Dr. Emanuela Gionfriddo, an assistant professor of analytical chemistry, and Nipunika H. Godage, a Ph.D. candidate in UToledo’s Dr. Nina McClelland Laboratory for Water Chemistry and Environmental Analysis, published research in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry outlining their groundbreaking method that is able to detect 79 pesticide residues in human blood plasma at “ultra-trace” levels, or parts per trillion.

“This has the potential to be applied to human exposure studies for the general public such as exposure through food or contaminated water but, most importantly, agricultural workers who have a higher potential for acute exposure to these toxic chemicals, which typically occurs through the skin, with pesticides then passing into the bloodstream and circulating through the body,” Gionfriddo said.

Pesticides are widely used in farming to prevent or reduce produce losses caused by pests and improve the quality of fruits and vegetables, but human exposure during mixing or application has been reported to cause neurological disorders, poisoning, cancer, reproductive disruptions, respiratory problems and chronic kidney diseases among farm workers.

Though pesticides are regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Gionfriddo said the legalization of cannabis recently in several states has led to “inexperienced” farmers exposing themselves to the harmful chemicals since those workers are less familiar with pesticide safety equipment and procedures as well as proper pesticide storage and handling.

The pesticides selected for her study are the most commonly used pesticides during cannabis cultivation.

Gionfriddo’s new testing method uses what’s called bio solid-phase microextraction with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

“To meet the growing demands of regulatory agencies and routine analysis laboratories, sample throughput and method tunability is critical,” Gionfriddo said. “Using automated samplers, the preparation time per sample is 1.7 minutes.”

And as occupational exposure to pesticides can occur at varying concentration levels, it is important for any method to quantify pesticides at low concentrations. The new testing method demonstrated higher sensitivity, precision and accuracy and a drastic reduction in abnormalities compared to the commonly used approach, known as QuEChERS, which stands for Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged and Safe but can be labor intensive with prolonged workflows.

Last week during National Farmworker Awareness Week, the U.S. EPA said pesticide exposure doesn’t only happen when working in the fields. The federal agency said pesticide take-home exposure can occur when farm workers go home bearing pesticide residues that may cling to their skin, clothing, hats, boots, tools, lunch coolers or other items in their work environment. Their children may then be exposed to these pesticide residues.

“Assessing pesticide exposure quickly and thoroughly is crucial for the health and safety of workers and their families, to correct malpractices in pesticide storage and application, and to prevent further exposure,” Godage said. “Our new method can extract and analyze simultaneously a wide variety of pesticides from human plasma.”

To learn more about the U.S. EPA’s Occupational Pesticide Safety and Health program, visit the agency’s website (https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety).

However, not all possible MOF structures are stable enough to be deployed for applications such as catalyzing reactions or storing gases. To help researchers figure out which MOF structures might work best for a given application, MIT researchers have developed a computational approach that allows them to predict which structures will be the most stable.

Using their computational model, the researchers have identified about 10,000 possible MOF structures that they classify as “ultrastable,” making them good candidates for applications such as converting methane gas to methanol.

“When people come up with hypothetical MOF materials, they don’t necessarily know beforehand how stable that material is,” says Heather Kulik, an MIT associate professor of chemistry and chemical engineering, and the senior author of the study. “We used data and our machine-learning models to come up with building blocks that were expected to have high stability, and when we recombined those in ways that were considerably more diverse, our dataset was enriched with materials with higher stability than any previous set of hypothetical materials people had come up with.”

MIT graduate student Aditya Nandy is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in the journal Matter. Other authors are MIT postdoc Shuwen Yue, graduate students Changhwan Oh and Gianmarco Terrones, Chenru Duan PhD ’22, and Yongchul G. Chung, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Pusan National University.

Modeling MOFs

Scientists are interested in MOFs because they have a porous structure that makes them well-suited to applications involving gases, such as gas storage, separating similar gases from each other, or converting one gas to another. Recently, scientists have also begun to explore using them to deliver drugs or imaging agents within the body.

The two main components of MOFs are secondary building units — organic molecules that incorporate metal atoms such as zinc or copper — and organic molecules called linkers, which connect the secondary building units. These parts can be combined together in many different ways, just like LEGO building blocks, Kulik says.

