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Federal Cuts Hurt Small Farms

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 25, 2025| 2 Comments »

Photo: Mark Stockwell/Boston Globe.
Mohammed Hannan of Hannan Healthy Foods farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, holds garlic, one of many organic greens grown on his farm.

After the US takes a step forward, it always seems to take two steps back. In today’s story, We learn about federal funds that have been supporting sustainable agriculture. Until now.

Jocelyn Ruggiero reports for the Boston Globe, “It’s dreary, gray, and unseasonably chilly on the first day of Community Supported Agriculture pickups at the Hannan Healthy Foods farm. As CSA members trickle in to collect their bags of produce, they chat with Mohammed Hannan and passersby who’ve stopped to buy green garlic, beets, collards, and various herbs and greens at the farm stand. Hannan’s 11-year-old daughter, Afsheen, sits bundled up at the checkout table, reading a book alongside volunteer and longtime CSA member Tricia Moore. Aside from the weather, the scene looks similar to opening day last summer. But circumstances are vastly different from what they were 12 months ago.

“One person is notably absent. Hannan’s wife, Kaniz Fouzia, died of pancreatic cancer in March. And even as the family grieves, Hannan confronts the practical challenges of running the farm without his primary support.

“He also faces another crisis. Last year, as with every year since it launched, the farm’s biggest buyer was the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Food Hub, which purchased $7,000 in produce, primarily funded by two federal grants: the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement programs.

“Since 2021, the Food Hub has bought more than $32,000 of produce from Hannan, supported by these food grants, both part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan. These initiatives enable local schools, food banks, and senior centers to purchase produce from the Hub and, by extension, local farmers and producers. They’ve brought close to $20 million to the Massachusetts economy. Both the LFPA and LFS were originally scheduled to run through December 2025, [but the federal] administration abruptly and prematurely terminated funding for both programs. …

“Established in 2005, the Food Hub aggregates and distributes vegetables grown by more than 35 beginning, immigrant, and refugee farmers in the Boston region. It is an initiative of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, which was founded in 1998 to integrate recent immigrants and refugees with farming backgrounds into Massachusetts agriculture. …

“[The] sudden termination of multiple streams of support disrupted many long-planned efforts and, in some cases, left farmers holding the bill for purchases they had already made based on awards that were withdrawn.

“It’s no coincidence that Hannan is the steward of a successful farm. He’s always had close ties to agriculture. He grew up on his family’s organic farm in Bangladesh, which was both a source of food and income. Hannan went on to earn a master’s degree in wildlife biology, studying the country’s ecologically critical coastal areas. In 2014, he gave up an opportunity to accept a Duke fellowship when his wife received a US Diversity Visa; the family left Bangladesh to settle in Cambridge.

“He eked out a living at multiple minimum-wage jobs — Walgreens, Indian restaurants, and MIT facilities — before landing work in biotech, then as a lab manager at MIT. During the lean years, he yearned for the affordable organic food that was so accessible in Bangladesh. He wondered, ‘How can I change my situation? How can I grow food here?’ …

“Unsure about whether working a full-time job while running a farm would be feasible, Hannan spent the summer of 2017 volunteering mornings, nights, and weekends at White Rabbit Farm in Dracut. … He began the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project farmer training program that winter, leasing a small piece of land through New Entry and growing produce to feed his family. By 2019, he had launched his first 30-member CSA and was selling to the Food Hub. In 2020, he graduated and set his sights on a plot in Lincoln.

“The weeds were chest-high on the 2.5-acre barren plot, and there was no potable water for washing produce. … ‘I came up with a plan: I’ll grow veggies that do not need washing: bottle and bitter gourds, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers.’ As he expanded, Hannan connected with the Lincoln community through an online forum. There, he met Tom Flint, an 11th-generation Lincoln farmer. Flint introduced him to Lincoln Land Conservation Trust trustee Jim Henderson, who let Hannan use his backyard sink and cure garlic in his barn. These were the first of many new friends who welcomed him to Lincoln. …

“During COVID, unsolicited, strangers started contacting Hannan: ‘I had accountants, engineers, doctors. They were helping on the weekends. … We were laughing, harvesting … and eating from the farm. It was really good.’ Town residents later responded to his query on the town’s forum and helped Hannan build a deer fence when he couldn’t afford a contractor. His robust volunteer network has strengthened and extended beyond Lincoln, and today includes such groups as the Boston-based climate justice nonprofit Mothers Out Front. …

“[Today] Hannan’s MIT job subsidizes his farm, and his volunteer community provides supplemental support. However, for many other small farmers affected by funding cuts, the consequences will be existential. As Hannan puts it: ‘Small farmers like me … will definitely choose other options.’ ”

More at the Globe, here.

