Real-time data for a better response to disease outbreaks

Kinsa was founded by MIT alumnus Inder Singh MBA ’06, SM ’07 in 2012, with the mission of collecting information about when and where infectious diseases are spreading in real-time. Today the company is fulfilling that mission along several fronts.

It starts with families. More than 1.5 million of Kinsa’s “smart” thermometers have been sold or given away across the country, including hundreds of thousands to families from low-income school districts. The thermometers link to an app that helps users decide if they should seek medical attention based on age, fever, and symptoms.

At the community level, the data generated by the thermometers are anonymized and aggregated, and can be shared with parents and school officials, helping them understand what illnesses are going around and prevent the spread of disease in classrooms.

By working with over 2,000 schools to date in addition to many businesses, Kinsa has also developed predictive models that can forecast flu seasons each year. In the spring of this year, the company showed it could predict flu spread 12-20 weeks in advance at the city level.

The milestone prepared Kinsa for its most profound scale-up yet. When Covid-19 came to the U.S., the company was able to estimate its spread in real-time by tracking fever levels above what would normally be expected. Now Kinsa is working with health officials in five states and three cities to help contain and control the virus.

“By the time the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control] gets the data, it has been processed, deidentified, and people have entered the health system to see a doctor,” say Singh, who is Kinsa’s CEO as well as its founder. “There’s a huge delay from when someone contracts an illness and when they see a doctor. The current health care system only sees the latter; we see the former.”

Today Kinsa finds itself playing a central role in America’s Covid-19 response. In addition to its local partnerships, the company has become a central information hub for the public, media, and researchers with its Healthweather tool, which maps unusual rates of fevers — among the most common symptom of Covid-19 — to help visualize the prevalence of illness in communities.

Singh says Kinsa’s data complement other methods of containing the virus like testing, contact tracing, and the use of face masks.

Better data for better responses

Singh’s first exposure to MIT came while he was attending the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government as a graduate student.

“I remember I interacted with some MIT undergrads, we brainstormed some social-impact ideas,” Singh recalls. “A week later I got an email from them saying they’d prototyped what we were talking about. I was like, ‘You prototyped what we talked about in a week!?’ I was blown away, and it was an insight into how MIT is such a do-er campus. It was so entrepreneurial. I was like, ‘I want to do that.’”

Soon Singh enrolled in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, an interdisciplinary program where Singh earned his master’s and MBA degrees while working with leading research hospitals in the area. The program also set him on a course to improve the way we respond to infectious disease.

Following his graduation, he joined the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), where he brokered deals between pharmaceutical companies and low-resource countries to lower the cost of medicines for HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. Singh described CHAI as a dream job, but it opened his eyes to several shortcomings in the global health system.

“The world tries to curb the spread of infectious illness with almost zero real-time information about when and where disease is spreading,” Singh says. “The question I posed to start Kinsa was ‘how do you stop the next outbreak before it becomes an epidemic if you don’t know where and when it’s starting and how fast it’s spreading’?”

Kinsa was started in 2012 with the insight that better data were needed to control infectious diseases. In order to get that data, the company needed a new way of providing value to sick people and families.

“The behavior in the home when someone gets sick is to grab the thermometer,” Singh says. “We piggy-backed off of that to create a communication channel to the sick, to help them get better faster.”

Kinsa started by selling its thermometers and creating a sponsorship program for corporate donors to fund thermometer donations to Title 1 schools, which serve high numbers of economically disadvantaged students. Singh says 40 percent of families that receive a Kinsa thermometer through that program did not previously have any thermometer in their house.

The company says its program has been shown to help schools improve attendance, and has yielded years of real-time data on fever rates to help compare to official estimates and develop its models.

“We had been forecasting flu incidence accurately several weeks out for years, and right around early 2020, we had a massive breakthrough,” Singh recalls. “We showed we could predict flu 12 to 20 weeks out — then March hit. We said, let’s try to remove the fever levels associated with cold and flu from our observed real time signal. What’s left over is unusual fevers, and we saw hotspots across the country. We observed six years of data and there’d been hot spots, but nothing like we were seeing in early March.”

The company quickly made their real-time data available to the public, and on March 14, Singh got on a call with the former New York State health commissioner, the former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the man responsible for Taiwan’s successful Covid-19 response.

“I said, ‘There’s hotspots everywhere,” Singh recalls. “They’re in New York, around the Northeast, Texas, Michigan. They said, ‘This is interesting, but it doesn’t look credible because we’re not seeing case reports of Covid-19.’ Low and behold, days and weeks later, we saw the Covid cases start building up.”

A tool against Covid-19

Singh says Kinsa’s data provide an unprecedented look into the way a disease is spreading through a community.

“We can predict the entire incidence curve [of flu season] on a city-by-city basis,” Singh says. “The next best model is [about] three weeks out, at a multistate level. It’s not because we’re smarter than others; it’s because we have better data. We found a way to communicate with someone consistently when they’ve just fallen ill.”

Kinsa has been working with health departments and research groups around the country to help them interpret the company’s data and react to early warnings of Covid-19’s spread. It’s also helping companies around the country as they begin bringing employees back to offices.

Now Kinsa is working on expanding its international presence to help curb infectious diseases on multiple fronts around the world, just like it’s doing in the U.S. The company’s progress promises to help authorities monitor diseases long after Covid-19.

“I started Kinsa to create a global, real-time outbreak monitoring and detection system, and now we have predictive power beyond that,” Singh says. “When you know where and when symptoms are starting and how fast their spreading, you can empower local individuals, families, communities, and governments.”

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Economist Antoine Levy is all over the map

Some of the stereotypical differences between the United States and France do check out, according to Antoine Levy: The weather and the food are much worse in New England, he says, and the people are much more welcoming. But for Levy, who is about to start the fifth year of his MIT PhD program in economics, the U.S. is starting to feel like his native France in some ways.

“For a long time, I thought France was obsessed by politics and the United States was not,” he recalls. However, his impression has changed over the last five years. In France, from urban neighborhoods to small villages, he says everyone has an opinion on every government minister. Lately, he has felt a transformation around him, and has observed his peers in the U.S. becoming more interested in local politics as well.

While this may be a reflection of recent changes in the American political climate, a local perspective on policy is also a key signature of Levy’s research at MIT. Whether in France or the U.S., the economist has long been fascinated by how politics and economics converge in different ways from one region or locality to another.

All over the place

Levy’s research looks at how different sociodemographic markers within a country, such as population density, can shape economic activity and policy across these areas.

His current projects focus on harnessing the power of regional data to inform economic policy, from housing development to unemployment to political influence. For example, he has studied the Economic and Monetary Union of the E.U. after the Great Recession, in relation to the Phillips curve, which, somewhat controversially, suggests there is an inverse relationship between unemployment and wage growth. While aggregated national data do not demonstrate a clear Phillips curve, Levy has found that regional European data do follow the pattern –– indicating that policy informed by regional data might be more important than ever.

“We’ve talked a lot about political polarization, but there’s also been a massive spatial polarization over the last 25 years,” he explains. “That conjunction of economic geography and political geography has massive implications for the relative influence of places, and for the policy and politics of trade, social insurance, and redistribution.”

His latest work has been inspired by recent historical events –– Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the “yellow vest” protests in his native France –– which have exposed the way one-size-fits-all economic policies have left behind people in vastly different geographical situations. Too often, Levy says, people rely on a mythicized idea of a region without drilling down into the patterns of population and economic behavior there. For example, in one working paper, he argues that a significant part of Emmanuel Macron’s success in the 2017 French presidential election can be attributed to a specific campaign promise to abolish a housing tax that affected 80 percent of households in the country.

A key theme in his work is how regional economics have an important influence on individuals’ political decisions — though this is often overlooked by economists.

“There’s this thing in economics where people are called agents,” Levy says. “People do stuff. People write laws, people vote, people get jobs and consume. And at some point, you have to still ask what you would do in their place.”

Taking it all in

Part of Levy’s interest in regional variations comes from personal experience. Growing up, he moved around often for his father’s work as an executive in the food industry, which took the family from the midsized city of Lyon, in the southeast, to the much smaller Périgueux, in the southwest; eventually they moved to Paris for his mother’s medical care and school. Experiencing the daily economic differences between those places, even commonplace details like the cost of coffee, have impressed upon him the way one’s economic circumstances affect one’s choices.

“The fate of places and how it’s tied to economics: I think that’s something that you get to experience very concretely when you move around,” Levy says. “Especially in a country as diverse as France.”

Levy’s penchant for variety followed him to college, where he couldn’t bring himself to choose between a more academically oriented education at École Normale Supérieure and business school at HEC Paris. In an unusual move, he ended up enrolling in both. He says he wanted to keep an eye on everything in economics –– from fundamental research to more applied areas. His embrace of interdisciplinary approaches ultimately brought him to MIT, where he appreciates how his program has allowed him to fold together his early interests in macroeconomics and international finance, and his current work on microeconomic and spatial topics.

“The professors tend to always push you to explore your interests and be very open about your interests,” Levy says of the MIT economics department, where he is advised by professors Arnaud Costinot and Ivan Werning. “They were never excessively restrictive about what I should work on or what I should study, they were always very open to hear new ideas.”

