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2,700 premature deaths attributed to excess emissions of Diesel cars
In September 2015, German Volkswagen Group, the world’s largest car producer, admitted to having installed “defeat devices” in 11 million diesel cars sold worldwide between 2008 and 2015. The devices enabled more than 11 million passenger vehicles to meet U.S. emissions standards in the laboratory despite producing emissions up to 40 times higher than the…
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LAE co-leading new research on autonomy and environment
In September 2017, LAE’s Director Professor Steven Barrett and Professor Sertac Karaman received a Seed Grant from MIT’s Environmental Solution Initiative (ESI). The research team aims to analyze autonomy-enabled transport in trucks, aircraft, and door-to-door systems to reduce fossil fuel consumption. In a first project phase, the project will focus on machine-learning techniques and apply them for the…
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Steven Barrett receives the Professor Bose Research Grant
Since 2014, the Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grant has supported MIT faculty with innovative and potentially paradigm-shifting research ideas, and this year is no exception: With Bose funding, six research teams composed of nine MIT faculty members will pursue projects ranging from nanoengineering a light-emitting plant to developing solid-state atmospheric propulsion technology for aircraft.…
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Measuring exposure to pollution
What’s the best way to measure human exposure to urban pollution? Typically, cities do so by studying air-quality levels in fixed places. New York City, for example, has an extensive monitoring network that measures air quality in 155 locations.But now a study led by MIT researchers, focused on New York City, suggests that using mobile-phone…
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Piston engine aircraft pose a health risk
They may seem innocuous enough, those small planes used for weekend getaways, flight training, small freight deliveries, and other civilian purposes. But collectively, the more than 167,000 piston-engine aircraft that comprise the majority of the U.S. general aviation (GA) fleet may pose a significant health threat. That’s because these vehicles, which rely on leaded fuel to operate…
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Study quantifies premature deaths in Europe resulting from Volkswagen’s excess emissions
In September 2015, the German Volkswagen Group, the world’s largest car producer, admitted to having installed “defeat devices” in 11 million diesel cars sold worldwide between 2008 and 2015. The devices were designed to detect and adapt to laboratory tests, making the cars appear to comply with environmental standards when, in fact, they emitted pollutants…
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Singapore-MIT Environmental Solutions Hackathon
Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling, SMART, Singapore From July 5th-7th, students from MIT and National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) converged on the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) for the Singapore Environmental Solutions Hackathon. The challenge put to the students was…
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Study quantifies US health impacts of Volkswagen emissions defeat devices
Volkswagen’s use of software to evade emissions standards in more than 482,000 diesel vehicles sold in the U.S. will directly contribute to 60 premature deaths across the country, a new MIT-led study finds.In September, the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the German automaker had developed and installed “defeat devices” (actually software) in light-duty diesel vehicles…
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New model calculates how air transport connects the world
Study finds one-stop flights are a big contributor to global connectivity. Every time you’ve seen a plane take off or land at a hub airport, you’ve seen the world growing more connected, according to a new model developed by researchers at MIT. In a study published in the journal Transportation Research Part E, the MIT team outlines…