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Sculptor Maya Lin in Massachusetts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2025| 4 Comments »

Photo: David L. Ryan/Globe Staff.
Maya Lin’s landscape artwork in Kendall Square in Cambridge. It’s an “undulating wave field” in front of the Volpe Transportation building on Binney Street.

For most of us, sculptor Mia Lin first came to our attention when she was chosen to create the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, DC. The solemn listing of the names of the dead on black granite was a brilliant idea, endlessly moving.

Until now Lin had never created landscape art in Massachusetts, so people were surprised to learn that in fact she had had an impressive earthwork in busy Cambridge since 2023.

Scott Kirsner writes at the Boston Globe, “What if someone spent $1.3 million on a work of art, installed it in one of the busiest parts of Cambridge, and forgot to tell anyone?

“That’s effectively what happened with a piece called ‘The Sound We Travel At,’ by the New York City artist Maya Lin. She is best known for works like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. …

“But she also makes works of landscape art … and that’s what was created in Kendall in 2023. You can find it on Binney Street as you head toward Boston, to the left of a new 13-story building that houses the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a research center run by the US Department of Transportation. Sandwiched between a row of trees and lampposts is a series of 11 grass-covered, wave-like mounds of earth.

“Apropos of the Volpe Center’s work … the artwork outside is a physical representation of the Doppler effect. You know: the phenomenon of a sound, like a train’s horn, changing in pitch as it races past you. Some of the rippling mounds in Lin’s work represent sound waves that are approaching the viewer, and some of them represent sound waves that are receding from the viewer. Visitors are invited to walk atop, or even sit on, the work.

“There’s so much construction work in Kendall Square right now that I only noticed the artwork in November 2023, when I was visiting the Volpe Center to write a piece. … A year later, I noticed that there’s still no sign, and it doesn’t appear on the website of either the Volpe Center or the Maya Lin Studio. I couldn’t find a single museum curator or former curator in town who knew about it. …

“The artwork is part of a 14-acre site that MIT’s real estate management arm acquired from the federal government in 2017, and is redeveloping to include housing, retail, office space, parks, and a new community center. Part of that deal involved MIT building a newer home for the Volpe Center, and any time a new federal building goes up, half of one percent of the building’s cost goes to art. (That’s even true when MIT is footing the construction bill, as it was in this case.)

“Paul Ha, the director of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, helped make the connection to Lin for the project. He was one of the few people in the local art world I could find that was aware of its existence. Ha had worked with Lin on a major exhibit when he was running the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. …

“Aprile Gallant of the Smith College Museum of Art says, ‘I do believe this is Lin’s first landscape piece in Massachusetts, so it is a milestone.’ That museum hosted a major exhibit of Lin’s works in 2022, when a library that she’d designed opened on campus. …

“Did ‘The Sound We Travel At’ fall through the cracks, in a neighborhood peppered with cranes and construction fencing, and tech and biotech workers who go from garages to offices perhaps two or three days a week?

“ ‘We felt that way,’ says James Ewart, manager of the Maya Lin Studio.

“But according to the government’s General Services Administration, by the time spring rolls around, a sign will finally be installed next to the artwork.”

More on the Maya Lin project at the Globe, here.

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House of Trees

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 13, 2024| 3 Comments »

Photo: Mitchell Joachim/Terreform ONE.

Most builders rely on steel and concrete in construction, but the production of those materials is bad for the environment. That’s why innovative thinking in architecture is so important. At Fast Company, Nate Berg describes one unusual experiment.

“In a forest along the Hudson River north of New York City, a strange new building is slowly rising. The strangeness of the building is that it’s meant to be occupied by humans, animals, and plants. The slowness of the building is that it’s made out of — made by, really — growing trees.