That doesn’t mean the path has always been easy, especially with the sheer time investment of a doctoral degree. “I used to be the one who wanted to experience satisfaction in the very short run,” Levy says. “Sometimes you have to slow down and go back to the beginning instead of going through a project very quickly.” To keep himself going he also takes on smaller projects, like writing short proposals, book reviews, and popular press articles.

He also take the time to read the news or a favorite Philip Roth novel, and has fond memories of playing squash, picnicking on the Charles River, and bouncing research ideas with friends from his cohort and the French community at MIT. He has an affinity for his fellow ex-pats: “They made a choice of leaving France, and I think that’s always a sign of being ready to find out the limits of your openness.”

As he continues with his research, Levy plans to stay focused on issues that matter to the people around him, and remaining open to topics outside his expertise and immediate research field. Knowing that his work could have an impact on people’s lives keeps him passionate about economics, wherever it might take him in the future.

“It’s not something that you do for the sake of beauty,” he says of economics. “When you say you’re an economist, and you’re at the dinner table, people have tons of questions. If people have a question that they think is relevant for economics, then maybe it should be. You have to have an answer.”

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The factory of the future, batteries not included

Many analysts have predicted an explosion in the number of industrial “internet of things” (IoT) devices that will come online over the next decade. Sensors play a big role in those forecasts.

Unfortunately, sensors come with their own drawbacks, many of which are due to the limited energy supply and finite lifetime of their batteries.

Now the startup Everactive has developed industrial sensors that run around the clock, require minimal maintenance, and can last over 20 years. The company created the sensors not by redesigning its batteries, but by eliminating them altogether.

The key is Everactive’s ultra-low-power integrated circuits, which harvest energy from sources like indoor light and vibrations to generate data. The sensors continuously send that data to Everactive’s cloud-based dashboard, which gives users real time insights, analysis, and alerts to help them leverage the full power of industrial IoT devices.

“It’s all enabled by the ultra-low-power chips that support continuous monitoring,” says Everactive Co-Chief Technology Officer David Wentzloff SM ’02, PhD ’07. “Because our source of power is unlimited, we’re not making tradeoffs like keeping radios off or doing something else [limiting] to save battery life.”

Everactive builds finished products on top of its chips that customers can quickly deploy in large numbers. Its first product monitors steam traps, which release condensate out of steam systems. Such systems are used in a variety of industries, and Everactive’s customers include companies in sectors like oil and gas, paper, and food production. Everactive has also developed a sensor to monitor rotating machinery, like motors and pumps, that runs on the second generation of its battery-free chips.

By avoiding the costs and restrictions associated with other sensors, the company believes it’s well-positioned to play a role in the IoT-powered transition to the factory of the future.

“This is technology that’s totally maintenance free, with no batteries, powered by harvested energy, and always connected to the cloud. There’s so many things you can do with that, it’s hard to wrap your head around,” Wentzloff says.

Breaking free from batteries

Wentzloff and his Everactive co-founder and co-CTO Benton Calhoun SM ’02, PhD ’06 have been working on low-power circuit design for more than a decade, beginning with their time at MIT. They both did their PhD work in the lab of Anantha Chandrakasan, who is currently the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. Calhoun’s research focused on low-power digital circuits and memory while Wentzloff’s focused on low power radios.

After earning their PhDs, both men became assistant professors at the schools they attended as undergraduates — Wentzloff at the University of Michigan and Calhoun at the University of Virginia — where they still teach today. Even after settling in different parts of the country, they continued collaborating, applying for joint grants and building circuit-based systems that combined their areas of research.

The collaboration was not an isolated incident: The founders have maintained relationships with many of their contacts from MIT.

“To this day I stay in touch with my colleagues and professors,” Wentzloff says. “It’s a great group to be associated with, especially when you talk about the integrated circuit space. It’s a great community, and I really value and appreciate that experience and those connections that have come out of it. That’s far an away the longest impression MIT has left on my career, those people I continue to stay in touch with. We’re all helping each other out.”

Wentzloff and Calhoun’s academic labs eventually created a battery-free physiological monitor that could track a user’s movement, temperature, heart rate, and other signals and send that data to a phone, all while running on energy harvested from body heat.

“That’s when we decided we should look at commercializing this technology,” Wentzloff says.

In 2014, they partnered with semiconductor industry veteran Brendan Richardson to launch the company, originally called PsiKick.

In the beginning, when Wentzloff describes the company as “three guys and a dog in a garage,” the founders sought to reimagine circuit designs that included features of full computing systems like sensor interfaces, processing power, memory, and radio signals. They also needed to incorporate energy harvesting mechanisms and power management capabilities.

“We wiped the slate clean and had a fresh start,” Wentzloff recalls.

The founders initially attempted to sell their chips to companies to build solutions on top of, but they quickly realized the industry wasn’t familiar enough with battery-free chips.

“There’s an education level to it, because there’s a generation of engineers used to thinking of systems design with battery-operated chips,” Wentzloff says.

The learning curve led the founders to start building their own solutions for customers. Today Everactive offers its sensors as part of a wider service that incorporates wireless networks and data analytics.

The company’s sensors can be powered by small vibrations, lights inside a factory as dim as 100 lux, and heat differentials below 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The devices can sense temperature, acceleration, vibration, pressure, and more.

The company says its sensors cost significantly less to operate than traditional sensors and avoid the maintenance headache that comes with deploying thousands of battery-powered devices.

For instance, Everactive considered the cost of deploying 10,000 traditional sensors. Assuming a three-year battery life, the customer would need to replace an average of 3,333 batteries each year, which comes out to more than nine a day.

The next technological revolution

By saving on maintenance and replacement costs, Everactive customers are able to deploy more sensors. That, combined with the near-continuous operation of those sensors, brings a new level of visibility to operations.

“[Removing restrictions on sensor installations] starts to give you a sixth sense, if you will, about how your overall operations are running,” Calhoun says. “That’s exciting. Customers would like to wave a magic wand and know exactly what’s going on wherever they’re interested. The ability to deploy tens of thousands of sensors gets you close to that magic wand.”

With thousands of Everactive’s steam trap sensors already deployed, Wentzloff believes its sensors for motors and other rotating machinery will make an even bigger impact on the IoT market.

Beyond Everactive’s second generation of products, the founders say their sensors are a few years away from being translucent, flexible, and the size of a postage stamp. At that point customers will simply need to stick the sensors onto machines to start generating data. Such ease of installation and use would have implications far beyond the factory floor.

“You hear about smart transportation, smart agriculture, etc.,” Calhoun says. “IoT has this promise to make all of our environments smart, meaning there’s an awareness of what’s going on and use of that information to have these environments behave in ways that anticipate our needs and are as efficient as possible. We believe battery-less sensing is required and inevitable to bring about that vision, and we’re excited to be a part of that next computing revolution.”

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A scientific approach to education reform

The Covid-19 pandemic has upended educational systems around the world, from kindergartens through graduate schools. Classes with students packed into seats and a teacher giving lessons from the front were suddenly transformed into some combination of online Zoom lessons, home instruction by parents, or solitary work. When things eventually stabilize and return to “normal,” what will that normal be?

Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning, sees this unprecedented upheaval as a moment to get rid of outmoded methods with little pedagogical basis, and replace them with new approaches based on the latest scientific research on how learning works.

In a new book called “Grasp!” Sarma has drawn on his years of experience directing MIT’s many online learning systems, including MITx and OpenCourseWare. With lessons from the use of these platforms and from ongoing research on cognitive science, he offers a vision of how teaching and learning can be radically improved using new methods.

Though the book was completed before the pandemic struck, its lessons have become all the more timely as the world has shifted toward online learning. Sarma recently published an essay on the lessons from the research on learning that are especially relevant to the present situation.

Online learning, he says, offers both advantages and disadvantages compared to in-person classes; it all depends on the approach taken, the subject matter, and the circumstances. Ultimately, looking ahead to a post-pandemic education system, the goal should be to combine the advantages of both online and in-person approaches — and jettison what doesn’t work.

One thing that has become clear from research in recent years is the benefit of what has been called a “flipped” classroom approach. In such a system, lessons that would typically be taught in the classroom would instead be given through online, video, audio, or written materials that students could absorb at their own pace, being able to pause and rewind a lecture repeatedly if necessary in order to grasp a point.

In scenarios where students have safely returned to school, classroom time would instead be devoted to the kinds of things that have traditionally been “homework,” such as working on math problems or on a project, where teachers could be there to offer help and guidance when needed, as students work away individually or in pairs or teams.

When it comes to the time spent lecturing in front of classrooms, Sarma says, “that could be done better online.” Another benefit to this approach is that providing information in shorter units of 10 or 15 minutes each, instead of fitting everything into one-hour or 90-minute lecture formats, has been shown to be much more effective, he says.

As for the interactive parts of teaching, Sarma points out that in some ways there can be advantages to having some kinds of classroom-like discussions in an online Zoom-style format, since that acts as a kind of equalizer so that nobody gets lost in the back rows. “At least they’re all in front of you,” he says. “There are no back-benchers.”

