the new Simons-supported enhancements in computational infrastructure, Darwin Project collaborators in the Chisholm Lab will be able to tackle assembly from larger metagenomic libraries and single-cell genome phylogenies using maximum likelihood and/or Bayesian algorithms. Currently, some large metagenomics assembly activities require compute resources with more memory than this team has readily had available. "Single-cell genome phylogeny activities are computationally demanding and require dedicating compute resources for weeks or months at a time, Hill explains. “This creates a bottleneck for other work. To accelerate work in these areas additional compute resources, some with larger memory than current resources and some with GPU accelerators are going to be hugely beneficial. The new systems will permit larger metagenomics library assembly than is currently possible."

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Greenpeace pide al Ministerio de Industria descartar los permisos de nuevas prospecciones en el Mediterráneo

• Afectarían al Corredor de Migración de Cetáceos, futura Zona Especialmente Protegida de Importancia para el Mediterráneo (ZEPIM) • Solo las explosiones de la primera fase producen daños...

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El cambio climático ya es la segunda preocupación de la gente a nivel mundial

Según un estudio publicado recientemente por el Pew Research Center, las dos mayores amenazas globales percibidas por la población a nivel mundial son el terrorismo islámico y el cambio climático,...

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Playa, vacaciones, sombrillas,... ¿incendios?

Y con el verano, llega el momento de hablar de vacaciones, de si eres más de mar o de montaña, de cuadrar trabajo con las vacaciones de peques, de las fiestas de los pueblos,... y de los incendios....

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Greenpeace celebra el cierre definitivo de Garoña

• La organización considera que se abre la puerta hacia el fin de la energía nuclear en España y pide que no se amplíe la vida del resto de las centrales • Greenpeace reclama más fondos a los...

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Por fin: cierra Garoña

En Greenpeace llevamos muchos años pidiendo el cierre de Garoña, en 2003 lo pedíamos desde un globo aerostático, en 2004 dieciocho activistas fueron detenidos por una protesta pacífica, en 2008 tuvo...

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