“Fab Tree Hab is a 1,000 square foot tent-shaped pavilion that uses grafted white willow trees to form its walls and roof. Using a computer-designed scaffolding system to precisely guide their growth, these trees are bent to create a living canopy that will, through specifically placed tree grafts and planter boxes, fill out the form and structure of the almost-entirely bio-based building. The scaffold can eventually be removed and reused elsewhere. Within 10 years, it would be a kind of multi-armed and interconnected mega tree house. It’s a prototype that could show how buildings may eventually be grown rather than built.

“The project comes from Terreform One, a nonprofit art, architecture, and urban design research group led by architect Mitchell Joachim. The idea behind this project has had a tree-like maturation period, starting from seed around 2002. Habitat for Humanity had launched a design competition looking for new approaches to building suburban housing. At the time, Joachim was pursuing a PhD in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exploring the application of ecological processes to design.

“Along with fellow doctoral researchers Lara Greden and Javier Arbona, he began to explore new ways ecological processes might be applied to the design brief of getting massive amounts of housing built. …

“The idea of shaping trees into usable structures goes back thousands of years. ‘You can find examples of this within illuminated manuscripts, within the bible,’ Joachim says. The main problem, though, is that these structures take a long time to grow.

“Joachim and his collaborators began thinking of ways to accelerate the process. Initially they explored growing trees hydroponically, and transplanting them into a scaffold. This would have given them height very quickly, but the strength of the trees would have been less than naturally grown trees. With hopes of turning this tree-based system into a viable approach to building, Joachim and his collaborators decided they also needed that strength.

“By this point, Joachim was years into the research process, and had launched Terreform One. In looking at other methods for growing trees quickly, the team learned about biomass farms, which grow trees that are harvested and burned to create electricity. These farms grow tightly packed rows of trees that rise dozens of feet in height within just a few years. The tall, slender trees seemed perfect for use in the scaffold Joachim and his team envisioned. The design shifted and the project was reoriented around replanting white willows harvested from a commercial biomass farm.

“The Fab Tree Hab pavilion that’s now standing in the forest in New York is made up of these replanted trees. Planted together in clusters, the trees make up a few dozen vertical ribs of the pavilion. Designed to graft together over time into a thicker tree, each cluster forms what will be a pillar of the building.

“While they’re still young and pliable, the clusters have been bent into the mass timber scaffold, which is itself a unique piece of architecture, appearing somewhat like an upside-down boat hull. The ribs of the scaffold guide the trees upwards and along the path of what will eventually be a sloping pitched roof. In the wall space between the vertical trees, the scaffold is outfitted with planters and habitat for other plant and animal species, each made from biodegradable materials like hand-crocheted jute and bioplastic. After a year’s growth, it’s estimated that the tree elements will be able to physically support the weight of these planters and habitat structures.

“ ‘It is kind of a land coral, or a terrestrial reef. It attracts all kinds of things to live inside it and around it and underneath it and then thrive in that section of the forest,’”’ Joachim says.

‘On day one we had frogs move into the shelter.’

“About halfway up the arched pavilion, additional planters create space for the Fab Tree Hab’s key architectural element. This is where additional trees can be grafted onto the tree structure as it matures, enabling the building to rise even taller. …

“ ‘The point of the entire structure is a prototype to really get this right so that this could be replicated anywhere,’ Joachim says. He envisions the system being scaled up, made into a kit of parts people could use to grow, say, a garage or a backyard pergola, and eventually even a house. There could be tree-walled museums grown over a decade, or even opera houses with resonant walls of willow timber that are alive and still growing.”

More at Fast Company, here. No paywall.

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Anti-Bullying App

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 22, 2020| 9 Comments »

Nowadays, I’m repeatedly surprised by young people leading inspiring initiatives. They are the ones out front, showing leadership on issues such as climate change, sane gun laws, food security, and social justice. Honestly, I want to follow where they lead. They are building a better future.

After seeing so many examples, I shouldn’t be surprised by today’s story about a college junior who started building a better world when she was 13. But as usual, I’m amazed.