The real hope, of course, is to get back as soon as safely possible to learning situations that really do benefit from face-to-face interaction, he says. For example, projects that entail generating ideas, narrowing down choices, and ending up with a finished product — whether that’s a simple robot or a successful lab experiment or a musical composition — are an important way to build new knowledge and skills, he says. Such activities can benefit immensely from interactions while working hands-on as a team, and from judicious one-on-one coaching by an instructor who is watching carefully as the project unfolds.

The old view of education, Sarma says, saw students’ minds as pieces of paper, and the teacher’s job was essentially to write information on that paper. That’s all wrong, he says. “The student is building a model of the world, like a plant growing. What you need to do is tend to that plant.”

Every student is different, he says, and it’s important to serve the individual interests and needs of individual students. But, he says, that’s very different from the notion of “learning styles” that is prevalent in some educational circles, suggesting that some people learn better visually and others through sound, for example. That notion, he says, is totally unsupported by evidence. Rather, it’s more useful to home in on an individual student’s specific areas of confusion and struggle.

Much of Sarma’s book, which is subtitled “The science transforming how we learn,” is based on recent research using tools such as magnetic resonance imaging to study what takes place in the brain during the learning process. One key lesson, he says, is the importance of circling back to a topic multiple times, and of integrating different parts of a lesson with each other.

Traditionally, classes have often involved teaching a concept, giving an exam, and moving on, he says. But long-term learning is greatly reinforced if that concept is also reintroduced alongside the next one being taught, and if some exercises involve how the two concepts can interact. “If you’re teaching two or three concepts in succession, integrate across them. Give problems along the way that mix them up. It causes them to reload the thinking required for that first problem. It’s in the reloading where the learning occurs,” Sarma says.

For learning to last, he says, it’s also important to “ask [students] now, ask them a week later, and ask them a month later.”

The book delves into a wide variety of other aspects of how recent research is changing our understanding of many aspects of learning and teaching. For example, new ways of detecting the different ways brains process visual information could lead to very early detection of dyslexia, and to ways of applying early and more effective measures to help address it.

One key message of the book is the need for a new way of looking at the whole purpose of education. For a long time, a major function of educational institutions was what Sarma describes as “winnowing” — progressively sorting out the best and brightest students from the rest.

But that’s not an effective or useful strategy, he suggests. An approach that is built on inclusiveness and encouragement, which gives learners a chance to struggle and wrestle with a problem — though not to the point of discouragement and giving up — is likely to produce much better outcomes, Sarma says.

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How MIT built its own Covid-19 testing trailer

In mid-March, in response to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic, MIT Medical quickly set up testing tents where essential workers and others who remained on campus could be safely screened for the novel coronavirus. In the tents, nurses and physicians administered nasal swabs while dressed in full personal protective equipment, or PPE.

It soon became clear that to safely test on a daily basis, medical workers needed to regularly replenish their PPE — a resource in short, desperate supply. There was also the possibility that, in doffing all that PPE at the end of an eight-hour shift, a nurse could risk inhaling any infectious particles that might cling to gowns, surgical masks, and face shields.

“One of the biggest challenges in Covid testing is [that] you place the one doing the testing at a not-insignificant risk,” says Brian Schuetz, MIT Medical’s chief of staff.

Weather conditions were also a challenge, as a late-March noreaster threatened to upend the tents. Looking to the hot summer months, Schuetz and his medical team knew that major adjustments would have to be made to improve the safety and comfort of both patients and staff.

“We made a decision early on that we had to think differently about how we did things,” Schuetz says.

Over two months, he and experts from across campus worked tirelessly to design and build MIT’s newest testing facility — a 60-foot trailer that is now operating as the main test site for asymptomatic members of the MIT community who need to return to campus.

Inside, the renovated trailer accommodates a check-in station and six testing bays. Floor-to-ceiling plastic partitions run the length of the trailer, keeping medical staff on one side, and those getting tested on the other. In each testing bay, a tester on one side of the partition can fit her arms into large rubber gloves that extend out to the other side, so that she can perform a nasal swab without either party coming in physical contact.

The trailer is also equipped with an upgraded HVAC system, calibrated so that the air on either side of the partitions will not mix. The two separate spaces within the trailer make it possible for medical staff to safely test people while wearing a simple surgical mask, rather than full PPE.

“The result is: The folks behind that plastic are very safe,” Schuetz says. “If we can make our team comfortable and patients comfortable, we can help everyone be safer.”

The trailer began operating in early July, with the capacity to test up to 1,500 people per day. MIT’s Information Systems and Technology group wired the trailer to MIT’s Covid Pass system, which allows an MIT member to access campus facilities if they have tested negative for the coronavirus. The trailer is designated as a testing site for asymptomatic members with access to the Covid Pass app.

The entire experience takes about two minutes. The nasal swabs are analyzed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and results are entered into the Covid Pass system; those who have been tested can check their results via the app.

“One of the biggest challenges in this whole effort was figuring out how to get all these disparate pieces put together, and I think we’ve created a solution that works together to help the campus be safe,” Schuetz says. “It’s really an example of MIT at its best — innovation from the ground up.”

A race against time

That ground-up effort took off quickly, when Schuetz first approached Elazer Edelman, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, looking for additional sources of PPE for the medical tents that were used initially.

“And Elazer said, ‘Wait a minute — MIT is the best place in the world to find people that can make exactly what we want,” recalls Martin Culpepper, professor of mechanical engineering and a member of MIT’s governance team on manufacturing opportunities for Covid-19.

So the medical team refocused their vision to test the MIT community, not in tents with medical staff in full PPE, but in a well-ventilated, weather-protected space.

Edelman connected with Culpepper, who reached out to campus workshops for material resources and expertise. Meanwhile, Schuetz worked with the Department of Facilities to acquire two trailers.

“We order trailers for construction projects all the time, and it’s nothing out of the norm, except now we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and there are not a lot of trailers out there,” recalls Paul Murphy, director of special projects in the Facilities Campus Construction team. “But everyone stepped up and knew how important this was, and within four days, we had two trailers, which normally could take months with this type of fit-out.”

Culpepper met with Tasker Smith, technical instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Jennifer O’Brien, technical instructor in the Department of Architecture, who together drew up a testing space designed for the larger, 60-foot trailer, based on initial conversations with medical staff. 

“The early stages were all about napkin sketches, cardboard, duct tape, and bubblegum — whatever it takes to help you wrap your mind around this thing quickly,” Smith says.

O’Brien built a rough model of a testing bay and invited several nurses and physicians to test it out.

“Having experience building custom furniture, I thought there might be needs they will find that they have, that they weren’t going to think of ahead of time,” O’Brien recalls. “I realized that, for example, based on the wide range of height and shoulder width of testers, that existing designs found online at the time might not be comfortable for everyone.”

So she made a crucial adjustment to the final design, building the gloves into an extra panel in each bay’s window that can be adjusted up and down to accommodate a tester’s height. The team then worked with Culpepper to acquire materials for the actual build.

“At that time, the whole world was realizing they needed to source clear-sheet plastic to shield people interacting with one another, like cashiers and students, so there was a big scramble,” O’Brien says. “We were racing against time, and had to get this thing up and running as fast as possible, to manage a larger MIT population as soon as they started returning to campus.”

While she and Smith started building out the trailer’s physical layout with the help of campus construction crews, Culpepper worked with Facilities engineers to optimize the trailer’s HVAC system.

“We ran all sorts of calculations on how much air had to be turned over at a certain time, with the number of individuals who would occupy both sides of the trailer,” Murphy says.

The team designed a positive pressure HVAC system that pumps 700 cubic feet per minute of outdoor air through one side of the trailer’s plastic partition, in a way that keeps one side at positive pressure, and the other at negative pressure — a balance that prevents air on either side from mixing. A large, custom-built exhaust stack blows the air out about 12 feet above the trailer.

So far, about 4,000 people have been tested in the trailer. The eventual goal is to have all members of the community working and living on campus be tested up to twice a week, with the trailer as a key component of that stategy. Schuetz notes, however, that the evolution of testing technologies, medical guidance, and prevalence of Covid-19 in the broader Massachusetts community will likely result in changes to the testing strategy over the coming months.  

Looking to a hopeful future, Schuetz suggests the trailer can be configured for other purposes, such as testing people for antibodies, or even, administering a vaccine.

“It’s not over now that it’s built,” adds O’Brien, who with Smith, is assembling a packet of sharable specs for anyone interested in building similar facilities. “It continues to be a versatile design, and we are still here on campus if needed, to update it.”

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Rebuilding cultures through art, design, and community

In the spring of 2016, a striking art installation was constructed outside MIT’s building E15. The work consisted of 20,000 small green plexiglass squares, with intricate holes cut in each one, depicting vanished or endangered pieces of global cultural heritage, including buildings, monuments, and sculptures. Attached to fencing about 40 feet high, the squares collectively formed an image of the Arch of Triumph from Palmyra, Syria, an ancient treasure destroyed by fundamentalists in 2015.