“Because there are so many different types of LEGO blocks and ways you can assemble them, it gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of different possible metal organic framework materials,” she says. “You can really control the overall structure of the metal organic framework by picking and choosing how you assemble different components.”

Currently, the most common way to design MOFs is through trial-and-error. More recently, researchers have begun to try computational approaches to designing these materials. Most such studies have been based on predictions of how well the material will work for a particular application, but they don’t always take into account the stability of the resulting material.

“A really good MOF material for catalysis or for gas storage would have a very open structure, but once you have this open structure, it may be really hard to make sure that that material is also stable under long-term use,” Kulik says.

In a 2021 study, Kulik reported a new model that she created by mining a few thousand papers on MOFs to find data on the temperature at which a given MOF would break down and whether particular MOFs can withstand the conditions needed to remove solvents used to synthesize them. She trained the computer model to predict those two features — known as thermal stability and activation stability — based on the molecules’ structure.

In the new study, Kulik and her students used that model to identify about 500 MOFs with very high stability. Then, they broke those MOFs down into their most common building blocks — 120 secondary building units and 16 linkers.

By recombining these building blocks using about 750 different types of architectures, including many that are not usually included in such models, the researchers generated about 50,000 new MOF structures.

“One of the things that was unique about our set was that we looked at a lot more diverse crystal symmetries than had ever been looked at before, but [we did so] using these building blocks that had only come from experimentally synthesized highly stable MOFs,” Kulik says.

Ultrastability

The researchers then used their computational models to predict how stable each of these 50,000 structures would be, and identified about 10,000 that they deemed ultrastable, both for thermal stability and activation stability.

They also screened the structures for their “deliverable capacity” — a measure of a material’s ability to store and release gases. For this analysis, the researchers used methane gas, because capturing methane could be useful for removing it from the atmosphere or converting it to methanol. They found that the 10,000 ultrastable materials they identified had good deliverable capacities for methane and they were also mechanically stable, as measured by their predicted elastic modulus.

“Designing a MOF requires consideration of many types of stability, but our models enable a near-zero-cost prediction of thermal and activation stability,” Nandy says. “By also understanding the mechanical stability of these materials, we provide a new way to identify promising materials.”

The researchers also identified certain building blocks that tend to produce more stable materials. One of the secondary building units with the best stability was a molecule that contains gadolinium, a rare-earth metal. Another was a cobalt-containing porphyrin — a large organic molecule made of four interconnected rings.

Students in Kulik’s lab are now working on synthesizing some of these MOF structures and testing them in the lab for their stability and potential catalytic ability and gas separation ability. The researchers have also made their database of ultrastable materials available for researchers interested in testing them for their own scientific applications.

The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Energy, an MIT Portugal Seed Fund, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

The seas surrounding the Arctic are important fisheries and ecological regions; they are also among the areas most affected by climate change. The effects of warming waters and loss of sea ice on the biodiversity of these waters, and hence their ecology, is still not fully understood.

An international team of researchers led by Dr. Irene D. Alabia at the Arctic Research Center at Hokkaido University has examined Arctic-wide and regional changes in species richness, composition, and potential species associations. Their findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that recent changes in biodiversity were driven by pervasive poleward species range expansions.

“We used data on the occurrences of 69 species of apex predators and mesopredators in eight Arctic areas from 2000-2019,” Alabia explains. “We combined this information with climate and productivity data across the same period to map species-specific habitat distributions.”

The team calculated the species richness, community composition, and co-occurrences between species pairs throughout the twenty-year study period at each of the eight Arctic areas. They were able to infer potential species associations and changes therein from the co-occurrence data.

Their most important finding was that species richness — the number of different species represented in the study regions — has increased over the study period, driven by the northward migration of apex predators such as whales, sharks and seabirds. Mesopredators such as fish and crabs exhibited a relatively limited degree of northward migration, confined to the shallow continental shelf seas of the Pacific and Atlantic. Although the spatial extent varies, this northward expansion was driven by changes in either climate, productivity, or both.

These climate-driven biodiversity changes, in turn, led to alterations in potential species associations due to habitat overlap between taxa from different marine communities during unprecedented periods of temperature and sea ice changes.

“Our findings revealed that changes in climate and species richness in the Arctic vary across different large marine areas and highlight potential regions of climate and productivity hotspots, and emerging areas of species gain,” Alabia concluded. “This information is relevant for strengthening conservation and management efforts for the sustainable use of resources under the expanding footprints of climate change in the Arctic.”