Hiawatha Bray writes at the Boston Globe, “A junior at Harvard University is about to receive a big payoff for her seven-year campaign against cyberbullying. Trisha Prabhu, 20, will get at least $300,000 from the Elevate Prize Foundation to further develop ReThink, a smartphone app that nudges people into using more courteous language online.

“The grant is just the latest accolade for Prabhu, whose work earned her a White House visit during the Obama administration and a 2016 appearance on the ABC television series ‘Shark Tank,’ where she persuaded entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner to invest in ReThink.

“ ‘It’s been an incredible ride, and not one I imagined at 13,’ said Prabhu, a native of Naperville, Ill., who is studying political science and computer science at Harvard.

“In middle school, Prabhu endured some bullying but shrugged it off. She later learned about other children who had suffered far worse, in some cases committing suicide. …

“So Prabhu channeled her outrage into a science project.

She surveyed 500 high schoolers and found they were less likely to make insulting comments if they were encouraged to think about their words before speaking.

“The results of the survey inspired Prabhu to develop ReThink. …

“The app monitors the words typed by the user and pops up subtle messages when it detects a swear word or insult. For instance, the user might see ‘Would you like to reword this?’

“ReThink doesn’t censor speech. The user can choose to go ahead and type the insult. But Prabhu believes many people will take the app’s advice to heart and mind their manners.

“Prabhu said that schools in 134 countries have formed ReThink chapters that encourage students to use the app, and it’s being used by some 5 million students worldwide. Now Prabhu is looking for ways to generate revenue without relying on intrusive onscreen ads. …

“The Elevate Prize Foundation will support ReThink as it upgrades the product and provide business advice and mentoring. The foundation was launched by a Boston native, Joseph Deitch, former chief executive of Commonwealth Financial Network, in partnership with MIT Solve, a social innovation project sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” More at the Globe, here.

I looked up more on the Elevate Foundation. I think you’ll be interested.

“The Elevate Prize offers $5 million in prize funding, professional development services, and connections to a powerful network of influencers, industry leaders, and subject-matter experts. …

“We are looking for extraordinary people leading high-impact projects and organizations who are:

  • “Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind
  • “Elevating issues and their solutions by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world
  • “Elevating understanding of and between people through changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.”

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Symphony of the Street

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 10, 2017| 2 Comments »

Composer Tod Machover never stops experimenting. He’s known for music that combines his electronic inventions with traditional instruments, he records street sounds to capture the ambiance of cities, and he works continuously to engage regular folks in the process of creation.

Linda Poon writes at CityLab, “It’s easy to disregard the hum of a city — the incessant honking or indistinct chattering — or to cast it off as noise pollution. … To the likes of Tod Machover, a composer who combines music with technology at the MIT Media Lab, these sounds are what makes a city sing.

“Machover has turned the sounds of Toronto and Edinburgh into symphonies that reflect the characters of each city. His first piece for an American city, Symphony in D, invited Detroiters in 2015 to contribute over 15,000 sounds unique to the city—drumming from the streets, sounds from factories, and spoken words by local poets—that were combined with instruments played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

‘Like so many things in our culture, there’s a growing gap between experts and ordinary people, and I thought music is such a great laboratory to show how things can be different,’ says Machover.

” ‘So I wanted the project to be a representation of connecting people—no matter what their background was in music—as equals.’

“His latest project, called Project 305 and funded by the Knight Foundation, takes him to Miami, where he’s teamed up with the city’s New World Symphony [NWS] academy to create an audio and visual masterpiece. He’s helping lead community tours to collect sounds and videos, and working with schools to teach students how to do the same. …

“Typical urban noise, like the revving of a car engine, the ringing of a bicycle bell, or the pitter-patter of pedestrian footsteps, can be found in virtually any city. So how do you make an audio portrait feel particular to the town it’s supposed to reflect?

“Sometimes, it’s about incorporating the sounds that reflect a city’s history. Detroit, for example, was famously dubbed the Motor City for being the heart of America’s auto manufacturing industry. So Machover asked the community to send in recordings of different car engines, which he merged with Motown riffs, in homage to the city’s music scene. …

“NWS is also gathering clips of human chatter, a way of capturing the diasporas within Miami. The city is often called the capital of Latin America with immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Spanish-speaking countries making up the majority of the population. Spanish has become a dominant language, but ‘you hear the same words inflected with all kinds of different accents,’ says Machover.