Lit up at night or shimmering in daytime, this installation — the “Memory Matrix” — was a powerful reminder of the fragility of our cultural creations in the face of conflict and strife. But it also represented human resilience and the strength of collaboration: About 700 people helped construct it, including MIT community members from 11 different departments and programs, and participants from Egypt and Jordan.

“That project was amazing, because of the solidarity-building it created across campus and internationally,” says MIT Associate Professor Azra Akšamija, who created the idea for the installation.  

Akšamija is an uncommonly versatile artist, architect, and scholar whose work explores cultural identity and conflict. Her own career exemplifies resilience: Akšamija experienced displacement as a Bosnian Muslim whose family left in the early 1990s to escape the war at home. Having spent much of her life in Austria, the United States, and Germany, her work frequently explores encounters between Islam and the West.

Among other distinctions, Akšamija was given the 2013 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for her design of a prayer space’s symbolic elements, at Austria’s first-ever Muslim cemetery, in Altach (the cemetery itself was designed by Bernardo Bader). Some of her best-known designs are wearable art, including her “Frontier Vest” from 2006, a garment that works as a jacket for refugees and can be transformed into a Jewish prayer shawl or an Islamic prayer rug. Akšamija has detailed many of her ideas in a 2015 book, “Mosque Manifesto — Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence.”

She has also been a program-builder at MIT, founding the Future Heritage Lab (FHL), which focuses on cultural preservation. At the Al Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan, FHL members, along with their partners at German-Jordanian University, have helped Syrian refugees document their lives through photography, design, and poetry; the work was displayed at the 2017 Amman Design Week.

Over the past three years, camp residents, FHL members, and MIT students have developed a book about refugee inventions, which will be used in MIT’s first design studio-based online course, “Design and Scarcity” (co-taught by Akšamija and FHL program director Melina Philippou). The book will also be translated for the camp and the wider region.

The Al Azraq camp refugees, Akšamija says, “design artifacts that are partly utilitarian, but are about preserving human dignity and memory, and keeping the feeling of who you are. It’s powerful.”

“Making things since I could think”

Akšamija grew up in Sarajevo, now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of her grandfathers was an accomplished architect who had studied in Prague and, she says, “brought Czech modernism back to Bosnia.” Design grabbed Akšamija’s interest from a young age.

“I have been making things since I could think about myself,” Akšamija says. “As a child I was completely obsessed with drawing and sculpture, which I would do for hours. Also, to get out of my piano lessons, I would make these plasticine sculptures and then display them on the piano, to distract the piano teacher.”

At the time, Sarajevo was part of the larger republic of Yugoslavia. But in 1992, after war broke out in the Balkans, Akšamija and her family moved to Germany, then Austria, to escape the conflict. As an undergraduate, Akšamija studied architecture at the Graz University of Technology. Still, she says, the university “had these awesome art classes,” and she wanted to incorporate art into her career.

Akšamija attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving her MArch in 2004, while becoming active artistically; by 2004, her work had been displayed in high-profile institutions and exhibitions in Vienna, Valencia, Leipzig, and Liverpool. Joining MIT’s PhD program in the history and theory of architecture, Akšamija continued to create art; in addition to “Frontier Vest,” she produced noted works such as “Survival Mosque” (2005), a wearable and portable mosque equipped with a copy of the U.S. Constitution, earplugs (to block out the insults Muslims might hear), books, and more. Soon her work was exhibited in major art museums in London, New York, and Berlin.

Some of Akšamija’s projects from this period went in novel directions. With nine other artists and architects, Akšamija co-curated the “Lost Highway Expedition” in 2006, a trek in which 300 people walked the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity that connects the capitals of the former Yugoslavia.

“After the war I had thought, ‘I’m never going to Serbia again in my life,’” Akšamija says. However, for the trek, “we had events in cities and you had to find your own way, you had to make friends. And this is the way I went for the first time to the territories my country had the war with.” Though the project was challenging, she says, “It was important to start discussing difficult topics. It doesn’t mean they’re fully resolved. Unfortunately, there are still many people denying that genocide happened in Bosnia.”

For her dissertation, working with MIT professors Nasser Rabbat and Caroline Jones, as well as Harvard University’s András Riedlmayer, Akšamija looked at the systematic targeting of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war, examining how Bosnian Muslims restored mosques that had been destroyed.

“These buildings were attacked because nationalists wanted to revise history and alienate people to an extent that they would never want to live together in the future,” Akšamija says.

The questions driving her research apply anywhere, Akšamija says. “From the Balkans we can learn important lessons about how we live in spaces of fragmented commons. When that falls apart, how do you reconnect? What kinds of cultural institutions do we need to bridge divides and hold governments accountable? It is relevant globally. Who has the right to write their history, to be visible in public space, and who decides those things?”

After joining the MIT faculty, Akšamija earned tenure in 2019.

Becoming yourself

At MIT, Akšamija has found it gratifying to see students gravitate to her classes, to projects like “Memory Matrix,” and to the Future Heritage Lab.

“MIT students care,” Akšamija says. “They really want to do something to contribute to this world. This place is so inspiring.”

At the same time, she notes, the Institute can be an intense academic setting, and instructors need to help sustain the sheer enjoyment of learning.

“You [can] lose sight of why you started doing things and what initially drew you to them, and it can be overwhelming,” Akšamija says. “You see it with students. I like to create joy in things, especially in classes. That’s why it’s so amazing to teach here, because the students are so full of enthusiasm and joy. But also sometimes anxiety, and I think we all have responsibility here as teachers to take care of that. It’s not about students performing for someone else, but becoming better versions of themselves.”

Akšamija calls the current direction of her research “Performative Preservation.” This is an approach to cultural preservation that uses “methods of contemporary arts and participatory art.” She emphasizes that participation and co-creation are crucial to cultural restoration; physical structures can be rebuilt, but they will lack meaning without community involvement.

Her work is now on view at the Gallery for Contemporary Art, in Leipzig, Germany, and at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, with a new work slated for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition for the Venice Biennale, in May 2021. Curated by Hashim Sarkis, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the Biennale’s theme is “How Will We Live Together?” Akšamija’s project, “Silk Road Works,” a symbolic construction site for a pluralist society, will be part of a section at the Arsenale titled, “Among Diverse Beings.”

As always, Akšamija hopes for a thoughtful response from her audience, without knowing exactly what that will be.

“When you work in public space, it’s not about finding a consensus, where we all have the same opinion and are happily living together,” Akšamija says. “It’s about accepting and coming to terms with conflicting attitudes and ideas, and making space for them.”

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How airplanes counteract St. Elmo’s Fire during thunderstorms

At the height of a thunderstorm, the tips of cell towers, telephone poles, and other tall, electrically conductive structures can spontaneously emit a flash of blue light. This electric glow, known as a corona discharge, is produced when the air surrounding a conductive object is briefly ionized by an electrically charged environment.

For centuries, sailors observed corona discharges at the tips of ship masts during storms at sea. They coined the phenomenon St. Elmo’s fire, after the patron saint of sailors.

Scientists have found that a corona discharge can strengthen in windy conditions, glowing more brightly as the wind further electrifies the air. This wind-induced intensification has been observed mostly in electrically grounded structures, such as trees and towers. Now aerospace engineers at MIT have found that wind has an opposite effect on ungrounded objects, such as airplanes and some wind turbine blades.

In some of the last experiments performed in MIT’s Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel before it was dismantled in 2019, the researchers exposed an electrically ungrounded model of an airplane wing to increasingly strong wind gusts. They found that the stronger the wind, the weaker the corona discharge, and the dimmer the glow that was produced.

The team’s results appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. The study’s lead author is Carmen Guerra-Garcia, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Her co-authors at MIT are Ngoc Cuong Nguyen, a senior research scientist; Theodore Mouratidis, a graduate student; and Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, a post-tenure professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Electric friction

Within a storm cloud, friction can build up to produce extra electrons, creating an electric field that can reach all the way to the ground. If that field is strong enough, it can break apart surrounding air molecules, turning neutral air into a charged gas, or plasma. This process most often occurs around sharp, conductive objects such as cell towers and wing tips, as these pointed structures tend to concentrate the electric field in a way that electrons are pulled from surrounding air molecules toward the pointed structures, leaving behind a veil of positively charged plasma immediately around the sharp object.

Once a plasma has formed, the molecules within it can begin to glow via the process of corona discharge, where excess electrons in the electric field ping-pong against the molecules, knocking them into excited states. In order to come down from those excited states, the molecules emit a photon of energy, at a wavelength that, for oxygen and nitrogen, corresponds to the characteristic blueish glow of St. Elmo’s fire.

In previous laboratory experiments, scientists found that this glow, and the energy of a corona discharge, can strengthen in the presence of wind. A strong gust can essentially blow away the positively charged ions, that were locally shielding the electric field and reducing its effect — making it easier for electrons to trigger a stronger, brighter glow.

These experiments were mostly carried out with electrically grounded structures, and the MIT team wondered whether wind would have the same strengthening effect on a corona discharge that was produced around a sharp, ungrounded object, such as an airplane wing.