The approach uses an innovative copper-containing polymeric filter and essentially converts CO₂ into sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) that can be released harmlessly into the ocean. This new hybrid material, or filter, is called DeCarbonHIX (i.e., decarbonization through hybrid ion exchange material), and is described in a paper recently published in the journal Science Advances.

The research, which demonstrated a 300 percent increase in the amount of carbon captured compared with existing direct air capture methods, has garnered international attention from media outlets like the BBC, CNN, Fast Company, and The Daily Beast, and professional organizations like the American Chemical Society. SenGupta himself has been fielding interest in the technology from companies based in Brazil, Ireland, and the Middle East.

“The climate crisis is an international problem,” says SenGupta, who is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and civil and environmental engineering in Lehigh’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “And I believe we have a responsibility to build direct air capture technology in a way that it can be implemented by people and countries around the world. Anyone who can operate a cell phone should be able to operate this process. This is not technology for making money. It’s for saving the world.”

The work is yet another extension of SenGupta’s personal and professional commitment to developing technologies that benefit humanity, and in particular, marginalized communities around the world. His research on water science and technology has included drinking water treatment methodologies, desalination, municipal wastewater reuse, and resource recovery. He invented the first reusable, arsenic-selective hybrid anion exchanger nanomaterial (HAIX-Nano), and as a result, more than two million people around the world now drink arsenic-safe water. Two of his patents have been recognized as “Patents for Humanity” by the US patent and Trademark Office.

His invention of DeCarbonHIX was the outcome of an ongoing CO₂-driven wastewater desalination project funded by the Bureau of Reclamation under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. SenGupta and his students were on the lookout for a reliable supply of CO₂ even in remote places. That quest led the way to the field of direct air capture, or DAC, and the creation of DeCarbonHIX. This subject was the dissertation topic for environmental engineering student Hao Chen ’23 PhD, who successfully defended his PhD in March and will receive his doctorate in May.

Capturing carbon at lower concentrations

The most abundant of the greenhouse gasses contributing to global warming is carbon dioxide. In 2021, global emissions of CO₂ rose by 6 percent from the previous year — to 36.3 gigatons, according to the International Energy Agency. Just one gigaton (equal to 1 billion tons) is the equivalent of the mass of all land mammals on earth.

Emissions from greenhouse gasses have increased global temperatures by approximately 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In its 2021 working group report, the IPCC estimates the average yearly temperature over the next 20 years is expected to rise by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius. The warmer the earth gets, the greater the fallout in terms of rising sea levels, extreme storm events, and ecological disruption, all of which have repercussions on global health, security, and stability.

“The worst part of this crisis is that people who are marginalized, who are poor, will suffer 10 times more than those who contributed to this situation,” says SenGupta.

There are three ways to reduce CO₂, he says. The first — government action — can reduce emissions, but that won’t address what’s already in the air.

“The second way is removing it from point sources, places like chimneys and stacks where carbon dioxide is being emitted in huge amounts,” he says. “The good thing about that is you can remove it at very high concentrations, but it only targets emissions from specific sources.”

The newest method is called direct air capture, which, he says, “allows you to remove CO₂ from anywhere, even your own backyard.”

With DAC, chemical processes remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, after which it’s typically stored underground. However, says SenGupta, the technology is limited by its capacity. It can’t capture enough CO2 to overcome the energy cost of running the process.

“If you’re capturing carbon dioxide from a chimney at a plant, the amount of CO₂ in the air can be upwards of 100,000 parts per million,” he says. “At that concentration, it’s easy to remove. But generally speaking, the CO2 level in the air is around 400 parts per million. That’s very high from a climate change point of view, but for removal purposes, we consider that ultra-dilute. Current filter materials just can’t collect enough of it.”

Another challenge with DAC involves storage. After the CO₂ is captured, it’s dissolved, put under pressure, liquified, and typically stored miles underground. A DAC operation must then be located in an area with enough geological storage — and stability. A country like Japan, for instance, can’t pump CO₂ underground because the area is prone to earthquakes.

Seeing a solution in seawater

SenGupta has developed a DAC method that overcomes both the capture problem and the issue of storage.

For the capture problem, he developed DeCarbonHIX — a mechanically strong, chemically stable sorbent (a material used to absorb liquids or gasses) — that contains copper.