“When all is done, the entire performance won’t be confined to the halls of the academy. Instead, it will also be projected onto the facade of the building and simultaneously broadcast in different neighborhoods throughout Miami.” More here.

I have attended two of Machover’s operas. I thought the one based on a story by Tolstoy was lovely, although the one written with former poet laureate Robert Pinsky didn’t work for me. Something about an inventor seeking immortality by entering his electronic system after death.

Photo: Bowers & Wilkins
Endlessly inventive composer Tod Machover is incorporating sounds of the city in his new music.

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New Platform Helps Food Nonprofits

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 19, 2017| 4 Comments »

Photo: Daily Table
Fresh surplus food is sold for less, with help from a distribution platform called Spoiler Alert.

A logistics company that moves unwanted, unneeded but perfectly fresh food to people who do want and need it has chosen the perfect Internet slang for its name: Spoiler Alert. Ordinarily, “spoiler alert” is what you say if you are recommending or reviewing a film or book and don’t want to spoil the ending for someone else. In this case, it’s about delivering fresh food where it’s needed before it spoils.

Janelle Nanos writes at the Boston Globe, “Spoiled food is a costly problem, accounting for about $218 billion in financial losses to US farms, businesses, and consumers each year, according to ReFED, a group of companies, nonprofits, and foundations that was formed last year to minimize food waste. Since its launch in 2015, Spoiler Alert’s food-matching platform has been adopted by 200 businesses and nonprofits in New England to cut down on waste and encourage donations by making them easier to track.

“The company was created by two MIT Sloan School of Management graduates, Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily Malina, and their chief technology officer, Marty Sirkin, and has worked its way through the city’s accelerator programs, winning $50,000 from MassChallenge in 2015 and a spot in this year’s Techstars Boston cohort. …

” ‘At Daily Table I like to think of Spoiler Alert as an opportunity to further meet our mission of capturing healthy, tasty products before they make it to compost or trash,’ said Ismail Samad, executive chef of the Dorchester grocery store, which sells food and prepared meals gleaned from donations. He said he relies heavily on Spoiler Alert to source the food for his store shelves.

“But part of Spoiler Alert’s recent success can be credited to another, rather wonky aspect of its platform, which helps companies navigate the tax code. [In December 2015], Congress passed a bill that expanded the tax breaks companies can receive for donating food, making it easier for small businesses to donate and for farmers to assess the fair market value of their inventories.” Read how it all comes together, here.

A nonprofit organization that is also a MassChallenge winner and does similar work in the region is Lovin’ Spoonfuls, which I blogged about here. MassChallenge is a startup accelerator that helps new companies get launched. Its judges are partial to companies that can do well by doing good, bless their hearts.

Photo: Lovin’ Spoonfuls
Lovin’ Spoonfuls donates food to Safe Haven, a housing program run by the Bedford (MA) Veterans Administration.

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Gloves Make Sign Language Audible

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2016| 2 Comments »

Here’s a new idea. A couple of young entrepreneurs have found a way to convert sign language into audible speech with their prize-winning electronic gloves.

National Public Radio has the story.

“For years, inventors have been trying to convert some sign language words and letters into text and speech. Now a pair of University of Washington undergraduates have created gloves called SignAloud. Sensors attached to the gloves measure hand position and movement, and data is sent to a computer via Bluetooth and is then converted into spoken word and text.

“Theirs is one of seven inventions recently awarded a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, with awards ranging from $10,000 to $15,000.

“Inventors Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor, both college sophomores, say the gloves will help create a communication bridge between deaf and hearing communities. The gloves, they say, will help deaf people better communicate with the rest of the world without changing the way they already interact with each other.

“However, the invention has been met with criticism that the bridge they want to create goes only one way — and it’s not necessarily one the deaf community has been clamoring for. …

“Azodi says he and Pryor are moving beyond their prototype and are working closer with those who use American Sign Language to develop new versions. They’re also working on better understanding ASL, which is more than just hand movements; it also uses facial expressions and body language to convey meaning.” Read more.