To test this idea, they fabricated a simple wing structure out of wood and wrapped the wing in foil to make it electrically conductive. Rather than try to produce an ambient electric field similar to what would be generated in a thunderstorm, the team studied an alternative configuration in which the corona discharge was  generated in a metal wire running parallel to the length of the wing, and connecting a small high-voltage power source between wire and wing. They fastened the wing to a pedestal made from an insulating material that, because of its nonconductive nature, essentially made the wing itself electrically suspended, or ungrounded.

The team placed the entire setup in MIT’s Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, and subjected it to increasingly higher velocities of wind, up to 50 meters per second, as they also varied the amount of voltage that they applied to the wire. During these tests, they measured the amount of electrical charge building up in the wing, the current of the corona and also used an ultraviolet-sensitive camera to observe the brightness of the corona discharge on the wire.

Scientists observe the ion “glow” of corona discharge in an electrically ungrounded object (left) compared to a grounded object (right). Courtesy of the researchers

In the end, they found that the strength of the corona discharge and its resulting brightness decreased as the wind increased — a surprising and opposite effect from what scientists have seen for wind acting on grounded structures.

Pulled against the wind

The team developed numerical simulations to try and explain the effect, and found that, for ungrounded structures, the process is largely similar to what happens with grounded objects — but with something extra.

In both cases, the wind is blowing away the positive ions generated by the corona, leaving behind a stronger field in the surrounding air. For ungrounded structures, however, because they are electrically isolated, they become more negatively charged. This results in a weakening of  the positive corona discharge. The amount of negative charge that the wing retains is set by the competing effects of positive ions blown by the wind and those attracted and pulled back as a result of the negative excursion. This secondary effect, the researchers found, acts to weaken the local electric field, as well as the corona discharge’s electric glow.

“The corona discharge is the first stage of lightning in general,” Guerra-Garcia says. “How corona discharge behaves is important and kind of sets the stage for what could happen next in terms of electrification.”

In flight, aircraft such as planes and helicopters inherently produce wind, and a glow corona system like the one tested in the wind tunnel could actually be used to control the electrical charge of the vehicle. Connecting to some prior work by the team, she and her colleagues previously showed that if a plane could be negatively charged, in a controlled fashion, the plane’s risk of being struck by lightning could be reduced. The new results show that charging of an aircraft in flight to negative values can be achieved using a controlled positive corona discharge.

‘’The exciting thing about this study is that, while trying to demonstrate that the electrical charge of an aircraft can be controlled using a corona discharge, we actually discovered that classical theories of corona discharge in wind do not apply for airborne platforms, that are electrically isolated from their environment,” Guerra-Garcia says. “Electrical breakdown occurring in aircraft really presents some unique features that do not allow the direct extrapolation from ground studies.”

This research was funded, in part, by The Boeing Company, through the Strategic Universities for Boeing Research and Technology Program.

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The Philippines, the US, and a century of military alliance

For a few nights in late 1991, a 74-year-old army veteran, newly arrived in Los Angeles and looking for family members, needed to sleep outside. Pastor Amarillento was a recently naturalized Filipino American, based on a 1990 law granting citizenship to Philippine Army soldiers from World War II. Amarillento had fought at Bataan. But after being naturalized in San Francisco, his money had been stolen on the bus down to Los Angeles.

Thus Amarillento had “marched under General Douglas MacArthur, only to find himself, 50 years later, sleeping in MacArthur Park,” writes MIT historian Christopher Capozzola in a new book about the unique relationship between the Philippines and the United States.

Amarillento soon found relatives in Orange County, thanks to help from a shelter in the Filipinotown neighborhood, near downtown Los Angeles. Still, this episode symbolizes some contours of the larger Filipino American experience. Filipinos have long been staunch U.S. military soldiers, sailors, and servicemembers while receiving modest, belated rewards for their efforts. The countries’ ties have led to extensive immigration — there are 4 million Filipino-Americans in the U.S. — but even for decorated veterans, entry into U.S. society has not always been easy.

Capozzola’s new book, “Bound by War: How the United States and Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century,” published by Basic Books, details both the military relationship between the countries, from the U.S. conquest of the Philippines in 1898 onward, and the way that military engagement shaped social connections between the nations.

“This is not a book about foreign policy, but foreign relations,” Capozzola says. “Not just what generals and presidents were doing, but what ordinary soldiers and immigrants were doing.”

New beginnings

After winning the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. was granted control of the Philippines, a long-time Spanish possession. Then it squelched a Philippine independence movement, in what Capozzola calls a “very intense and brutal war.” It was a huge imperial leap across the Pacific for the U.S., which eventually installed over 20 military bases in the Philippines and ruled the land as a colony until 1946.

“This is really the heart of the relationship between these two countries,” Capozzola says.

Before long, Filipinos started enlisting in the U.S. army and navy, and Filipinos soon had new immigration opportunities as well. For a spell after 1924, the Philippines was the only country in Asia from which the U.S. allowed immigration. The number of Filipinos in the U.S. swelled from 5,600 in 1920 to about 56,000 in 1930, with substantial Filipino-American communities springing up near San Diego, in the Bay Area, and around Norfolk and Virginia Beach — close to Navy bases.

But while many Filipinos had come to the U.S. hoping to acquire more education and better work, they often landed on farms, in fisheries, or in service jobs, as Capozzola documents.

“When Filipinos migrated to the United States in the early 20th century, they faced the same forms of discrimination that most Asian immigrants did: restrictions on housing and education and the professions, [while] being relegated to low-status, low-paying jobs,” Capozzola says. “It could have been otherwise. And that’s a running theme throughout the book as well. There is a series of broken promises.”

Still, as Capozzola writes, the military service of many Filipino men gave their familes “a language of patriotism and sacrifice — and therefore of equality.” That sense of belonging helped spur battles for civic justice. It was Filipino grape pickers who initiated what became famous as the United Farm Workers strike of the 1960s.

In the sphere of veteran’s rights, 64,000 of the 76,000 prisoners on the Bataan Death March had been Filipinos, fighting for the U.S. — yet they did not receive equitable military benefits. Only after a concerted effort, including a year-long vigil in MacArthur Park in the 1990s, was compensation folded into the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Only about 12,400 Filipino veterans realized those payments, leading one advocate for Filipino veterans to call the settlement “yet another beginning” in the battle for Filipino-American rights and benefits. There may be similar fights for inclusion in the future: In the Iraq War, about 31,000 U.S. troops were not citizens, and 20 percent of those were Filipino.

“The book is a way to think about who serves in and with and for our armed forces, [and] to ask what we owe them in return,” Capozzola says. “If we really want to understand big forces like war and globalization, we need to look at that full frame.”

With or without the U.S.?

While it explores immigration and social integration, “Bound by War” also examines politics in both countries after 1946, when the Philippines gained independence but remained in the U.S. sphere of influence.

“In many ways the Philippines enters the community of nations on the back foot,” Capozzola observes. “It’s devastated by the war, its economy is destroyed, and there is an emerging Cold War threat. This requires Philippine politicians to maintain ties to the U.S. in order to protect their country.”

But many voices have criticized that arrangement, Capozzola notes: “If there’s one central question in Philippine foreign policy that’s consistent from 1946 to the present, it is this: Are we better off with the Americans, or without them?”

President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972 and ruled over a police state until the “People Power” movement ousted him in 1986 — with the U.S. only belatedly grasping the strength of opposition leader Corazon Aquino. Yet despite solid U.S. backing, Marcos actually made rhetorical overtures to China in the 1970s, perhaps trying to play off the two powers against each other. In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte surprised the U.S. by announcing the Philippines would “realign” with China, but has not followed through on the idea.

On the ground, the U.S.-Philippines relationship evolved again in 1965 when U.S. immigration law allowed Asians back into the country — especially white-collar workers. In the 1970s, Filipinos were the second-largest group immigrating to the U.S., behind only Mexicans.

Today Filipino emigration is worldwide, with workers settling in the Gulf States, elsewhere in Asia, and some parts of Europe. Overall, Filipino immigrants sent an estimated $10 billion in remittances back home in 2005.

“The core aspects of the U.S.-Philippine military relationship are remarkably unchanged from the early 20th century to today,” Capozzola says. “What has changed is the power of Filipinos themselves. The economy is substantially different and not as tied to the United States. Filipino migrations are global, and the United States is not by any means the largest recipient country. Through their everyday choices, the relationship is being remade. And I think ultimately that will shift the U.S.-Philippine military relationship.”

So while it is important to know formal military history, Capozzola thinks, it is also vital to regard military history as something more than wars and strategies.

“To understand 20th-century America, you need to understand the U.S. military,” Capozzola says. “Not only as a [fighting] force, although of course that’s what it was designed for, but also a generative force that transforms social relationships, immigration patterns, ideas about race and culture. This book is a way to bring that to the center of the story.”

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When the chemical industry met modern architecture

Just months before starting her PhD, Jessica Varner and her partner bought a small house built in 1798. Located on tidal wetlands along Connecticut’s Patchogue River, the former residence of an ironworker had endured over two centuries of history and neglect.

As Varner began to slowly restore the house — discovering its nail-less construction and thin horsehair plaster walls, learning plumbing skills, and burning oyster shells to make lime wash — she discovered a deep connection between her work inside and outside academia.