“The copper changes an intrinsic property of the parent polymer material and enhances the capturing capacity by 300 percent,” he says. “We showed that for direct air capture from air with 400 parts per million of CO₂, we achieve capacity, meaning capacity is no longer a function of how much carbon dioxide is in the air. The filter will get saturated completely at any concentration, which means you can perform DAC in your backyard, in the middle of the desert, or in the middle of the ocean.”

The ocean is actually SenGupta’s solution to the storage problem. His DAC process starts with air blowing through the filter to capture CO₂. Once the filter is saturated with gas molecules (determined by measuring the amount of gas going into the filter versus coming out of it), seawater is passed through the filter. The seawater converts the carbon dioxide to sodium bicarbonate (you likely know it as baking soda, but lose the visual as we’re talking about a dissolved solution here). The dissolved sodium bicarbonate is then released directly into the ocean, what Sengupta calls “an infinite sink.”

“And it has no adverse impact on the ocean whatsoever,” says SenGupta. “It doesn’t change the salinity at all.”

In fact, he says, the sodium bicarbonate, which is slightly alkaline, may improve the health of the ocean. That’s because elevated levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere have gradually reduced the pH of the ocean, causing acidification. More acidic waters harm the growth and reproduction of marine life like corals and plankton and can create catastrophic collapses in the food chain.

“Sodium bicarbonate may reverse that lowering of pH,” he says.

It’s worth noting, he says, that like existing DAC processes, DeCarbonHIX can also be desorbed with hot water or steam, and pure CO₂ can be recovered, compressed, and stored underground in geological storage.

“In reality, this new filter material offers a dual mode of desorption and sequestration.”

Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. Markets that sell fresh locally grown and produced food make it easy to shop your values across both environmental and social considerations. This week, you can take action for the Earth by visiting a farmers market.

Action: Visit a Farmers Market

Greener Produce

Industrial agriculture works at too large a scale to bother with local markets. Not everything at your local farmers market will be organic and GMO-free. But farms that sell at local markets are much more likely to be involved in sustainable or regenerative agriculture. You can find foraged wild foods like mushrooms, produce grown under permaculture or biodynamic methods, and humanely raised meats more easily at farmers markets than at supermarkets.

Even when farmers use conventional methods, shopping at a farmers market guarantees freshness. Buying food at its freshest helps eliminate food waste and may be more nutritious. Shopping at the farmers market contributes to a plastic-free living since only a few prepared foods at such markets are prepackaged and you bring your own containers for produce.

Growing Community

Farmers markets are the epitome of shopping local. Shopping locally reduces the environmental impacts of transporting food. It also supports local farms and artisans like bakers and other small food businesses, keeping money in your community. Nearly 32 jobs are created for every $1 million in revenue generated by produce farms involved in direct marketing, such as farmers markets, compared to only 10.5 jobs for wholesale farms.  Supporting local growers also improves food security by increasing the variety of crops grown and decreasing reliance on long-distance transport networks. Shopping at the farmers market gives you the opportunity to learn about the origin of your food, build relationships within the community, and even eat a more varied and healthful diet in tune with the seasons.

Visit the Farmers Market

You can use the USDA’s Local Food Directory to find a farmers market near you. Many markets run year-round, while others only operate in the summer. Larger markets may be open every day, but most will only open on one or two days each week. This week, if a market near you is open, grab your reusable shopping bag and visit the market. Find out what’s available and how the prices and quality compare to the supermarket. Even if you’re underwhelmed, commit to visiting again in a few weeks. Available produce changes with the seasons, and there will be more variety each week as the weather heats up.

If none of the markets near you are open yet, make a note of the opening date on your calendar, and commit to shopping there when the reminder pops up. The market might not be able to completely replace the supermarket. But every time you shop there, you are investing in the Earth.

NASA has been working to better understand our home planet from the unique vantage point of space since the first TIROS satellites launched in the 1960s. Today, with more than two dozen Earth-observing satellites and instruments, it’s clearer than ever that our planet is an interconnected system. Local events can have global impacts and global events impact local communities. Recognizing that the challenges of today and tomorrow require an agency-wide effort, NASA’s Office of the Chief Scientist established a cross-agency working group and released “Advancing NASA’s Climate Strategy.”