I don’t know much about the culture of the deaf community, but I do remember reading about resistance to cochlear implants a few years ago. It’s hard for people who can hear to understand that some people really don’t mind deafness and prefer their own ways of dealing with the world. But kudos to all inventors anyway, especially young ones open to continuous revision!

Photo: Conrado Tapado/Univ of Washington, CoMotion
SignAloud gloves translate sign language into text and speech.

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Public Nap Space

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 16, 2016| 6 Comments »

Here is an idea whose time has come. Aux armes! We need to remove the barriers to napping!

Olivia Vanni at BostonInno explains the revolutionary new Sleepbox concept.

“Sleepbox, a startup that’s recently set Boston roots, is making our wildest dreams come true: You will soon be able to sleep soundly and safely in any public place conceivable. As the name implies, the company has developed cozy, technologically decked-out cabins that can be set up just about anywhere — in airports, offices or downtown metropolitan areas — and rented by folks looking to catch some Zs.

“How did this visionary venture come about? According to Mikhail Krymov, CEO of Sleepbox and research fellow at MIT, he and his business partner Alexey Goryainov started it as a theoretical side project for their architecture firm Arch Group. The two professionals travel a lot for work and were constantly subjected to flight delays and layovers where all they could do was wish for a comfortable, private place to rest. From their personal experience, they created an initial design for Sleepbox. But it was meant only as a concept, at first.

” ‘It was just a design idea, but then it was published — it was actually published quite a few times — we started receiving requests and orders from all over the world,’ Krymov told me. …

“There are some customers who are buying them for noncommerical uses — say, companies installing them in their offices for employees to use for free. However, there are clients who buy them with the intention of charging people to rent them, like airports and municipalities. …

” ‘I really want people to be more happy, productive and healthy by having enough sleep, and hope that our solution will help,’ Kyrmov said.”

Ye-es!

More here.

Photo: Mikhail Kyrmov

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Solar Technology in Clothes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2016| 2 Comments »

Radio show Living on Earth did a segment in February on new technology to store and release solar heat. Here is host Steve Curwood on his outing to MIT to learn about the breakthrough.

“A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a chemical that would let windshield glass directly store solar energy and then release it on demand as heat to melt the ice. … The same chemical could be woven into clothing fibers to capture the sun’s energy and then give you some added warmth when you ask for it, even days later.

“I paid a visit to the lab where the MIT team has been working on this breakthrough and met up with researchers David Zhitomirsky and Eugene Cho, who work in the lab of professor Jeffrey Grossman.”

To Curwood’s question about the difference between the familiar electrical, battery-enabled solar technology and the MIT lab’s chemical version, Zhitomirsky replies,”We use these molecules that can absorb UV light and instead of generating charges, what they do is that they change shape, and by changing shape, they can store chemical energy …

“CURWOOD: OK, so sunlight hits this molecule, it changes shape and can storage its energy. And how do you get the energy out?

“ZHITOMIRSKY: So you can figure the material in several ways. One way is to add a small amount of heat, and the material will release more heat than you add in. The other methods are triggering it with light or you can apply an electrical field to the material. …

“The way we envision using it is to integrate into fibers that you then make clothing out of.” More here.

Release solar heat from my coat in a blizzard? Where do I sign up?

Photo: Helen Palmer
Living on Earth host Steve Curwood, right, in the MIT lab with Eugene Cho and David Zhitomirsky.

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Grow Salad in the Entertainment Cabinet

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Rupa Shenoy had an interesting story on WGBH radio recently. It was about local startups interested in urban farming. I wrote previously about Higher Ground Farm, situated on top of the Design Center in South Boston, but Grove Labs, with its use of LED lighting for indoor gardening, was new to me.

Shenoy says, “Some of these new entrepreneurs are thinking big. Jamie Byron and Gabe Blanchet graduated from MIT and started Grove Labs two years ago with the idea to make every living room a potential growing space. …

“Their product is a cabinet that allows people to grow fruits and vegetables year-round in the home. It’s connected to the internet, controlled by an app on your phone, and designed to make urban farming easy and engaging.