For her dissertation in MIT’s History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program, Varner had been investigating how the chemical industry wooed the building and construction industry with the promise of “invisible,” “new,” and “durable” synthetic materials at the turn of the 20th century. In the process, these companies helped transform modern architecture while also disregarding or actively obscuring the health and environmental risks posed by these materials. While researching the history of these dyes, additives, and foams, Varner was also considering the presence of similar synthetics in her own new home.

Coming into closer contact with these types of materials as a builder herself gave Varner a new perspective on the widespread implications of her research. “I think with my hands … and both projects began to inform each other,” she says. “Making and writing at the same time, I’m amazed how much this house is a part of the work.”

The reverse proved true as well. Next year Varner will launch the Black House Project, an interdisciplinary artist-in-residence space on the Connecticut property. Artists who participate will be asked to engage with a seasonal theme relating to the intersection of history, environment, and community. The inaugural theme will be, “building from the ashes,” with a focus on burning and invasive species.

A personal chemical history

The chemical industry has a longer history for Varner than she even initially understood: She comes from a long line of farming families in Nebraska, a state with a complex relationship with the agricultural-chemical industry.

“That was just our way of life and we never questioned it,” she says of the way farm life became entwined with the chemical necessities and economic hardships of American industrial agriculture. She recalls spraying herbicide, without a mask, on thistles on the farm after her family received government letters threatening daily fines if her family did not remove the plant. She also remembers how their farm, and much of the region, depended on seeds and other products from DeKalb.

“Coming from a place that depends so much on the economy of an industry, there are nuances and deeper layers to the story” of modern agriculture, she says, noting that the subsistence farming and often industrial farming go hand in hand.

At MIT, Varner has continued to probe beneath the surface of how chemical products are promoted and adopted. For her thesis, with the help of a Fulbright scholarship, she began digging through the chemical companies’ corporate archives. Her research has revealed how these companies generated research strategies, advertising, and publicity to transform the materials of the “modern interior and exterior.”

Underneath a veneer of technological innovation and promises of novelty, Varner argues, these companies carefully masked their supply chains, adjusted building codes, and created marketing teams knowns as “truth squads,” which monitored and reshaped conversations around these products and growing concerns about their environmental harms. The result, she writes in her dissertation, was “one of the most successful, and toxic, material transformations in modern history.”

Bridging activism and academia

Varner has a long-running interest in environmental activism, from the conservation and restoration efforts in her home state, to vegetarianism, to studying glaciers in Alaska, to her current conception of the Black House Project. “At every point I feel like my life has had environmental activism in it,” she says.

Environmental concerns have always been an integral part of her studies as well. After her undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska, Varner went on to study architecture and environmental design at Yale University, where she studied the debates between climate scientists and architects in the 1970s. Then she headed to Los Angeles as a practicing architect and professor.

Working with as a designer with Michael Maltzan Architecture while teaching seminars and studios on at the University of Southern California and Woodbury University, she realized her students had bigger, historical questions, such as about the origin of sustainability catchphrases like “passive cooling,” “circular economy,” and “net-zero.” “There were deeper questions behind what environmentalism was, how you can enact it, how you know what the rules of sustainability are, and I realized I didn’t have answers,” Varner says. “It was taken for granted.”

Those questions brought her to MIT, where she says the cross-cutting nature of her work benefitted from the Institute’s intersection with chemistry and engineering and history of technology. “The questions I was asking were interdisciplinary questions, so it was helpful to have those people around to bounce ideas off of,” she says.

This fall, Varner will return to MIT as a lecturer while also working with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. At EDGI, she is the assistant curator for the EPA Interviewing Working Group, an ongoing oral history project chronicling the inner workings of the EPA and the way the organization has been affected by the current administration.

“I’m excited to get back in the classroom,” she says, as well as finding a new way to take her academic interests into a more activist and policy-oriented sphere at EDGI. “I definitely think that’s what MIT brought to me in my education, other ways to carry your knowledge and your expertise to engage at different levels. It’s what I want to keep, going forward as a graduate.”

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“Junior republics,” a unique concept in the history of American childhood

Around 1900, the famed Baedeker’s travel guide began listing a new tourist sight in Freeville, New York: the “George Junior Republic,” a miniature United States run by kids.

The invention of philanthropist William R. George, the “junior republic” was mostly occupied by impoverished or immigrant teenagers from New York City, acting as politicians, judges, police officers, journalists, and other workers, in their own separate civic world. George thought this would instill American democratic values in Freeville’s young residents.

“This interesting experiment seems to work well, and a visit to Freeville rivals in sociological interest that to Ellis Island,” the Baedeker’s guide stated.

Indeed, “George’s idea caught on like wildfire,” says MIT Professor Jennifer Light. Soon junior republics were springing up around America, with modified versions introduced into schools, playgrounds, and settlements. In an era when popular entertainment included “living villages” — reconstructions of settings from Cairo to Native American encampments, complete with their inhabitants — Americans were enchanted by the concept of a participatory virtual experience of adult life for kids.

Now the junior republic movement is the subject of a new book by Light, “States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945,” published this month by the MIT Press. In it, Light — who is the head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society; the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology; and a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning — illuminates the history of this influential but forgotten movement and reminds us that, long before the invention of computing, Americans were intrigued by the educational possibilities of virtual worlds.

“George lived at a time when many kids were still part of the labor force, but reformers were pressing to send them to school and adult-supervised recreational activities instead,” Light says. “Junior republics offered a middle ground where they could role-play adult jobs inside child-only settings to prepare for their future lives.”

Double life

A reform-minded businessman working in New York City, George founded a “fresh air camp” in Freeville in 1890. Five years later, he gathered 150 young people to start the full junior republic, with limited adult supervision. The participants passed laws, debated women’s suffrage — George was ambivalent about the idea, but thought it was good for girls to anticipate it — and created an elaborate simulacrum of civic life that included a currency system and hotels like “the Waldorf,” named after New York City establishments. George cultivated attention, receiving what Light calls “overwhelmingly positive” reviews from journalists and public officials.

Freeville soon generated imitation villages — and even more related programs in schools. A friend of George’s named Wilson Gill developed “school republics” in New York City classrooms. These patterned student governments after local governments — with mayors, police, and street cleaning departments — and emphasized that what mattered most for kids was the role-playing experience, not their environment. That meant junior republics did not all have to be built anew, and many programs focused on creating a “double life” for kids to enjoy adult-like experiences while being protected from actual adult life.

This focus on role-playing also meshed with the ideas of some prominent thinkers. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, an admirer of George, emphasized in his work how much children at play are imitative of adults; the famous educational theorist John Dewey, who advised Gill, was an advocate of “learning by doing.” All told, this constellation of views enhanced the popularity of the junior republic concept, in any physical form. If kids loved to pretend they were adults, the thinking went, why not turn their play into an educational experience?

“It was a challenge to get independent republics going,” Light observes, “so after 1900 the main trend was for schools and youth-serving institutions to integrate republics into their programming. They were incredibly popular.”

Over time, the junior republic idea kept evolving. Public officials, seeing kids’ efficacy as police, judges, and health inspectors inside child-only societies, subsequently organized junior police squads, junior juvenile courts, and junior sanitary inspectors — making city streets the settings for elaborate role-playing games in which kids arrested peers, adjudicated cases of juvenile delinquency, and kept their neighborhoods clean. During World War I, children in junior republics and related programs directed attention to the war effort, growing food, making hospital supplies, and sewing clothing for refugees. In the 1920s and 1930s, schools and police departments deployed children for traffic management near schools.

“We conventionally understand the transformation of childhood to be a straightforward story of kids being removed from the labor force and public life,” Light says. “But many of these programs assigned kids to keep order in public streets! And, there was tremendous economic value in role-playing of all kinds, even as people called it educational or recreational.”

Just as women’s work was (and is) often unpaid, Light notes, a similar dynamic unfolded with kids, well into the 20th century. “There are some interesting parallels to the digital economy as well. On platforms like Facebook it’s users who generate economic value, but we call this having fun rather than work, and don’t expect to get paid.”

Echoes today

The junior republic movement outlasted George (who died in 1936), but eventually lost momentum. As Light observes, the rise in material wealth in the U.S., a shift to consumer culture, and the expansion of mass media changed how children played.

“Film, radio, and television became increasingly central in kids’ lives,“ Light says. “Educators turned away from role-playing to adapt these newer technologies to their learning objectives.”

Today, Light says, “Nobody has heard of the junior republics.” Still, she notes, their legacy has endured: “Student newspapers, teen courts, Model United Nations, and Boys and Girls State — all these things had ties to the republic movement.”

And we still encounter discussions about simulation and learning that resemble those from a century ago, Light notes. Today those questions may surround things like online activites and the gamification of learning, but they are not new.

“It’s fascinating to discover a national conversation about the educational possibilities of role-playing and virtual worlds that’s 125 years old,” she says.

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Masks mandates have major impact, study finds

The research described in this article has been published as a working paper but has not yet been peer-reviewed by experts in the field.