“The last nine years have been the hottest ever recorded. That is simply an indisputable fact, underscoring the need for bold action to protect our planet,” said Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA’s climate strategy is a declaration of our continued commitment to lead on climate – and how we intend to do so.”

A PDF version of the full “Advancing NASA’s Climate Strategy” document is available here.

The strategy assesses NASA’s climate portfolio across the agency for the first time, extending beyond science and exploration efforts to include every mission directorate and NASA facility.

“The climate and Earth system are changing, and this impacts not only what science we need, but also how we think about our operations and mission safety,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor. “This strategy will help NASA integrate our understanding of climate across the agency and in our partnerships to better serve the public.”

The strategy lays out four key priorities for the agency to aide with the integration of climate across NASA: innovate, inform, inspire, and partner. The first priority of innovation relies on continuing NASA’s 60+ years of Earth science studied not only from space – but also through airborne research, direct measurements and field campaigns. With new missions coming online in 2023 to observe air pollution (TEMPO), Earth’s water to help improve climate models (SWOT), and the increasing intensity of storms (TROPICS), NASA-powered observations of our planet are at the core of how we study the effects of climate change.

NASA’s innovation efforts also extend to aeronautics engineering, as NASA seeks to advance the development of greener aerospace technology. Such advances in science and engineering can also lay a foundation for future innovation as NASA technologies and know-how are shared with the world, including agency collaborations to develop remote sensing technology, combat wildfires, and develop space power systems that could advance power alternatives on Earth. Finally, we are working to ensure the sustainability of NASA centers and facilities, including reducing agency greenhouse gas emissions and increasing resiliency to climate variability and change.

The strategy also lays out our commitment to inform the public and decision-makers around the world. NASA is focused on improving the accessibility and usability of climate and Earth science information. From seaside towns who wish to know more about their changing coastlines, to those in wildfire-vulnerable areas, to city-dwellers looking to track smog in their neighborhoods, communities around the world can benefit from NASA’s observations and models to help plan for the future. Providing resources that draw on NASA observations and models can help support everyone in preparing for and responding to climate change.

More than just providing information, one of NASA’s goals is always to inspire and to educate. As we make our observations about Earth accessible to the world, we are also seeking to encourage and train the next generation of climate researchers.

Finally, the strategy discusses the key role that partnering across agencies, institutions, and industries plays in understanding and responding to climate change. NASA will continue and enhance coordination and partnerships with other federal agencies, international entities, and state, local, and tribal governments to deliver actionable climate information to stakeholders – and ensure the broadest applicability of NASA climate information and technologies.

“NASA’s decades-long and vast array of Earth, atmospheric, and solar data have long been one of the foundations of how we understand climate and the Earth system,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division. “By studying Earth as a system – from a variety of viewpoints and through many different instruments and scientific fields – NASA’s integrated approach is key for better understanding our home planet. And understanding it gives us the means to better protect it.”

A PDF version of the full “Advancing NASA’s Climate Strategy” document is available here.

News Media Contacts:

Katherine Rohloff

Headquarters, Washington

[email protected]

Changing behaviours is essential if we are to meet our climate targets. Information and other types of interventions designed to influence behaviour are some of the tools being used. In a meta-analysis study, researchers from Cambridge and Yale universities and the University of Gothenburg analysed what makes a good intervention if your aim is to change people’s behaviours.

The results showed that intervention techniques based on social comparisons and financial incentives are more effective than interventions that focus on knowledge about what is ‘right’ or ‘good’.

“Learning that people around us have started choosing vegetarian food or cycling to work is often a better motivation for getting people to change their behaviours,” says Magnus Bergquist from the University of Gothenburg.

Together with colleagues in the UK and the USA, he compiled ten meta-analyses that included a total of 430 primary studies on proenvironmental behavioural changes in people’s everyday lives.

The meta-analyses also showed that these interventions generally have a relatively small effect on people’s behaviours. Compared to those who had not participated in the interventions, people who had increased their proenvironmental behaviours by just 7 percentage points on average. The interventions were about recycling, choosing a more sustainable transport option, or saving electricity for example.

The effect was more pronounced in small-scale interventions, with fewer than 9,000 participants, than in larger ones.

“One explanation for this may be that small-scale studies are more often based on direct techniques such as face-to-face interactions, which have a greater chance of influencing behaviour,” says Magnus Bergquist.