“There are a few models set up in a space at Greentown Labs in Somerville, which they share with other startups. Each wooden cabinet, with several components, is about the size of an entertainment center.

“At the heart of the cabinet system is a fish swimming in a tank. The waste from that fish is sucked into tubes and converted into nitrate fertilizer. The fertilizer is pumped around the cabinet to trays filled with brown clay pebbles. That’s where the fruits and vegetables grow, with the pebbles serving as soil. Byron says once you get the system up and running, you can harvest enough for about two small salads everyday.” More at WGBH.

For more on using fish to fertilize your produce, see my recent post about an experiment in Duluth, here.

Photo: Rupa Shenoy / WGBH News
Somerville startup Grove Labs plans to sell cabinets for growing produce in your home.

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A Carrot Clarinet Is Just the Beginning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Gotta love MIT. There is always something crazy going on over there. And when MIT and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) ideas come together, watch out.

At WBUR radio, Fred Thys explains about a new, multidiscipline design program.

Matt “Kressy has put MIT’s first-ever integrated design and management (IDM) students in a kind of boot camp. He wanted to immerse the engineers, designers and business school students in a project where they would have to work in concert. …

“The task: build instruments from found materials. And boy did the students find materials. Mechanical engineer Maria Tafur, from Bogota, made a clarinet from a carrot. Engineer Tammy Shen, from Taipei, has made an instrument that includes glass bottles. …

“Kressy was teaching a course at the Rhode Island School of Design when he got the idea for the new IDM master’s program. He was also teaching engineers and business students at MIT — but it was the design students from RISD that caught Kressy’s attention by asking a critical question:

‘How does this product enhance our lives?’ …

“Kressy says it took 13 years for his idea for a design program to get traction at MIT. When it did, he was able to pick 18 students with completely different criteria from what MIT typically uses.

“ ‘And that rubric had crazy metrics, such as the metric love,’ Kressy says. ‘And the love metric was basically: Does this candidate have a large capacity for love and compassion? …

“ ‘When I showed the rubric to my colleagues here, let’s just say it got mixed responses,’ he says, laughing.”

To get at the love-and-compassion metric, he asked applicants to submit a portfolio indicating their efforts to make the world a better place.

You can read here about the impressive portfolios, struggles to get to MIT from poor countries, and inventive ideas for the future.”

Photo: Jesse Costa/WBUR
MIT integrated design graduate students Maria Tafur and Masakazu Nagata play their homemade instruments along with Brave Sharab, 7, on Main Street in Cambridge.

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Charitable Venture Capital

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 22, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a story about venture capital with a do-good focus.

Sacha Pfeiffer writes at the Boston Globe, “Among entrepreneurs, there’s a dreaded place called the Valley of Death. That’s where startup companies go when they run out of funding before making money on their own, and it’s an especially common fate for clean-energy startups, like manufacturers of solar panels and wind turbines. …

“But what if that early-stage, high-risk financing could instead come from philanthropists, who aren’t driven by profit? Later, traditional investors could step in and supply continued funding.

“That’s the concept behind PRIME Coalition, a year-old Cambridge nonprofit that has pooled $1 million from wealthy donors, including Hollywood actors Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, as seed money for its first investment: an energy storage startup company. …

“PRIME rethinks the traditional definition of charitable work and charitable giving. Its founder, 30-year-old MIT graduate Sarah Kearney, argues that companies whose products or services reduce greenhouse gases are doing a social good, just like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, so they should be able to receive philanthropic funding. In this case, the social benefits include conserving the environment and fighting climate change.

“The group searches for early-stage alternative energy companies … then locates philanthropists or socially minded for-profit investors to fund them. Those could include charitable foundations, investment offices of wealthy families, and donor-advised funds. …

“Peter Rothstein, president of the New England Clean Energy Council, said philanthropic funding ‘can make a significant dent’ in filling the need for early-stage capital for clean-tech companies.” More here.

It is not unheard of for philanthropy to put its investment dollars into companies that provide a social good. Read about the Heron Foundation’s decision to do so some years back in “Expanding Philanthropy’s Reach: Mission-Related Investing,” here.