Masks reduce the spread of Covid-19. But just how much of an effect do they have? A study co-authored by an MIT professor finds that if the U.S. had introduced a uniform national mask mandate for employees of public-facing businesses on April 1, the number of deaths in the U.S. would likely have been 40 percent lower on June 1.

“It is a very effective policy that includes relatively little economic disruption,” says Victor Chernozhukov, a professor in the Department of Economics and the Statistics and Data Science Center at MIT, and one of the authors of a paper detailing the study’s results. “We found it produced a considerable reduction in fatalities.”

Among other findings about the ongoing pandemic, drawing on the timing of state policy announcements, medical data, and Google mobility data, the study also shows that in the same timeframe, total Covid-19 cases in the U.S. would have likely been 80 percent higher without the stay-at-home orders implemented by the vast majority of states.

Additionally, the researchers evaluated how much the reduction in people’s movement — such as commuting and shopping trips — has followed specific state policies, and how much has stemmed from personal decisions to stay home more often. Their conclusion is that each factor accounts for about half of the decline in physical movement during the pandemic.

The paper, “Causal Impact of Masks, Policies, Behavior on Early Covid-19 Pandemic in the U.S.,” has been posted on the MedRxiv preprint server and as part of the  Covid Economics paper series by the Center for Economic Policy Research in London. The authors are Chernozhukov; Hiroyuki Kasahara, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia; and Paul Schrimpf, an associate professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia.

State variation creates room for study

To conduct the study, the economists took advantage of the fact that many U.S. states have implemented mask mandates at different times this year. By examining the before-and-after trajectories of cases and deaths, the study was able to identify the impact of the mask mandates.

To be sure, states also differ from each other in numerous ways that may influence the spread of Covid-19, including demographic factors such as the age and health of state residents; population density; additional state-level policies curbing the spread of Covid-19; and self-directed changes in population movement, in response to the pandemic. The study also accounted for the fact that Covid-19 testing increased during this time.

“The results hold up,” Chernozhukov says. “Controlling for behavior, information variables, confounding factors — the mask mandates are critical to the decline in deaths. No matter how we look at the data, that result is there.”

Specifically, after accounting for those circumstances, the researchers estimated that mask mandates would have produced a 40 percent reduction in deaths, nationally. That finding had a 90 percent confidence interval, which describes the likely range of estimated outcomes. That means mandated mask-wearing would have reduced U.S. fatalities by anywhere from 17,000 to 55,000 from April 1 through June 1.

The 80 percent reduction in cases the researchers attributed to stay-at-home orders also had a 90 percent confidence interval, implying that those policies reduced the overall number of cases by anywhere from 500,000 to 3.4 million between April 1 and June 1.

Accounting for movement

In assessing the relationship between public policy and the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, the researchers used Google Mobility Reports data to assess a related question: To what extent does people’s behavior respond to state policy mandates, or to what extent does it stem from “private” or self-directed decisions, based on other information about the public-health situation?

The Google data included mobility measures showing the prevalence of visits to public transit, grocery stores, other retail establishments, and workplaces. Ultimately — again based on the timing of changes in mobility patterns in relation to state-level stay-at-home directives — the researchers concluded that adherence to government mandates accounts for about half of the observed reductions in travel.

“We compute that the policies played an important role, but also that the private responses of people played an equally important role,” Chernozhukov says. “It’s a combination of the two.”

The researchers note that they could not measure the effects of all important policy decisions on the reduction of Covid-19 transmission. Consider the school closures that occurred almost nationwide in mid-March: Because the timing of that policy change was so similar across the country, it is very difficult to estimate its effects. If some states had left their schools open longer, it would be easier to quantify what difference the closures made.

“We couldn’t reliably answer that question with our data because the school closures happened almost in one week, with very little variation,” Chernozhukov observes.

However, given that many states have continued changing their policies after June 1, with significant variation in state-level mask policies and economic reopening plans, the scholars say they are continuing to study the subject, and plan to release more findings about it in the near future.

“We are continuing to analyze these issues, and we hope to produce another paper that focuses on the effects of mask mandates during the reopening phase,” Chernozhukov says.

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New US postage stamp highlights MIT research

Letter writers across the country will soon have a fun and beautiful new Forever stamp to choose from, featuring novel research from the Media Lab's Biomechatronics research group. 

The stamp is part of a new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) series on innovation, representing computing, biomedicine, genome sequencing, robotics, and solar technology. For the robotics category, the USPS chose the bionic prosthesis designed and built by Matt Carney PhD ’20 and members of the Biomechatronics group, led by Professor Hugh Herr.

The image used in the stamp was taken by photographer Andy Ryan, whose portfolio spans images from around the world, and who for many years has been capturing the MIT experience — from stunning architectural shots to the research work of labs across campus. Ryan suggested the bionic work of the biomechatronics group to USPS to represent the future of robotics. Ryan also created the images that became the computing and solar technology stamps in the series. 

“I was aware that Hugh Herr and his research team were incorporating robotic elements into the prosthetic legs they were developing and testing,” Ryan notes. “This vision of robotics was, in my mind, a true depiction of how robots and robotics would manifest and impact society in the future." 

With encouragement from Herr, Ryan submitted high-definition, stylized, and close-up images of Matt Carney working on the group's latest designs. 

Carney, who recently completed his PhD in media arts and sciences at the Media Lab, views bionic limbs as the ultimate humanoid robot, and an ideal innovation to represent and portray robotics in 2020. He was all-in for sharing that work with the world.

"Robotic prostheses integrate biomechanics, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, and no piece is off-the-shelf,” Carney says. “To attempt to fit within the confines of the human form, and to match the bandwidth and power density of the human body, we must push the bounds of every discipline: computation, strength of materials, magnetic energy densities, sensors, biological interfaces, and so much more."

In his childhood, Carney himself collected stamps from different corners of the globe, and so the selection of his research for a U.S. postal stamp has been especially meaningful. 

"It's a freakin' honor to have my PhD work featured as a USPS stamp," Carney says, breaking into a big smile. "I hope this feat is an inspiration to young students everywhere to crush their homework, and to build the skills to make a positive impact on the world. And while I worked insane hours to build this thing — and really tried to inspire with its design as much as its engineering — it's truly the culmination of powered prosthesis work pioneered by Dr. Hugh Herr and our entire team at the Media Lab's Biomechatronics group, and it expands on work from a global community over more than a decade of development."

The new MIT stamp joins a venerable list of other stamps associated with the Institute. Formerly issued stamps have featured Apollo 11 astronaut and moonwalker Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63, Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman ’39, and architect Robert Robinson Taylor, who graduated from MIT in 1892 and is considered the nation’s first academically trained African American architect, followed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei ’40, whose work includes the Louvre Glass Pyramid and the East Building on the National Gallery in Washington, as well as numerous buildings on the MIT campus. 

The new robotics stamp, however, is the first to feature MIT research, as well as members of the MIT community.

"I'm deeply honored that a USPS Forever stamp has been created to celebrate technologically-advanced robotic prostheses, and along with that, the determination to alleviate human impairment," Herr says. "Through the marriage of human physiology and robotics, persons with leg amputation can now walk with powered prostheses that closely emulate the biological leg. By integrating synthetic sensors, artificial computation, and muscle-like actuation, these technologies are already improving people's lives in profound ways, and may one day soon bring about the end of disability."

The Innovation Stamp series will be available for purchase through the U.S. Postal Service later this month.

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Q&A: Peter Fisher discusses JASON report on reopening university laboratories

What will it take for research universities across the U.S. to safely open their labs? That’s the subject of a recently released report by JASON, an independent group of scientists who advise the U.S. government about science and technology, in association with the MITRE Corporation. The report was led by Peter Fisher, professor and head of MIT’s Department of Physics, who is a JASON member. (MIT has separately examined the question, and began a phased ramp-up of lab research in June; Fisher participated in MIT reopening efforts as well.) MIT News talked with Fisher about the JASON report.

Q: What are the main things the JASON report recommends to universities trying to reopen labs?

A: Probably the top-level things are just mask-wearing, handwashing, and social distancing. Those are three things that everybody can do. And people know this, but the report looks in exhaustive detail at why those things are important — from the physics of masks to a whole section on air handling and how the virus builds up in the air. The design of campuses, including MIT, is intended to bring people together as much as possible, so we are really fighting the physical nature of MIT.

The research is important because the people who work in the labs and come back to campuses have to buy into these rules. And I think they buy in much better if they understand the science behind the rules.

Q: One implication of the report is that details matter greatly. For instance, the report notes that, compared to breathing, the viral load people exhale from speaking is 20 times as great — so you recommend communicating via text, whiteboards, scratch pads, or other nonverbal means. And the report has a section on proper mask fitting. Won’t people have to get used to some distinctly new practices?

A: Yes. For example, really minimize the amount you speak. And you can whisper. The amount that comes out between breathing [on the one hand], and speaking, singing, and shouting [on the other] is just enormous. … [Regarding masks], if you are in a hospital wearing one, part of the standard operating procedure is there is a specialist who fits it onto your face. There’s a metal bar that goes across your nose and it’s all about how you press down that metal bar so it forms a good seal, going across your nose and your cheekbones.