Photo: Lane Turner/Globe Staff
PRIME Coalition founder Sarah Kearney says that companies whose products or services reduce greenhouse gases are doing a social good and should be able to receive philanthropic funding.

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Heat That Follows You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I saved up this one until it was cool enough outside to talk about heating systems.

Liz Stinson writes at Wired, “Commercial buildings account for 20 percent of the national energy consumption—a big number on its own, but stunning when you consider that often, those buildings are half empty.

“A new project from MIT’s Senseable City Lab is looking to decrease the amount of wasted energy by creating hyper-localized beams of heat. Called Local Warming, the prototype system uses LED bulbs to beam direct rays of infrared light onto people. This is in direct contrast to HVAC systems, which blanket entire spaces with hot or cool air, regardless of how many people are present.

“MIT’s system is rigged to the ceiling, like highly-efficient track lighting. Using a WiFi-enabled tracking system, the lights can sense when a human is present and will beam infrared heat down like a spotlight. ‘It’s almost like having a your personal sun,’ says Carlo Ratti, a professor in the Senseable City Lab.

“The current prototype is on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale until November. It features a large infrared bulb surrounded by rotating mirrors that can direct the light in a focused beam. It’s bulky—hardly the type of thing you’d like in your home—but Ratti envisions future prototypes will use smaller LEDs for a more compact aesthetic.”

Read more at Wired. 

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Sprites Electrify the Atmosphere

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2014| 3 Comments »

I’ve put off writing about sprites because I’m not sure I can explain what they are  — powerful upward lightning flashes that send electricity around the earth and were originally going to be photographed by an astronaut on the ill-fated Columbia.

A team of scientists and a few daredevil pilots flew repeatedly into storms to prove the visions were real. The television show Nova covered the quest.

“NARRATOR: On a stormy night, in Denver, a team of scientists takes to the air to investigate a mystery.

“RONALD WILLIAMS (United States Air Force): I reported it, and nobody believed me.

“NARRATOR: They’re trying to catch a burst of energy so fleeting and hard to see that scientists call it by the ethereal name of ‘sprite.’

“EARLE WILLIAMS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): The bolts that cause sprites are superbolts, the kind of lightning that’ll blow your T.V. sky high. …

“KERRI CAHOY (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): You can see airglow that’s more diffuse and just in layers than the curtain-like aurora.

“NARRATOR: NOVA takes to the air, on a quest to record these elusive events.

“GEOFF MCHARG (United States Air Force Academy): Sprite!

“NARRATOR: And the effort also continues above, from the vantage point of space, where the work had it’s beginning during the ill-fated Columbia mission, with Israeli astronaut Ilon Ramon.

“YOAV YAIR (The Open University of Israel): I asked him, ‘Please bring me one sprite image.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you a couple.’

“NARRATOR: Ramon’s colleagues now continue where he left off.

“SATOSHI FURUKAWA (Japanese Astronaut): We must take over their work. I thought that was the survivors’ duty.

“NARRATOR: Their dramatic discoveries are revealing that we live on an electrified planet, surrounded by a global circuit that rings the earth. And like a planetary heartbeat, we can now detect it.”

More here.

 Image: Nova

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Using Fog to Irrigate an Arid Land

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2014| 2 Comments »

If you want to convert the moisture in clouds into water to feed a parched land, you could train to be a sorcerer.

Alternatively, you could go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Beth Buczynski at MIT’s inhabitat.com has the story on the “giant nets that trap moisture in the foggy mist, and funnel all of the tiny droplets into a container where they add up to water we can drink.”

According to “findings published online in the journal Langmuir, most existing fog harvesting systems are far from optimized. … Postdoc Kyoo-Chul Park PhD, MIT alumnus Shreerang Chhatre PhD, graduate student Siddarth Srinivasan, chemical engineering professor Robert Cohen, and mechanical engineering professor Gareth McKinley, believe that by closing the gaps in the net material, they can drastically improve the efficiency of fog harvesting systems.”

A press release from the research team says, “Chilean investigators have estimated that if just 4 percent of the water contained in the fog could be captured, that would be sufficient to meet all of the water needs of that nation’s four northernmost regions, encompassing the entire Atacama Desert area.”

Photo: Shutterstock

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