Q: Beyond those things, the report suggests making aggregate health information available to community in a dashboard format. Why would that help?

 A: Because people are competitive. And sometimes if you want to get people to do something, you turn it into a game. Also, from some of the work the organization does with the military, there is what’s called situational awareness. That comes down to a few numbers that tell you how you’re doing. And for Covid-19, it would be how many tests have you administered; how many of them came back positive; how many people are coming onto campus every day; and how many of them are not complying with the rules, like wearing masks. It’s all anonymous, but it gives you a snapshot of how you’re doing.

When you design a system, you can’t just assume that compliance is going to be 100 percent. It’s going to be lower, and you have to account for that in your planning and thinking. That’s one [reason] we talked about the dashboard. Another thing [that helps] is really good modeling. At MIT, the senior researchers and faculty are very highly regarded and closely watched. And I think really the faculty and senior research staff have to model this behavior.

Q: The report also discusses whether university campuses can be “islands” apart from the pandemic, or part of larger community. What are some of the factors at play there?

A: It depends on what you’re willing to do and where you are. MIT is an urban campus and Cambridge is one of the most densely populated places around. Everybody on campus, before the Covid-19, relied on the surrounding community for something — food, entertainment, health services. And it’s hard to change that. Inevitably, how a university is doing is going to be closely coupled to the community it’s embedded in. It’s true of all the big Boston-area campuses.

In [rural cases], the college can separate itself pretty well from the city. … [For example], at Vassar they are having a strict rule: Nobody leaves campus, and they’re going to try to make it into a bubble. Some colleges, you can draw a line around campus, and it’s clear what is campus and what is not campus. But MIT leaks out all into the city.

Q: It seems apparent from all this that some universities might have midstream, midsemester decisions to make. There might be plans in place, but don’t institutions have to keep in mind that circumstances can change, this fall or further out in the future?

A: It’s really tough because the nature of this disease is that the people feeling symptoms now were infected five days ago. The people who are in the hospital now [were infected] 14 days ago. Knowing how many positive cases you’re getting today is not a great indicator of how many people are going to feel sick tomorrow. It’s an indicator of how many people are going to feel really sick in two weeks, and during that time, the virus can spread exponentially. So there are going to have to be some tough decisions to be made. You don’t want to have to suddenly make them when you have 400 sick students to contend with. I think MIT’s done smart things — including the single-room occupancy housing policy. The leadership at MIT is taking the long view.

One thing that everybody is only starting to struggle with is that the world just changed, in this really fundamental way. We’re all hoping it gets a lot better, but where that ends up is not going to be where we were at the start of 2020. We’re living through a remarkable moment in history. It’s quite daunting to think about, but what we always try to do with JASON [reports] is just detail the bedrock science.

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Study sheds light on the evolution of the earliest dinosaurs

The classic dinosaur family tree has two subdivisions of early dinosaurs at its base: the Ornithischians, or bird-hipped dinosaurs, which include the later Triceratops and Stegosaurus; and the Saurischians, or lizard-hipped dinosaurs, such as Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.

In 2017, however, this classical view of dinosaur evolution was thrown into question with evidence that perhaps the lizard-hipped dinosaurs evolved first — a finding that dramatically rearranged the first major branches of the dinosaur family tree.

Now an MIT geochronologist, along with paleontologists from Argentina and Brazil, has found evidence to support the classical view of dinosaur evolution. The team’s findings are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The team reanalyzed fossils of Pisanosaurus, a small bipedal dinosaur that is thought to be the earliest preserved Ornithiscian in the fossil record. The researchers determined that the bird-hipped herbivore dates back to 229 million years ago, which is also around the time that the earliest lizard-hipped Saurischians are thought to have appeared.

The new timing suggests that Ornithiscians and Saurischians first appeared and diverged from a common ancestor at roughly the same time, giving support to the classical view of dinosaur evolution.

The researchers also dated rocks from the Ischigualasto Formation, a layered sedimentary rock unit in Argentina that is known for having preserved an abundance of fossils of the very earliest dinosaurs. Based on these fossils and others across South America, scientists believe that dinosaurs first appeared in the southern continent, which at the time was fused together with the supercontinent of Pangaea. The early dinosaurs are then thought to have diverged and fanned out across the world.

However, in the new study, the researchers determined that the period over which the Ischigualasto Formation was deposited overlaps with the timing of another important geological deposit in North America, known as the Chinle Formation.

The middle layers of the Chinle Formation in the southwestern U.S. contain fossils of various fauna, including dinosaurs that appear to be more evolved than the earliest dinosaurs. The bottom layers of this formation, however, lack animal fossil evidence of any kind, let alone early dinosaurs. This suggests that conditions within this geological window prevented the preservation of any form of life, including early dinosaurs, if they walked this particular region of the world. 

“If the Chinle and Ischigualasto formations overlap in time, then early dinosaurs may not have first evolved in South America, but may have also been roaming North America around the same time,” says Jahandar Ramezani, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, who co-authored the study. “Those northern cousins just may not have been preserved.”

The other researchers on the study are first author Julia Desojo from the National University of La Plata Museum, and a team of paleontologists from institutions across Argentina and Brazil.

“Following footsteps”

The earliest dinosaur fossils found in the Ischigualasto Formation are concentrated within what is now a protected provincial park known as “Valley of the Moon” in the San Juan Province. The geological formation also extends beyond the park, albeit with fewer fossils of early dinosaurs. Ramezani and his colleagues instead looked to study one of the accessible outcrops of the same rocks, outside of the park.

They focused on Hoyada del Cerro Las Lajas, a less-studied outcrop of the Ischigualasto Formation, in La Rioja Province, which another team of paleontologists explored in the 1960s.

“Our group got our hands on some of the field notes and excavated fossils from those early paleontologists, and thought we should follow their footsteps to see what we could learn,” Desojo says.

Over four expeditions between 2013 to 2019, the team collected fossils and rocks from various layers of the Las Lajas outcrop, including more than 100 new fossil specimens, though none of these fossils were of dinosaurs. Nevertheless, they analyzed the fossils and found they were comparable, in both species and relative age, to nondinosaur fossils found in the park region of the same Ischigualasto Formation. They also found out that the Ischigualasto Formation in Las Lajas was significantly thicker and much more complete than the outcrops in the park. This gave them confidence that the geological layers in both locations were deposited during the same critical time interval.

Ramezani then analyzed samples of volcanic ash collected from several layers of the Las Lajas outcrops. Volcanic ash contains zircon, a mineral that he separated from the rest of the sediment, and measured for isotopes of uranium and lead, the ratios of which yield the mineral’s age.

With this high-precision technique, Ramezani dated samples from the top and bottom of the outcrop, and found that the sedimentary layers, and any fossils preserved within them, were deposited between 230 million and 221 million years ago. Since the team determined that the layered rocks in Las Lajas and the park match in both species and relative timing, they could also now determine the exact age of the park’s more fossil-rich outcrops.

Moreover, this window overlaps significantly with the time interval over which sediments were deposited, thousands of kilometers northward, in the Chinle Formation.

“For many years, people thought Chinle and Ischigualasto formations didn’t overlap, and based on that assumption, they developed a model of diachronous evolution, meaning the earliest dinosaurs appeared in South America first, then spread out to other parts of the world including North America,” Ramezani says. “We’ve now studied both formations extensively, and shown that diachronous evolution isn’t really based on sound geology.”

A family tree, preserved

Decades before Ramezani and his colleagues set out for Las Lajas, other paleontologists had explored the region and unearthed numerous fossils, including remains of Pisanosaurus mertii, a small, light-framed, ground-dwelling herbivore. The fossils are now preserved in an Argentinian museum, and scientists have gone back and forth on whether it is a true dinosaur belonging to the Ornithiscian group, or a “ basal dinosauromorph” — a kind of pre-dinosaur, with features that are almost, but not quite fully, dinosaurian.

“The dinosaurs we see in the Jurassic and Cretaceous are highly evolved, and ones we can nicely identify, but in the late Triassic, they all looked very much alike, so it’s very hard to distinguish them from each other, and from basal dinosauromorphs,” Ramezani explains.

His collaborator Max Langer from the University of São Paulo in Brazil painstakingly reanalyzed the museum-preserved fossil of Pisanosaurus, and concluded, based on certain key anatomical features, that it is indeed a dinosaur — and what’s more, that it is the earliest preserved Ornithiscian specimen. Based on Ramezani’s dating of the outcrop and the interpretation of Pisanosaurus, the researchers concluded that the earliest bird-hipped dinosaurs appeared around 229 million years ago — around the same time as their lizard-hipped counterparts.

“We can now say the earliest Ornithiscians first showed up in the fossil record roughly around the same time as the Saurischians, so we shouldn’t throw away the conventional family tree,” Ramezani says. “There are all these debates about where dinosaurs appeared, how they diversified, what the family tree looked like. A lot of those questions are tied to geochronology, so we need really good, robust age constraints to help answer these questions.”

This research was mainly funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Argentina) and the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Brazil). Geochronologic research at the MIT Isotope Lab has been supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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